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Title: The Myth of Sisyphus Author: Albert Camus Date: 1955 Language: en Topics: absurdism, philosophy, existentialism, Sisyphus, myths Source: https://postarchive.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/myth-of-sisyphus-and-other-essays-the-albert-camus.pdf Notes: Translated by Justin O'Brien
For me “The Myth of Sisyphus” marks the beginning of an idea which I was
to pursue in The Rebel. It attempts to resolve the problem of suicide,
as The Rebel attempts to resolve that of murder, in both cases without
the aid of eternal values which, temporarily perhaps, are absent or
distorted in contemporary Europe. The fundamental subject of “The Myth
of Sisyphus” is this: it is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether
life has a meaning; therefore it is legitimate to meet the problem of
suicide face to face. The answer, underlying and appearing through the
paradoxes which cover it, is this: even if one does not believe in God,
suicide is not legitimate. Written fifteen years ago, in 1940, amid the
French and European disaster, this book declares that even within the
limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond
nihilism. In all the books I have written since, I have attempted to
pursue this direction. Although “The Myth of Sisyphus” poses mortal
problems, it sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation to live and to
create, in the very midst of the desert.
It has hence been thought possible to append to this philosophical
argument a series of essays, of a kind I have never ceased writing,
which are somewhat marginal to my other books.
In a more lyrical form, they all illustrate that essential fluctuation
from assent to refusal which, in my view, defines the artist and his
difficult calling. The unity of this book, that I should like to be
apparent to American readers as it is to me, resides in the reflection,
alternately cold and impassioned, in which an artist may indulge as to
his reasons for living and for creating. After fifteen years I have
progressed beyond several of the positions which are set down here; but
I have remained faithful, it seems to me, to the exigency which prompted
them. That is why this hook is in a certain sense the most personal of
those I have published in America. More than the others, therefore, it
has need of the indulgence and understanding of its readers.
—Albert Camus, Paris, March 1955
for PASCAL PIA
O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the
possible.
—Pindar, Pythian iii
The pages that follow deal with an absurd sensitivity that can be found
widespread in the age—and not with an absurd philosophy which our time,
properly speaking, has not known. It is therefore simply fair to point
out, at the outset, what these pages owe to certain contemporary
thinkers. It is so far from my intention to hide this that they Will be
found cited and commented upon throughout this work.
But it is useful to note at the same time that the absurd, hitherto
taken as a conclusion, is considered in this essay as a starting- point.
In this sense it may be said that there is something provisional in my
commentary: one cannot prejudge the position it entails. There will be
found here merely the description, in the pure state, of an intellectual
malady. No metaphysic, no belief is involved in it for the moment. These
are the limits and the only bias of this book. Certain personal
experiences urge me to make this clear.
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is
suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to
answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest— whether
or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or
twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first
answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to
deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the
importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These
are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before
they become clear to the intellect.
If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than
that, I reply that one judges by the actions it entails. I have never
seen anyone die for the ontological argument. Galileo, who held a
scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the greatest ease
as soon as it endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did right.[1]
That truth was not worth the stake. Whether the earth or the sun
revolves around the other is a matter of profound indifference. To tell
the truth, it is a futile question. On the other hand, I see many people
die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others
paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a
reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an
excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of
life is the most urgent of questions.
How to answer it? On all essential problems (I mean thereby those that
run the risk of leading to death or those that intensify the passion of
living) there are probably but two methods of thought: the method of La
Palisse and the method of Don Quixote. Solely the balance between
evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and
lucidity. In a subject at once so humble and so heavy with emotion, the
learned and classical dialectic must yield, one can see, to a more
modest attitude of mind deriving at one and the same time from common
sense and understanding.
Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon. On the
contrary, we are concerned here, at the outset, with the relationship
between individual thought and suicide. An act like this is prepared
within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man
himself is ignorant of it. One evening he pulls the trigger or jumps. Of
an apartment-building manager who had killed himself I was told that he
had lost his daughter five years before, that be bad changed greatly
since, and that that experience had “undermined” him. A more exact word
cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.
Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in
man’s heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and
understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of
existence to flight from light.
There are many causes for a suicide, and generally the most obvious ones
were not the most powerful. Rarely is suicide committed (yet the
hypothesis is not excluded) through reflection.
What sets off the crisis is almost always unverifiable. Newspapers often
speak of “personal sorrows” or of “incurable illness.” These
explanations are plausible. But one would have to know whether a friend
of the desperate man had not that very day addressed him indifferently.
He is the guilty one. For that is enough to precipitate all the rancors
and all the boredom still in suspension.[2]
But if it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when the
mind opted for death, it is easier to deduce from the act itself the
consequences it implies. In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing
yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much
for you or that you do not understand it. Let’s not go too far in such
analogies, however, but rather return to everyday words. It is merely
confessing that that “is not worth the trouble.” Living, naturally, is
never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for
many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies
that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character
of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane
character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.
What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the
sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad
reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe
suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a
stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory
of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man
and this life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of
absurdity. All healthy men having thought of their own suicide, it can
be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection
between this feeling and the longing for death.
The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the
absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to
the absurd. The principle can be established that for a man who does not
cheat, what he believes to be true must determine his action. Belief in
the absurdity of existence must then dictate his conduct. It is
legitimate to wonder, clearly and without false pathos, whether a
conclusion of this importance requires forsaking as rapidly as possible
an incomprehensible condition. I am speaking, of course, of men inclined
to be in harmony with themselves.
Stated clearly, this problem may seem both simple and insoluble. But it
is wrongly assumed that simple questions involve answers that are no
less simple and that evidence implies evidence.
A priori and reversing the terms of the problem, just as one does or
does not kill oneself, it seems that there are but two philosophical
solutions, either yes or no. This would be too easy. But allowance must
be made for those who, without concluding, continue questioning. Here I
am only slightly indulging in irony: this is the majority. I notice also
that those who answer “no” act as if they thought “yes.” As a matter of
fact, if I accept the Nietzschean criterion, they think “yes” in one way
or another. On the other hand, it often happens that those who commit
suicide were assured of the meaning of life. These contradictions are
constant. It may even be said that they have never been so keen as on
this point where, on the contrary, logic seems so desirable. It is a
commonplace to compare philosophical theories and the behavior of those
who profess them. But it must be said that of the thinkers who refused a
meaning to life none except Kirilov who belongs to literature,
Peregrinos who is born of legend,[3] and Jules Lequier who belongs to
hypothesis, admitted his logic to the point of refusing that life.
Schopenhauer is often cited, as a fit subject for laughter, because he
praised suicide while seated at a well-set table. This is no subject for
joking. That way of not taking the tragic seriously is not so grievous,
but it helps to judge a man.
In the face of such contradictions and obscurities must we conclude that
there is no relationship between the opinion one has about life and the
act one commits to leave it? Let us not exaggerate in this direction. In
a man’s attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills
in the world. The body’s judgment is as good as the mind’s and the body
shrinks from annihilation. We get into the habit of living before
acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us
toward death, the body maintains its irreparable lead. In short, the
essence of that contradiction lies in what I shall call the act of
eluding because it is both less and more than diversion in the Pascalian
sense. Eluding is the invariable game. The typical act of eluding, the
fatal evasion that constitutes the third theme of this essay, is hope.
Hope of another life one must “deserve” or trickery of those who live
not for life itself but for some great idea that will transcend it,
refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it.
Thus everything contributes to spreading confusion. Hitherto, and it has
not been wasted effort, people have played on words and pretended to
believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to
declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary
common measure between these two judgments. One merely has to refuse to
he misled by the confusions, divorces, and inconsistencies previously
pointed out.
One must brush everything aside and go straight to the real problem. One
kills oneself because life is not worth living, that is certainly a
truth yet an unfruitful one because it is a truism. But does that insult
to existence, that flat denial in which it is plunged come from the fact
that it has no meaning? Does its absurdity require one to escape it
through hope or suicide—this is what must be clarified, hunted down, and
elucidated while brushing aside all the rest. Does the Absurd dictate
death? This problem must be given priority over others, outside all
methods of thought and all exercises of the disinterested mind. Shades
of meaning, contradictions, the psychology that an “objective” mind can
always introduce into all problems have no place in this pursuit and
this passion. It calls simply for an unjust—in other words, logical—
thought. That is not easy. It is always easy to be logical. It is almost
impossible to be logical to the bitter end. Men who die by their own
hand consequently follow to its conclusion their emotional inclination.
Reflection on suicide gives me an opportunity to raise the only problem
to interest me: is there a logic to the point of death? I cannot know
unless I pursue, without reckless passion, in the sole light of
evidence, the reasoning of which I am here suggesting the source. This
is what I call an absurd reasoning. Many have begun it. I do not yet
know whether or not they kept to it.
When Karl Jaspers, revealing the impossibility of constituting the world
as a unity, exclaims: “This limitation leads me to myself, where I can
no longer withdraw behind an objective point of view that I am merely
representing, where neither I myself nor the existence of others can any
longer become an object for me,” he is evoking after many others those
waterless deserts where thought reaches its confines. After many others,
yes indeed, but how eager they were to get out of them! At that last
crossroad where thought hesitates, many men have arrived and even some
of the humblest.
They then abdicated what was most precious to them, their life.
Others, princes of the mind, abdicated likewise, but they initiated the
suicide of their thought in its purest revolt. The real effort is to
stay there, rather, in so far as that is possible, and to examine
closely the odd vegetation of those distant regions. Tenacity and acumen
are privileged spectators of this inhuman show in which absurdity, hope,
and death carry on their dialogue. The mind can then analyze the figures
of that elementary yet subtle dance before illustrating them and
reliving them itself.
Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious
of saying. The regularity of an impulse or a repulsion in a soul is
encountered again in habits of doing or thinking, is reproduced in
consequences of which the soul itself knows nothing. Great feelings take
with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with
their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate.
There is a universe of jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness, or of
generosity. A universe in other words, a metaphysic and an attitude of
mind. What is true of already specialized feelings will be even more so
of emotions basically as indeterminate, simultaneously as vague and as
“definite,” as remote and as “present” as those furnished us by beauty
or aroused by absurdity.
At any streetcorner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the
face. As it is, in its distressing nudity, in its light without
effulgence, it is elusive. But that very difficulty deserves reflection.
It is probably true that a man remains forever unknown to us and that
there is in him something irreducible that escapes us. But practically I
know men and recognize them by their behavior, by the totality of their
deeds, by the consequences caused in life by their presence. Likewise,
all those irrational feelings which offer no purchase to analysis. I can
define them practically, appreciate them practically, by gathering
together the sum of their consequences in the domain of the
intelligence, by seizing and noting all their aspects, by outlining
their universe. It is certain that apparently, though I have seen the
same actor a hundred times, I shall not for that reason know him any
better personally. Yet if I add up the heroes he has personified and if
I say that I know him a little better at the hundredth character counted
off, this will be felt to contain an element of truth. For this apparent
paradox is also an apologue. There is a moral to it. It teaches that a
man defines himself by his make-believe as well as by his sincere
impulses.
There is thus a lower key of feelings, inaccessible in the heart but
partially disclosed by the acts they imply and the attitudes of mind
they assume. It is clear that in this way I am defining a method.
But it is also evident that that method is one of analysis and not of
knowledge. For methods imply metaphysics; unconsciously they disclose
conclusions that they often claim not to know yet.
Similarly, the last pages of a book are already contained in the first
pages. Such a link is inevitable. The method defined here acknowledges
the feeling that all true knowledge is impossible. Solely appearances
can be enumerated and the climate make itself felt.
Perhaps we shall be able to overtake that elusive feeling of absurdity
in the different but closely related worlds of intelligence, of the art
of living, or of art itself. The climate of absurdity is in the
beginning. The end is the absurd universe and that attitude of mind
which lights the world with its true colors to bring out the privileged
and implacable visage which that attitude has discerned in it.
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.
Great works are often born on a street-corner or in a restaurant’s
revolving door. So it is with absurdity. The absurd world more than
others derives its nobility from that abject birth.
In certain situations, replying “nothing” when asked what one is
thinking about may be pretense in a man. Those who are loved are well
aware of this. But if that reply is sincere, if it symbolizes that odd
state of soul in which the void be-comes eloquent, in which the chain of
daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that
will connect it again, then it is as it were the first sign of
absurdity.
It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours
in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal,
sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday
according to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the
time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that
weariness tinged with amazement.
“Begins”—this is important. Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a
mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of
consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. What
follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive
awakening. At the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence:
suicide or recovery. In itself weariness has something sickening about
it. Here, I must conclude that it is good.
For everything be-gins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything
except through it. There is nothing original about these remarks. But
they are obvious; that is enough for a while, during a sketchy
reconnaissance in the origins of the absurd. Mere “anxiety,” as
Heidegger says, is at the source of everything.
Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us.
But a moment always comes when we have to carry it.
We live on the future: “tomorrow,” “later on,” “when you have made your
way,” “you will understand when you are old enough.”
Such irrelevancies are wonderful, for, after all, it’s a matter of
dying. Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty.
Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in
relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at
a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its
end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he
recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow,
whereas everything in him ought to reject it.
That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.[4]
A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is
“dense,” sensing to what a degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to
us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the
heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the
softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose
the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more
remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises
up to face us across millennia, for a second we cease to understand it
because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and
designs that we had attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we
lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because
it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes
again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us. Just as there are
days when under the familial face of a woman, we see as a stranger her
we had loved months or years ago, perhaps we shall come even to desire
what suddenly leaves us so alone. But the time has not yet come. Just
one thing: that denseness and that strangeness of the world is the
absurd.
Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the
mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes
silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone
behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his
incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort
in the face of man’s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the
image of what we are, this “nausea,” as a writer of today calls it, is
also the absurd.
Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a
mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our own
photographs is also the absurd.
I come at last to death and to the attitude we have toward it. On this
point everything has been said and it is only proper to avoid pathos.
Yet one will never be sufficiently surprised that everyone lives as if
no one “knew.” This is because in reality there is no experience of
death. Properly speaking, nothing has been experienced but what has been
lived and made conscious. Here, it is barely possible to speak of the
experience of others’ deaths. It is a substitute, an illusion, and it
never quite convinces us. That melancholy convention cannot be
persuasive. The horror comes in reality from the mathematical aspect of
the event. If time frightens us, this is because it works out the
problem and the solution comes afterward. All the pretty speeches about
the soul will have their contrary convincingly proved, at least for a
time. From this inert body on which a slap makes no mark the soul has
disappeared.
This elementary and definitive aspect of the adventure constitutes the
absurd feeling. Under the fatal lighting of that destiny, its
uselessness becomes evident. No code of ethics and no effort are
justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command
our condition.
Let me repeat: all this has been said over and over. I am limiting
myself here to making a rapid classification and to pointing out these
obvious themes. They run through all literatures and all philosophies.
Everyday conversation feeds on them. There is no question of reinventing
them. But it is essential to be sure of these facts in order to be able
to question oneself subsequently on the primordial question. I am
interested let me repeat again—not go much in absurd discoveries as in
their consequences. If one is assured of these facts, what is one to
conclude, how far is one to go to elude nothing? Is one to die
voluntarily or to hope in spite of everything? Beforehand, it is
necessary to take the same rapid inventory on the plane of the
intelligence.
The mind’s first step is to distinguish what is true from what is false.
However, as soon as thought reflects on itself, what it first discovers
is a contradiction. Useless to strive to be convincing in this case.
Over the centuries no one has furnished a clearer and more elegant
demonstration of the business than Aristotle: “The often ridiculed
consequence of these opinions is that they destroy themselves. For by
asserting that all is true we assert the truth of the contrary assertion
and consequently the falsity of our own thesis (for the contrary
assertion does not admit that it can be true).
And if one says that all is false, that assertion is itself false. If we
declare that solely the assertion opposed to ours is false or else that
solely ours is not false, we are nevertheless forced to admit an
infinite number of true or false judgments. For the one who expresses a
true assertion proclaims simultaneously that it is true, and so on ad
infinitum.”
This vicious circle is but the first of a series in which the mind that
studies itself gets lost in a giddy whirling. The very simplicity of
these paradoxes makes them irreducible. Whatever may be the plays on
words and the acrobatics of logic, to understand is, above all, to
unify. The mind’s deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations,
parallels man’s unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is
an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.
Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping
it with his seal. The cat’s universe is not the universe of the anthill.
The truism “All thought is anthropomorphic” has no other meaning.
Likewise, the mind that aims to understand reality can consider itself
satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought.
If man realized that the universe like him can love and suffer, he would
be reconciled. If thought discovered in the shimmering mirrors of
phenomena eternal relations capable of summing them up and summing
themselves up in a single principle, then would be seen an intellectual
joy of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ridiculous
imitation. That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the absolute
illustrates the essential impulse of the human drama.
But the fact of that nostalgia’s existence does not imply that it is to
be immediately satisfied. For if, bridging the gulf that separates
desire from conquest, we assert with Parmenides the reality of the One
(whatever it may be), we fall into the ridiculous contradiction of a
mind that asserts total unity and proves by its very assertion its own
difference and the diversity it claimed to resolve. This other vicious
circle is enough to stifle our hopes.
These are again truisms. I shall again repeat that they are not
interesting in themselves but in the consequences that can be deduced
from them. I know another truism: it tells me that man is mortal. One
can nevertheless count the minds that have deduced the extreme
conclusions from it. It is essential to consider as a constant point of
reference in this essay the regular hiatus between what we fancy we know
and what we really know, practical assent and simulated ignorance which
allows us to live with ideas which, if we truly put them to the test,
ought to upset our whole life. Faced with this inextricable
contradiction of the mind, we shall fully grasp the divorce separating
us from our own creations. So long as the mind keeps silent in the
motionless world of its hopes, everything is reflected and arranged in
the unity of its nostalgia.
But with its first move this world cracks and tumbles: an infinite
number of shimmering fragments is offered to the understanding. We must
despair of ever reconstructing the familiar, calm surface which would
give us peace of heart. After so many centuries of inquiries, so many
abdications among thinkers, we are well aware that this is true for all
our knowledge. With the exception of professional rationalists, today
people despair of true knowledge. If the only significant history of
human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its
successive regrets and its impotences.
Of whom and of what indeed can I say: “I know that!” This heart within
me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I
likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest
is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure,
if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping
through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able
to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this
upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or
this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is
mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have
of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap
will never be filled.
Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic,
there are truths but no truth. Socrates’”Know thyself” has as much value
as the “Be virtuous” of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at
the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great
subjects. They are legitimate only in precisely so far as they are
approximate.
And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel
its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings
when the heart relaxes—how shall I negate this world whose power and
strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to
assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach
me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge
I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope
increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and
multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom
itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for
you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in
which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me
with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I
shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already
changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends
up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty
is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The
soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart
teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realize that if
through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for
all that, apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with my
finger, I should not know any more. And you give me the choice between a
description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that
claim to teach me but that are not sure. A stranger to myself and to the
world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it
asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by
refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps
into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes.
Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned
peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal
renunciations.
Hence the intelligence, too, tells me in its way that this world is
absurd. Its contrary, blind reason, may well claim that all is clear; I
was waiting for proof and longing for it to be right. But despite so
many pretentious centuries and over the heads of so many eloquent and
persuasive men, I know that is false. On this plane, at least, there is
no happiness if I cannot know. That universal reason, practical or
ethical, that determinism, those categories that explain everything are
enough to make a decent man laugh. They have nothing to do with the
mind. They negate its profound truth, which is to be enchained. In this
unintelligible and limited universe, man’s fate henceforth assumes its
meaning. A horde of irrationals has sprung up and surrounds him until
his ultimate end. In his recovered and now studied lucidity, the feeling
of the absurd becomes clear and definite. I said that the world is
absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable,
that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of
this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in
the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world.
For the moment it is all that links them together. It binds them one to
the other as only hatred can weld two creatures together. This is all I
can discern clearly in this measureless universe where my adventure
takes place. Let us pause here. If I hold to be true that absurdity that
determines my relationship with life, if I become thoroughly imbued with
that sentiment that seizes me in face of the world’s scenes, with that
lucidity imposed on me by the pursuit of a science, I must sacrifice
everything to these certainties and I must see them squarely to be able
to maintain them. Above all, I must adapt my behavior to them and pursue
them in all their consequences. I am speaking here of decency. But I
want to know beforehand if thought can live in those deserts.
I already know that thought has at least entered those deserts.
There it found its bread. There it realized that it had previously been
feeding on phantoms. It justified some of the most urgent themes of
human reflection.
From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most
harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with one’s passions,
whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they
simultaneously exalt—that is the whole question. It is not, however, the
one we shall ask just yet. It stands at the center of this experience.
There will be time to come back to it. Let us recognize rather those
themes and those impulses born of the desert. It will suffice to
enumerate them. They, too, are known to all today. There have always
been men to defend the rights of the irrational. The tradition of what
may be called humiliated thought has never ceased to exist. The
criticism of rationalism has been made so often that it seems
unnecessary to begin again. Yet our epoch is marked by the rebirth of
those paradoxical systems that strive to trip up the reason as if truly
it had always forged ahead. But that is not so much a proof of the
efficacy of the reason as of the intensity of its hopes. On the plane of
history, such a constancy of two attitudes illustrates the essential
passion of man torn between his urge toward unity and the clear vision
he may have of the walls enclosing him.
But never perhaps at any time has the attack on reason been more violent
than in ours. Since Zarathustra’s great outburst: “By chance it is the
oldest nobility in the world. I conferred it upon all things when I
proclaimed that above them no eternal will was exercised,” since
Kierkegaard’s fatal illness, “that malady that leads to death with
nothing else following it,” the significant and tormenting themes of
absurd thought have followed one another.
Or at least, and this proviso is of capital importance, the themes of
irrational and religious thought. From Jaspers to Heidegger, from
Kierkegaard to Che-stov, from the phenomenologists to Scheler, on the
logical plane and on the moral plane, a whole family of minds related by
their nostalgia but opposed by their methods or their aims, have
persisted in blocking the royal road of reason and in recovering the
direct paths of truth. Here I assume these thoughts to be known and
lived. Whatever may be or have been their ambitions, all started out
from that indescribable universe where contradiction, antinomy, anguish,
or impotence reigns. And what they have in common is precisely the
themes so far disclosed.
For them, too, it must be said that what matters above all is the
conclusions they have managed to draw from those discoveries. That
matters so much that they must be examined separately. But for the
moment we are concerned solely with their discoveries and their initial
experiments. We are concerned solely with noting their agreement. If it
would be presumptuous to try to deal with their philosophies, it is
possible and sufficient in any case to bring out the climate that is
common to them.
Heidegger considers the human condition coldly and announces that that
existence is humiliated. The only reality is “anxiety” in the whole
chain of beings. To the man lost in the world and its diversions this
anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if that fear becomes conscious of
itself, it becomes anguish, the perpetual climate of the lucid man “in
whom existence is concentrated.” This professor of philosophy writes
without trembling and in the most abstract language in the world that
“the finite and limited character of human existence is more primordial
than man himself.” His interest in Kant extends only to recognizing the
restricted character of his “pure Reason.” This is to coincide at the
end of his analyses that “the world can no longer offer anything to the
man filled with anguish.” This anxiety seems to him so much more
important than all the categories in the world that he thinks and talks
only of it. He enumerates its aspects: boredom when the ordinary man
strives to quash it in him and benumb it; terror when the mind
contemplates death. He too does not separate consciousness from the
absurd. The consciousness of death is the call of anxiety and “existence
then delivers itself its own summons through the intermediary of
consciousness.” It is the very voice of anguish and it adjures existence
“to return from its loss in the anonymous They.” For him, too, one must
not sleep, but must keep alert until the consummation. He stands in this
absurd world and points out its ephemeral character. He seeks his way
amid these ruins.
Jaspers despairs of any ontology because he claims that we have lost
“naivete.” He knows that we can achieve nothing that will transcend the
fatal game of appearances. He knows that the end of the mind is failure.
He tarries over the spiritual adventures revealed by history and
pitilessly discloses the flaw in each system, the illusion that saved
everything, the preaching that hid nothing.
In this ravaged world in which the impossibility of knowledge is
established, in which everlasting nothingness seems the only reality and
irremediable despair seems the only attitude, he tries to recover the
Ariadne’s thread that leads to divine secrets.
Chestov, for his part, throughout a wonderfully monotonous work,
constantly straining toward the same truths, tirelessly demonstrates
that the tightest system, the most universal rationalism always stumbles
eventually on the irrational of human thought. None of the ironic facts
or ridiculous contradictions that depreciate the reason escapes him. One
thing only interests him, and that is the exception, whether in the
domain of the heart or of the mind. Through the Dostoevskian experiences
of the condemned man, the exacerbated adventures of the Nietzschean
mind, Hamlet’s imprecations, or the bitter aristocracy of an Ibsen, he
tracks down, il-luminates, and magnifies the human revolt against the
irremediable. He refuses the reason its reasons and begins to advance
with some decision only in the middle of that colorless desert where all
certainties have become stones.
Of all perhaps the most engaging, Kierkegaard, for a part of his
existence at least, does more than discover the absurd, he lives it.
The man who writes: “The surest of stubborn silences is not to hold
one’s tongue but to talk” makes sure in the beginning that no truth is
absolute or can render satisfactory an existence that is impossible in
itself. Don Juan of the understanding, he multiplies pseudonyms and
contradictions, writes his Discourses of Edification at the same time as
that manual of cynical spiritualism, The Diary of the Seducer. He
refuses consolations, ethics, reliable principles. As for that thorn he
feels in his heart, he is careful not to quiet its pain. On the
contrary, he awakens it and, in the desperate joy of a man crucified and
happy to be so, he builds up piece by piece—lucidity, refusal, make
believe—a category of the man possessed. That face both tender and
sneering, those pirouettes followed by a cry from the heart are the
absurd spirit itself grappling with a reality beyond its comprehension.
And the spiritual adventure that leads Kierkegaard to his beloved
scandals begins likewise in the chaos of an experience divested of its
setting and relegated to its original incoherence.
On quite a different plane, that of method, Husserl and the
phenomenologists, by their very extravagances, reinstate the world in
its diversity and deny the transcendent power of the reason. The
spiritual universe becomes incalculably enriched through them.
The rose petal, the milestone, or the human hand are as important as
love, desire, or the laws of gravity. Thinking ceases to be unifying or
making a semblance familiar in the guise of a major principle. Thinking
is learning all over again to see, to be attentive, to focus
consciousness; it is turning every idea and every image, in the manner
of Proust, into a privileged moment. What justifies thought is its
extreme consciousness. Though more positive than Kierkegaard’s or
Chestov’s, Husserl’s manner of proceeding, in the beginning,
nevertheless negates the classic method of the reason, disappoints hope,
opens to intuition and to the heart a whole proliferation of phenomena,
the wealth of which has about it something inhuman. These paths lead to
all sciences or to none.
This amounts to saying that in this case the means are more important
than the end. All that is involved is “an attitude for understanding”
and not a consolation. Let me repeat: in the beginning, at very least.
How can one fail to feel the basic relationship of these minds!
How can one fail to see that they take their stand around a privileged
and bitter moment in which hope has no further place? I want everything
to be explained to me or nothing. And the reason is impotent when it
hears this cry from the heart. The mind aroused by this insistence seeks
and finds nothing but contradictions and nonsense. What I fail to
understand is nonsense. The world is peopled with such irrationals. The
world itself, whose single meaning I do not understand, is but a vast
irrational. If one could only say just once: “This is clear,” all would
be saved. But these men vie with one another in proclaiming that nothing
is clear, all is chaos, that all man has is his lucidity and his
definite knowledge of the walls surrounding him.
All these experiences agree and confirm one another. The mind, when it
reaches its limits, must make a judgment and choose its conclusions.
This is where suicide and the reply stand. But I wish to reverse the
order of the inquiry and start out from the intelligent adventure and
come back to daily acts. The experiences called to mind here were born
in the desert that we must not leave behind. At least it is essential to
know how far they went. At this point of his effort man stands face to
face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness
and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the
human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. This must not be
forgotten.
This must be clung to because the whole consequence of a life can depend
on it. The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born
of their encounter—these are the three characters in the drama that must
necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable.
The feeling of the absurd is not, for all that, the notion of the
absurd. It lays the foundations for it, and that is all. It is not
limited to that notion, except in the brief moment when it passes
judgment on the universe. Subsequently it has a chance of going further.
It is alive; in other words, it must die or else reverberate. So it is
with the themes we have gathered together. But there again what
interests me is not works or minds, criticism of which would call for
another form and another place, but the discovery of what their
conclusions have in common. Never, perhaps, have minds been so
different. And yet we recognize as identical the spiritual landscapes in
which they get under way. Likewise, despite such dissimilar zones of
knowledge, the cry that terminates their itinerary rings out in the same
way. It is evident that the thinkers we have just recalled have a common
climate.
To say that that climate is deadly scarcely amounts to playing on words.
Living under that stifling sky forces one to get away or to stay. The
important thing is to find out how people get away in the first case and
why people stay in the second case. This is how I define the problem of
suicide and the possible interest in the conclusions of existential
philosophy.
But first I want to detour from the direct path. Up to now we have
managed to circumscribe the absurd from the outside. One can, however,
wonder how much is clear in that notion and by direct analysis try to
discover its meaning on the one hand and, on the other, the consequences
it involves.
If I accuse an innocent man of a monstrous crime, if I tell a virtuous
man that he has coveted his own sister, he will reply that this is
absurd. His indignation has its comical aspect. But it also has its
fundamental reason. The virtuous man illustrates by that reply the
definitive antinomy existing between the deed I am attributing to him
and his lifelong principles. “It’s absurd” means “It’s impossible” but
also “It’s contradictory.” If I see a man armed only with a sword attack
a group of machine guns, I shall consider his act to be absurd. But it
is so solely by virtue of the disproportion between his intention and
the reality he will encounter, of the contradiction I notice between his
true strength and the aim he has in view. Likewise we shall deem a
verdict absurd when we contrast it with the verdict the facts apparently
dictated. And, similarly, a demonstration by the absurd is achieved by
comparing the consequences of such a reasoning with the logical reality
one wants to set up. In all these cases, from the simplest to the most
complex, the magnitude of the absurdity will be in direct ratio to the
distance between the two terms of my comparison. There are absurd
marriages, challenges, rancors, silences, wars, and even peace treaties.
For each of them the absurdity springs from a comparison. I am thus
justified in saying that the feeling of absurdity does not spring from
the mere scrutiny of a fact or an impression, but that it bursts from
the comparison between a bare fact and a certain reality, between an
action and the world that transcends it. The absurd is essentially a
divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of
their confrontation.
In this particular case and on the plane of intelligence, I can
therefore say that the Absurd is not in man (if such a metaphor could
have a meaning) nor in the world, but in their presence together. For
the moment it is the only bond uniting them. If wish to limit myself to
facts, I know what man wants, I know what the world offers him, and now
I can say that I also know what links them. I have no need to dig
deeper. A single certainty is enough for the seeker. He simply has to
derive all the consequences from it.
The immediate consequence is also a rule of method. The odd trinity
brought to light in this way is certainly not a startling discovery. But
it resembles the data of experience in that it is both infinitely simple
and infinitely complicated. Its first distinguishing feature in this
regard is that it cannot be divided. To destroy one of its terms is to
destroy the whole. There can be no absurd outside the human mind. Thus,
like everything else, the absurd ends with death. But there can be no
absurd outside this world either. And it is by this elementary criterion
that I judge the notion of the absurd to be essential and consider that
it can stand as the first of my truths. The rule of method alluded to
above appears here. If I judge that a thing is true, I must preserve it.
If I attempt to solve a problem, at least I must not by that very
solution conjure away one of the terms of the problem. For me the sole
datum is the absurd.
The first and, after all, the only condition of my inquiry is to
preserve the very thing that crushes me, consequently to respect what I
consider essential in it. I have just defined it as a confrontation and
an unceasing struggle.
And carrying this absurd logic to its conclusion, I must admit that that
struggle implies a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with
despair), a continual rejection (which must not be confused with
renunciation), and a conscious dissatisfaction (which must not be
compared to immature unrest). Everything that destroys, conjures away,
or exorcises these requirements (and, to begin with, consent which
overthrows divorce) ruins the absurd and devaluates the attitude that
may then be proposed. The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not
agreed to.
There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a
man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot
free himself from them. One has to pay something.
A man who has be-come conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it. A
man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the
future. That is natural. But it is just as natural that he should strive
to escape the universe of which he is the creator.
All the foregoing has significance only on account of this paradox.
Certain men, starting from a critique of rationalism, have admitted the
absurd climate. Nothing is more instructive in this regard than to
scrutinize the way in which they have elaborated their consequences.
Now, to limit myself to existential philosophies, I see that all of them
without exception suggest escape. Through an odd reasoning, starting out
from the absurd over the ruins of reason, in a closed universe limited
to the human, they deify what crushes them and find reason to hope in
what impoverishes them. That forced hope is religious in all of them. It
deserves attention.
I shall merely analyze here as examples a few themes dear to Chestov and
Kierkegaard. But Jaspers will provide us, in caricatural form, a typical
example of this attitude. As a result the rest will be clearer. He is
left powerless to realize the transcendent, incapable of plumbing the
depth of experience, and conscious of that universe upset by failure.
Will he advance or at least draw the conclusions from that failure? He
contributes nothing new. He has found nothing in experience but the
confession of his own impotence and no occasion to infer any
satisfactory principle. Yet without justification, as he says to
himself, he suddenly asserts all at once the transcendent, the essence
of experience, and the superhuman significance of life when he writes:
“Does not the failure reveal, beyond any possible explanation and
interpretation, not the absence but the existence of transcendence?”
That existence which, suddenly and through a blind act of human
confidence, explains everything, he defines as “the unthinkable unity of
the general and the particular.” Thus the absurd becomes god (in the
broadest meaning of this word) and that inability to understand becomes
the existence that illuminates everything.
Nothing logically prepares this reasoning. I can call it a leap. And
para-doxically can be understood Jaspers’s insistence, his infinite
patience devoted to making the experience of the transcendent impossible
to realize. For the more fleeting that approximation is, the more empty
that definition proves to be, and the more real that transcendent is to
him; for the passion he devotes to asserting it is in direct proportion
to the gap between his powers of explanation and the irrationality of
the world and of experience. It thus appears that the more bitterly
Jaspers destroys the reason’s preconceptions, the more radically he will
explain the world. That apostle of humiliated thought will find at the
very end of humiliation the means of regenerating being to its very
depth.
Mystical thought has familiarized us with such devices. They are just as
legitimate as any attitude of mind. But for the moment I am acting as if
I took a certain problem seriously. Without judging beforehand the
general value of this attitude or its educative power, I mean simply to
consider whether it answers the conditions I set myself, whether it is
worthy of the conflict that concerns me. Thus I return to Chestov. A
commentator relates a remark of his that deserves interest:
“The only true solution,” he said, “is precisely where human judgment
sees no solution. Otherwise, what need would we have of God? We turn
toward God only to obtain the impossible. As for the possible, men
suffice.” If there is a Chestovian philosophy, I can say that it is
altogether summed up in this way. For when, at the conclusion of his
passionate analyses, Chestov discovers the fundamental absurdity of all
existence, he does not say: “This is the absurd,” but rather: “This is
God: we must rely on him even if he does not correspond to any of our
rational categories.” So that confusion may not be possible, the Russian
philosopher even hints that this God is perhaps full of hatred and
hateful, incomprehensible and contradictory; but the more hideous is his
face, the more he asserts his power. His greatness is his incoherence.
His proof is his inhumanity. One must spring into him and by this leap
free oneself from rational illusions. Thus, for Chestov acceptance of
the absurd is contemporaneous with the absurd itself. Being aware of it
amounts to accepting it, and the whole logical effort of his thought is
to bring it out so that at the same time the tremendous hope it involves
may burst forth. Let me repeat that this attitude is legitimate. But I
am persisting here in considering a single problem and all its
consequences. I do not have to examine the emotion of a thought or of an
act of faith. I have a whole lifetime to do that. I know that the
rationalist finds Chestov’s attitude annoying. But I also feel that
Chestov is right rather than the rationalist, and I merely want to know
if he remains faithful to the commandments of the absurd.
Now, if it is admitted that the absurd is the contrary of hope, it is
seen that existential thought for Chestov presupposes the absurd but
proves it only to dispel it. Such subtlety of thought is a conjuror’s
emotional trick. When Chestov elsewhere sets his absurd in opposition to
current morality and reason, he calls it truth and redemption. Hence,
there is basically in that definition of the absurd an approbation that
Chestov grants it. If it is admitted that all the power of that notion
lies in the way it runs counter to our elementary hopes, if it is felt
that to remain, the absurd requires not to be consented to, then it can
be clearly seen that it has lost its true aspect, its human and relative
character in order to enter an eternity that is both incomprehensible
and satisfying. If there is an absurd, it is in man’s universe. The
moment the notion transforms itself into eternity’s springboard, it
ceases to be linked to human lucidity.
The absurd is no longer that evidence that man ascertains without
consenting to it. The struggle is eluded. Man integrates the absurd and
in that communion causes to disappear its essential character, which is
opposition, laceration, and divorce. This leap is an escape. Chestov,
who is so fond of quoting Hamlet’s remark: “The time is out of joint,”
writes it down with a sort of savage hope that seems to belong to him in
particular. For it is not in this sense that Hamlet says it or
Shakespeare writes it. The intoxication of the irrational and the
vocation of rapture turn a lucid mind away from the absurd. To Chestov
reason is useless but there is something beyond reason. To an absurd
mind reason is useless and there is nothing beyond reason.
This leap can at least enlighten us a little more as to the true nature
of the absurd. We know that it is worthless except in an equilibrium,
that it is, above all, in the comparison and not in the terms of that
comparison. But it so happens that Chestov puts all the emphasis on one
of the terms and destroys the equilibrium. Our appetite for
understanding, our nostalgia for the absolute are explicable only in so
far, precisely, as we can understand and explain many things. It is
useless to negate the reason absolutely. It has its order in which it is
efficacious. It is properly that of human experience. Whence we wanted
to make everything clear. If we cannot do so, if the absurd is born on
that occasion, it is born precisely at the very meeting-point of that
efficacious but limited reason with the ever resurgent irrational. Now,
when Chestov rises up against a Hegelian proposition such as “the motion
of the solar system takes place in conformity with immutable laws and
those laws are its reason,” when he devotes all his passion to upsetting
Spinoza’s rationalism, he concludes, in effect, in favor of the vanity
of all reason. Whence, by a natural and illegitimate reversal, to the
pre-eminence of the irrational.[5] But the transition is not evident.
For here may intervene the notion of limit and the notion of level. The
laws of nature may be operative up to a certain limit, beyond which they
turn against themselves to give birth to the absurd. Or else, they may
justify themselves on the level of description without for that reason
being true on the level of explanation.
Everything is sacrificed here to the irrational, and, the demand for
clarity being conjured away, the absurd disappears with one of the terms
of its comparison. The absurd man, on the other hand, does not undertake
such a leveling process. He recognizes the struggle, does not absolutely
scorn reason, and admits the irrational. Thus he again embraces in a
single glance all the data of experience and he is little inclined to
leap before knowing. He knows simply that in that alert awareness there
is no further place for hope.
What is perceptible in Leo Chestov will be perhaps even more so in
Kierkegaard. To be sure, it is hard to outline clear propositions in so
elusive a writer. But, despite apparently opposed writings, beyond the
pseudonyms, the tricks, and the smiles, can be felt throughout that
work, as it were, the presentiment (at the same time as the
apprehension) of a truth which eventually bursts forth in the last
works: Kierkegaard likewise takes the leap. His childhood having been so
frightened by Christianity, he ultimately returns to its harshest
aspect. For him, too, antinomy and paradox become criteria of the
religious. Thus, the very thing that led to despair of the meaning and
depth of this life now gives it its truth and its clarity. Christianity
is the scandal, and what Kierkegaard calls for quite plainly is the
third sacrifice required by Ignatius Loyola, the one in which God most
rejoices: “The sacrifice of the intellect.”[6]
This effect of the “leap” is odd, but must not surprise us any longer.
He makes of the absurd the criterion of the other world, whereas it is
simply a residue of the experience of this world. “In his failure,” says
Kierkegaard, “the believer finds his triumph.”
It is not for me to wonder to what stirring preaching this attitude is
linked. I merely have to wonder if the spectacle of the absurd and its
own character justifies it. On this point, I know that it is not so.
Upon considering again the content of the absurd, one understands better
the method that inspired Kierkegaard. Between the irrational of the
world and the insurgent nostalgia of the absurd, he does not maintain
the equilibrium. He does not respect the relationship that constitutes,
properly speaking, the feeling of absurdity. Sure of being unable to
escape the irrational, he wants at least to save himself from that
desperate nostalgia that seems to him sterile and devoid of implication.
But if he may be right on this point in his judgment, he could not be in
his negation. If he substitutes for his cry of revolt a frantic
adherence, at once he is led to blind himself to the absurd which
hitherto enlightened him and to deify the only certainty he henceforth
possesses, the irrational. The important thing, as Abbe Galiani said to
Mme d’Epinay, is not to be cured, but to live with one’s ailments.
Kierkegaard wants to be cured. To be cured is his frenzied wish, and it
runs throughout his whole journal. The entire effort of his intelligence
is to escape the antinomy of the human condition. An all the more
desperate effort since he intermittently perceives its vanity when he
speaks of himself, as if neither fear of God nor piety were capable of
bringing him to peace. Thus it is that, through a strained subterfuge,
he gives the irrational the appearance and God the attributes of the
absurd: unjust, incoherent, and incomprehensible. Intelligence alone in
him strives to stifle the underlying demands of the human heart. Since
nothing is proved, everything can be proved.
Indeed, Kierkegaard himself shows us the path taken. I do not want to
suggest anything here, but how can one fail to read in his works the
signs of an almost intentional mutilation of the soul to balance the
mutilation accepted in regard to the absurd? It is the leitmotiv of the
Journal. “What I lacked was the animal which also belongs to human
destiny
But give me a body then.” And further on: “Oh! especially in my early
youth what should I not have given to be a man, even for six months ...
what I lack, basically, is a body and the physical conditions of
existence.”
Elsewhere, the same man nevertheless adopts the great cry of hope that
has come down through so many centuries and quickened so many hearts,
except that of the absurd man. “But for the Christian death is certainly
not the end of everything and it implies infinitely more hope than life
implies for us, even when that life is overflowing with health and
vigor.” Reconciliation through scandal is still reconciliation. It
allows one perhaps, as can be seen, to derive hope of its contrary,
which is death. But even if fellow- feeling inclines one toward that
attitude, still it must be said that excess justifies nothing. That
transcends, as the saying goes, the human scale; therefore it must be
superhuman. But this “therefore” is superfluous. There is no logical
certainty here. There is no experimental probability either. All I can
say is that, in fact, that transcends my scale. If I do not draw a
negation from it, at least I do not want to found anything on the
incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and
with that alone. I am told again that here the intelligence must
sacrifice its pride and the reason bow down. But if I recognize the
limits of the reason, I do not therefore negate it, recognizing its
relative powers. I merely want to remain in this middle path where the
intelligence can remain clear. If that is its pride, I see no sufficient
reason for giving it up. Nothing more profound, for example, than
Kierkegaard’s view according to which despair is not a fact but a state:
the very state of sin. For sin is what alienates from God. The absurd,
which is the metaphysical state of the conscious man, does not lead to
God.[7] Perhaps this notion will become clearer if I risk this shocking
statement: the absurd is sin without God.
It is a matter of living in that state of the absurd I know on what it
is founded, this mind and this world straining against each other
without being able to embrace each other. I ask for the rule— of life of
that state, and what I am offered neglects its basis, negates one of the
terms of the painful opposition, demands of me a resignation. I ask what
is involved in the condition I recognize as mine; I know it implies
obscurity and ignorance; and I am assured that this ignorance explains
everything and that this darkness is my light. But there is no reply
here to my intent, and this stirring lyricism cannot hide the paradox
from me. One must therefore turn away. Kierkegaard may shout in warning:
“If man had no eternal consciousness, if, at the bottom of everything,
there were merely a wild, seething force producing everything, both
large and trifling, in the storm of dark passions, if the bottomless
void that nothing can fill underlay all things, what would life be but
despair?” This cry is not likely to stop the absurd man. Seeking what is
true is not seeking what is desirable. If in order to elude the anxious
question:
“What would life be?” one must, like the donkey, feed on the roses of
illusion, then the absurd mind, rather than resigning itself to
falsehood, prefers, to adopt fearlessly Kierkegaard’s reply: “despair.”
Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.
I am taking the liberty at this point of calling the existential
attitude philosophical suicide. But this does not imply a judgment.
It is a convenient way of indicating the movement by which a thought
negates itself and tends to transcend itself in its very negation. For
the existentials negation is their God. To be precise, that god is
maintained only through the negation of human reason.[8] But, like
suicides, gods change with men. There are many ways of leaping, the
essential being to leap. Those redeeming negations, those ultimate
contradictions which negate the obstacle that has not yet been leaped
over, may spring just as well (this is the paradox at which this
reasoning aims) from a certain religious inspiration as from the
rational order. They always lay claim to the eternal, and it is solely
in this that they take the leap.
It must be repeated that the reasoning developed in this essay leaves
out altogether the most widespread spiritual attitude of our enlightened
age: the one, based on the principle that all is reason, which aims to
explain the world. It is natural to give a clear view of the world after
accepting the idea that it must be clear. That is even legitimate, but
does not concern the reasoning we are following out here. In fact, our
aim is to shed light upon the step taken by the mind when, starting from
a philosophy of the world’s lack of meaning, it ends up by finding a
meaning and depth in it.
The most touching of those steps is religious in essence; it becomes
obvious in the theme of the irrational. But the most paradoxical and
most significant is certainly the one that attributes rational reasons
to a world it originally imagined as devoid of any guiding principle. It
is impossible in any case to reach the consequences that concern us
without having given an idea of this new attainment of the spirit of
nostalgia.
I shall examine merely the theme of “the Intention” made fashionable by
Husserl and the phenomenologists. I have already alluded to it.
Originally Husserl’s method negates the classic procedure of the reason.
Let me repeat. Thinking is not unifying or making the appearance
familiar under the guise of a great principle. Thinking is learning all
over again how to see, directing one’s consciousness, making of every
image a privileged place. In other words, phenomenology declines to
explain the world, it wants to be merely a description of actual
experience. It confirms absurd thought in its initial assertion that
there is no truth, but merely truths. From the evening breeze to this
hand on my shoulder, everything has its truth. Consciousness illuminates
it by paying attention to it. Consciousness does not form the object of
its understanding, it merely focuses, it is the act of attention, and,
to borrow a Bergsonian image, it resembles the projector that suddenly
focuses on an image. The difference is that there is no scenario, but a
successive and incoherent illustration. In that magic lantern all the
pictures are privileged. Consciousness suspends in experience the
objects of its attention. Through its miracle it isolates them.
Henceforth they are beyond all judgments. This is the “intention” that
characterizes consciousness. But the word does not imply any idea of
finality; it is taken in its sense of “direction”: its only value is
topographical.
At first sight, it certainly seems that in this way nothing contradicts
the absurd spirit. That apparent modesty of thought that limits itself
to describing what it declines to explain, that intentional discipline
whence results paradoxically a profound enrichment of experience and the
rebirth of the world in its prolixity are absurd procedures. At least at
first sight. For methods of thought, in this case as elsewhere, always
assume two aspects, one psychological and the other metaphysical.[9]
Thereby they harbor two truths. If the theme of the intentional claims
to illustrate merely a psychological attitude, by which reality is
drained instead of being explained, nothing in fact separates it from
the absurd spirit. It aims to enumerate what it cannot transcend. It
affirms solely that without any unifying principle thought can still
take delight in describing and understanding every aspect of experience.
The truth involved then for each of those aspects is psychological in
nature. It simply testifies to the “interest” that reality can offer.
It is a way of awaking a sleeping world and of making it vivid to the
mind. But if one attempts to extend and give a rational basis to that
notion of truth, if one claims to discover in this way the “essence” of
each object of knowledge, one restores its depth to experience. For an
absurd mind that is incomprehensible. Now, it is this wavering between
modesty and assurance that is noticeable in the intentional attitude,
and this shimmering of phenomenological thought will illustrate the
absurd reasoning better than anything else.
For Husserl speaks likewise of “extra-temporal essences” brought to
light by the intention, and he sounds like Plato. All things are not
explained by one thing but by all things. I see no difference. To be
sure, those ideas or those essences that consciousness “effectuates” at
the end of every description are not yet to be considered perfect
models. But it is asserted that they are directly present in each datum
of perception. There is no longer a single idea explaining everything,
but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite
number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.
Platonic realism becomes intuitive, but it is still realism. Kierkegaard
was swallowed up in his God; Parmenides plunged thought into the One.
But here thought hurls itself into an abstract polytheism. But this is
not all: hallucinations and fictions likewise belong to “extra-temporal
essences.” In the new world of ideas, the species of centaurs
collaborates with the more modest species of metropolitan man.
For the absurd man, there was a truth as well as a bitterness in that
purely psychological opinion that all aspects of the world are
privileged. To say that everything is privileged is tantamount to saying
that everything is equivalent. But the metaphysical aspect of that truth
is so far-reaching that through an elementary reaction he feels closer
perhaps to Plato. He is taught, in fact, that every image presupposes an
equally privileged essence. In this ideal world without hierarchy, the
formal army is composed solely of generals.
To be sure, transcendency had been eliminated. But a sudden shift in
thought brings back into the world a sort of fragmentary immanence which
restores to the universe its depth.
Am I to fear having carried too far a theme handled with greater
circumspection by its creators? I read merely these assertions of
Husserl, apparently paradoxical yet rigorously logical if what precedes
is accepted: “That which is true is true absolutely, in itself; truth is
one, identical with itself, however different the creatures who perceive
it, men, monsters, angels or gods.” Reason triumphs and trumpets forth
with that voice, I cannot deny. What can its assertions mean in the
absurd world? The perception of an angel or a god has no meaning for me.
That geometrical spot where divine reason ratifies mine will always be
incomprehensible to me. There, too, I discern a leap, and though
performed in the abstract, it nonetheless means for me forgetting just
what I do not want to forget. When farther on Husserl exclaims: “If all
masses subject to attraction were to disappear, the law of attraction
would not be destroyed but would simply remain without any possible
application,” I know that I am faced with a metaphysic of consolation.
And if I want to discover the point where thought leaves the path of
evidence, I have only to reread the parallel reasoning that Husserl
voices regarding the mind: “If we could contemplate clearly the exact
laws of psychic processes, they would be seen to be likewise eternal and
invariable, like the basic laws of theoretical natural science. Hence
they would be valid even if there were no psychic process.” Even if the
mind were not, its laws would be! I see then that of a psychological
truth Husserl aims to make a rational rule: after having denied the
integrating power of human reason, he leaps by this expedient to eternal
Reason.
Husserl’s theme of the “concrete universe” cannot then surprise me. If I
am told that all essences are not formal but that some are material,
that the first are the object of logic and the second of science, this
is merely a question of definition. The abstract, I am told, indicates
but a part, without consistency in itself, of a concrete universal. But
the wavering already noted allows me to throw light on the confusion of
these terms. For that may mean that the concrete object of my attention,
this sky, the reflection of that water on this coat, alone preserve the
prestige of the real that my interest isolates in the world. And I shall
not deny it. But that may mean also that this coat itself is universal,
has its particular and sufficient essence, belongs to the world of
forms. I then realize that merely the order of the procession has been
changed. This world has ceased to have its reflection in a higher
universe, but the heaven of forms is figured in the host of images of
this earth. This changes nothing for me. Rather than encountering here a
taste for the concrete, the meaning of the human condition, I find an
intellectualism sufficiently unbridled to generalize the concrete
itself.
It is futile to be amazed by the apparent paradox that leads thought to
its own negation by the opposite paths of humiliated reason and
triumphal reason. From the abstract god of Husserl to the dazzling god
of Kierkegaard the distance is not so great.
Reason and the irrational lead to the same preaching. In truth the way
matters but little; the will to arrive suffices. The abstract
philosopher and the religious philosopher start out from the same
disorder and support each other in the same anxiety. But the essential
is to explain. Nostalgia is stronger here than knowledge.
It is significant that the thought of the epoch is at once one of the
most deeply imbued with a philosophy of the non-significance of the
world and one of the most divided in its conclusions. It is constantly
oscillating between extreme rationalization of reality which tends to
break up that thought into standard reasons and its extreme
irrationalization which tends to deify it. But this divorce is only
apparent. It is a matter of reconciliation, and, in both cases, the leap
suffices. It is always wrongly thought that the notion of reason is a
oneway notion. To tell the truth, however rigorous it may be in its
ambition, this concept is nonetheless just as unstable as others. Reason
bears a quite human aspect, but it also is able to turn toward the
divine. Since Plotinus, who was the first to reconcile it with the
eternal climate, it has learned to turn away from the most cherished of
its principles, which is contradiction, in order to integrate into it
the strangest, the quite magic one of participation.[10] It is an
instrument of thought and not thought itself. Above all, a man’s thought
is his nostalgia.
Just as reason was able to soothe the melancholy of Plotinus, it
provides modern anguish the means of calming itself in the familiar
setting of the eternal. The absurd mind has less luck. For it the world
is neither so rational nor so irrational. It is unreasonable and only
that. With Husserl the reason eventually has no limits at all. The
absurd, on the contrary, establishes its lim-its since it is powerless
to calm its anguish. Kierkegaard independently asserts that a single
limit is enough to negate that anguish. But the absurd does not go so
far. For it that limit is directed solely at the reason’s ambitions. The
theme of the irrational, as it is conceived by the existentials, is
reason becoming confused and escaping by negating itself. The absurd is
lucid reason noting its limits.
Only at the end of this difficult path does the absurd man recognize his
true motives. Upon comparing his inner exigence and what is then offered
him, he suddenly feels he is going to turn away. In the universe of
Husserl the world becomes clear and that longing for familiarity that
man’s heart harbors becomes useless.
In Kierkegaard’s apocalypse that desire for clarity must be given up if
it wants to be satisfied. Sin is not so much knowing (if it were,
everybody would be innocent) as wanting to know. Indeed, it is the only
sin of which the absurd man can feel that it constitutes both his guilt
and his innocence. He is offered a solution in which all the past
contradictions have become merely polemical games.
But this is not the way he experienced them. Their truth must be
preserved, which consists in not being satisfied. He does not want
preaching.
My reasoning wants to be faithful to the evidence that aroused it. That
evidence is the absurd. It is that divorce between the mind that desires
and the world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity, this fragmented
universe and the contradiction that binds them together. Kierkegaard
suppresses my nostalgia and Husserl gathers together that universe. That
is not what I was expecting. It was a matter of living and thinking with
those dislocations, of knowing whether one had to accept or refuse.
There can be no question of masking the evidence, of suppressing the
absurd by denying one of the terms of its equation. It is essential to
know whether one can live with it or whether, on the other hand, logic
commands one to die of it. I am not interested in philosophical suicide,
but rather in plain suicide. I merely wish to purge it of its emotional
content and know its logic and its integrity. Any other position implies
for the absurd mind deceit and the mind’s retreat before what the mind
itself has brought to light. Husserl claims to obey the desire to escape
“the inveterate habit of living and thinking in certain well- known and
convenient conditions of existence,” but the final leap restores in him
the eternal and its comfort. The leap does not represent an extreme
danger as Kierkegaard would like it to do.
The danger, on the contrary, lies in the subtle instant that precedes
the leap. Being able to remain on that dizzying crest—that is integrity
and the rest is subterfuge. I know also that never has helplessness
inspired such striking harmonies as those of Kierkegaard. But if
helplessness has its place in the indifferent landscapes of history, it
has none in a reasoning whose exigence is now known.
Now the main thing is done, I hold certain facts from which I cannot
separate. What I know, what is certain, what I cannot deny, what I
cannot reject—this is what counts. I can negate everything of that part
of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this
longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I can refute
everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me,
except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence
which springs from anarchy. I don’t know whether this world has a
meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning
and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning
outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.
What I touch, what resists me—that is what I understand. And these two
certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the
impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable
principle—I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can
I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means
nothing within the limits of my condition?
If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have
a meaning, or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong
to this world. I should be this world to which I am now opposed by my
whole consciousness and my whole insistence upon familiarity. This
ridiculous reason is what sets me in opposition to all creation. I
cannot cross it out with a stroke of the pen. What I believe to be true
I must therefore preserve. What seems to me so obvious, even against me,
I must support. And what constitutes the basis of that conflict, of that
break between the world and my mind, but the awareness of it? If
therefore I want to preserve it, I can through a constant awareness,
ever revived, ever alert. This is what, for the moment, I must remember.
At this moment the absurd, so obvious and yet so hard to win, returns to
a man’s life and finds its home there. At this moment, too, the mind can
leave the arid, dried-up path of lucid effort. That path now emerges in
daily life. It encounters the world of the anonymous impersonal pronoun
“one,” but henceforth man enters in with his revolt and his lucidity. He
has forgotten how to hope. This hell of the present is his Kingdom at
last. All problems recover their sharp edge. Abstract evidence retreats
before the poetry of forms and colors. Spiritual conflicts become
embodied and return to the abject and magnificent shelter of man’s
heart. None of them is settled. But all are transfigured. Is one going
to die, escape by the leap, rebuild a mansion of ideas and forms to
one’s own scale? Is one, on the contrary, going to take up the
heart-rending and marvelous wager of the absurd? Let’s make a final
effort in this regard and draw all our conclusions. The body, affection,
creation, action, human nobility will then resume their places in this
mad world. At last man will again find there the wine of the absurd and
the bread of indifference on which he feeds his greatness.
Let us insist again on the method: it is a matter of persisting. At a
certain point on his path the absurd man is tempted. History is not
lacking in either religions or prophets, even without gods. He is asked
to leap. All he can reply is that he doesn’t fully understand, that it
is not obvious. Indeed, he does not want to do anything but what he
fully understands. He is assured that this is the sin of pride, but he
does not understand the notion of sin; that perhaps hell is in store,
but he has not enough imagination to visualize that strange future; that
he is losing immortal life, but that seems to him an idle consideration.
An attempt is made to get him to admit his guilt. He feels innocent. To
tell the truth, that is all he feels—his irreparable innocence. This is
what allows him everything. Hence, what he demands of himself is to live
solely with what he knows, to accommodate himself to what is, and to
bring in nothing that is not certain. He is told that nothing is. But
this at least is a certainty.
And it is with this that he is concerned: he wants to find out if it is
possible to live without appeal.
Now I can broach the notion of suicide. It has already been felt what
solution might be given. At this point the problem is reversed. It was
previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a
meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will
be lived all the better if it has no meaning.
Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. Now, no
one will live this fate, knowing it to be absurd, unless he does
everything to keep before him that absurd brought to light by
consciousness. Negating one of the terms of the opposition on which he
lives amounts to escaping it. To abolish conscious revolt is to elude
the problem. The theme of permanent revolution is thus carried into
individual experience. Living is keeping the absurd alive. Keeping it
alive is, above all, contemplating it. Unlike Eurydice, the absurd dies
only when we turn away from it. One of the only coherent philosophical
positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and
his own obscurity. It is an insistence upon an impossible transparency.
It challenges the world anew every second. Just as danger provided man
the unique opportunity of seizing awareness, so metaphysical revolt
extends awareness to the whole of experience. It is that constant
presence of man in his own eyes. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid
of hope.
That revolt is the certainly of a crushing fate, without the resignation
that ought to accompany it.
This is where it is seen to what a degree absurd experience is remote
from suicide. It may be thought that suicide follows revolt—but wrongly.
For it does not represent the logical outcome of revolt. It is just the
contrary by the consent it presupposes. Suicide, like the leap, is
acceptance at its extreme. Everything is over and man returns to his
essential history. His future, his unique and dreadful future—he sees
and rushes toward it. In its way, suicide settles the absurd. It engulfs
the absurd in the same death.
But I know that in order to keep alive, the absurd cannot be settled.
It escapes suicide to the extent that it is simultaneously awareness and
rejection of death. It is, at the extreme limit of the condemned man’s
last thought, that shoelace that despite everything he sees a few yards
away, on the very brink of his dizzying fall. The contrary of suicide,
in fact, is the man condemned to death.
That revolt gives life its value. Spread out over the whole length of a
life, it restores its majesty to that life. To a man devoid of blinders,
there is no finer sight than that of the intelligence at grips with a
reality that transcends it. The sight of human pride is unequaled. No
disparagement is of any use. That discipline that the mind imposes on
itself, that will conjured up out of nothing, that face-to-face struggle
have something exceptional about them. To impoverish that reality whose
inhumanity constitutes man’s majesty is tantamount to impoverishing him
himself. I understand then why the doctrines that explain everything to
me also debilitate me at the same time. They relieve me of the weight of
my own life, and yet I must carry it alone. At this juncture, I cannot
conceive that a skeptical metaphysics can be joined to an ethics of
renunciation.
Consciousness and revolt, these rejections are the contrary of
renunciation. Everything that is indomitable and passionate in a human
heart quickens them, on the contrary, with its own life. It is essential
to die unrecon-ciled and not of one’s own free will.
Suicide is a repudi—ation. The absurd man can only drain everything to
the bitter end, and deplete himself. The absurd is his extreme tension,
which he maintains constantly by solitary effort, for he knows that in
that consciousness and in that day-to-day revolt he gives proof of his
only truth, which is defiance. This is a first consequence.
If I remain in that prearranged position which consists in drawing all
the conclusions (and nothing else) involved in a newly discovered
notion, I am faced with a second paradox. In order to remain faithful to
that method, I have nothing to do with the problem of metaphysical
liberty. Knowing whether or not man is free doesn’t interest me. I can
experience only my own freedom.
As to it, I can have no general notions, but merely a few clear
insights. The problem of “freedom as such” has no meaning, for it is
linked in quite a different way with the problem of God.
Knowing whether or not man is free involves knowing whether he can have
a master. The absurdity peculiar to this problem comes from the fact
that the very notion that makes the problem of freedom possible also
takes away all its meaning. For in the presence of God there is less a
problem of freedom than a problem of evil. You know the alternative:
either we are not free and God the all-powerful is responsible for evil.
Or we are free and responsible but God is not all powerful. All the
scholastic subtleties have neither added anything to nor subtracted
anything from the acuteness of this paradox.
This is why I cannot act lost in the glorification or the mere
definition of a notion which eludes me and loses its meaning as soon as
it goes beyond the frame of reference of my individual experience. I
cannot understand what kind of freedom would be given me by a higher
being. I have lost the sense of hierarchy. The only conception of
freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the
midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and
action. Now if the absurd cancels all my chances of eternal freedom, it
restores and magnifies, on the other hand, my freedom of action. That
privation of hope and future means an increase in man’s availability.
Before encountering the absurd, the everyday man lives with aims, a
concern for the future or for justification (with regard to whom or what
is not the question). He weighs his chances, he counts on “someday,” his
retirement or the labor of his sons. He still thinks that something in
his life can be directed. In truth, he acts as if he were free, even if
all the facts make a point of contradicting that liberty. But after the
absurd, everything is upset.
That idea that “I am,” my way of acting as if everything has a meaning
(even if, on occasion, I said that nothing has)—all that is given the
lie in vertiginous fashion by the absurdity of a possible death.
Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having
preferences—all this presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one
occasionally ascertains that one doesn’t feel it. But at that moment I
am well aware that that higher liberty, that freedom to be, which alone
can serve as basis for a truth, does not exist. Death is there as the
only reality. After death the chips are down. I am not even free,
either, to perpetuate myself, but a slave, and, above all, a slave
without hope of an eternal revolution, without recourse to contempt. And
who without revolution and without contempt can remain a slave? What
freedom can exist in the fullest sense without assurance of eternity?
But at the same time the absurd man realizes that hitherto he was bound
to that postulate of freedom on the illusion of which he was living. In
a certain sense, that hampered him. To the extent to which he imagined a
purpose to his life, he adapted himself to the demands of a purpose to
be achieved and became the slave of his liberty. Thus I could not act
otherwise than as the father (or the engineer or the leader of a nation,
or the post-office sub-clerk) that I am preparing to be. I think I can
choose to be that rather than something else. I think so unconsciously,
to be sure. But at the same time I strengthen my postulate with the
beliefs of those around me, with the presumptions of my human
environment (others are so sure of being free, and that cheerful mood is
so contagious!). However far one may remain from any presumption, moral
or social, one is partly influenced by them and even, for the best among
them (there are good and bad presumptions), one adapts one’s life to
them. Thus the absurd man realizes that he was not really free. To speak
clearly, to the extent to which I hope, to which I worry about a truth
that might be individual to me, about a way of being or creating, to the
extent to which I arrange my life and prove thereby that I accept its
having a meaning, I create for myself barriers between which I confine
my life. I do like so many bureaucrats of the mind and heart who only
fill me with disgust and whose only vice, I now see clearly, is to take
man’s freedom seriously.
The absurd enlightens me on this point: there is no future.
Henceforth this is the reason for my inner freedom. I shall use two
comparisons here. Mystics, to begin with, find freedom in giving
themselves. By losing themselves in their god, by accepting his rules,
they become secretly free. In spontaneously accepted slavery they
recover a deeper independence. But what does that freedom mean? It may
be said, above all, that they feel free with regard to themselves, and
not so much free as liberated. Likewise, completely turned toward death
(taken here as the most obvious absurdity), the absurd man feels
released from everything outside that passionate attention crystallizing
in him. He enjoys a freedom with regard to common rules. It can be seen
at this point that the initial themes of existential philosophy keep
their entire value. The return to consciousness, the escape from
everyday sleep represent the first steps of absurd freedom. But it is
existential preaching that is alluded to, and with it that spiritual
leap which basically escapes consciousness. In the same way (this is my
second comparison) the slaves of antiquity did not belong to themselves.
But they knew that freedom which consists in not feeling
responsible.[11] Death, too, has patrician hands which, while crushing,
also liberate.
Losing oneself in that bottomless certainty, feeling henceforth
sufficiently remote from one’s own life to increase it and take a broad
view of it—this involves the principle of a liberation. Such new
independence has a definite time limit, like any freedom of action. It
does not write a check on eternity. But it takes the place of the
illusions of freedom, which all stopped with death. The divine
availability of the condemned man before whom the prison doors open in a
certain early dawn, that unbelievable disinterestedness with regard to
everything except for the pure flame of life—it is clear that death and
the absurd are here the principles of the only reasonable freedom: that
which a human heart can experience and live. This is a second
consequence. The absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid,
transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but
everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness.
He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his
strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life
without consolation.
But what does life mean in such a universe? Nothing else for the moment
but indifference to the future and a desire to use up everything that is
given. Belief in the meaning of life always implies a scale of values, a
choice, our preferences. Belief in the absurd, according to our
definitions, teaches the contrary. But this is worth examining.
Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests
me. I do not want to get out of my depth. This aspect of life being
given me, can I adapt myself to it? Now, faced with this particular
concern, belief in the absurd is tantamount to substituting the quantity
of experiences for the quality. If I convince myself that this life has
no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole
equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious
revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my
freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I
must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living. It
is not up to me to wonder if this is vulgar or revolting, elegant or
deplorable. Once and for all, value judgments are discarded here in
favor of factual judgments. I have merely to draw the conclusions from
what I can see and to risk nothing that is hypothetical. Supposing that
living in this way were not honorable, then true propriety would command
me to be dishonorable.
The most living; in the broadest sense, that rule means nothing.
It calls for definition. It seems to begin with the fact that the notion
of quantity has not been sufficiently explored. For it can account for a
large share of human experience. A man’s rule of conduct and his scale
of values have no meaning except through the quantity and variety of
experiences he has been in a position to accumulate. Now, the conditions
of modern life impose on the majority of men the same quantity of
experiences and consequently the same profound experience. To be sure,
there must also be taken into consideration the individual’s spontaneous
contribution, the “given” element in him. But I cannot judge of that,
and let me repeat that my rule here is to get along with the immediate
evidence. I see, then, that the individual character of a common code of
ethics lies not so much in the ideal importance of its basic principles
as in the norm of an experience that it is possible to measure. To
stretch a point somewhat, the Greeks had the code of their leisure just
as we have the code of our eight-hour day. But already many men among
the most tragic cause us to foresee that a longer experience changes
this table of values. They make us imagine that adventurer of the
everyday who through mere quantity of experiences would break all
records (I am purposely using this sports expression) and would thus win
his own code of ethics.[12] Yet let’s avoid romanticism and just ask
ourselves what such an attitude may mean to a man with his mind made up
to take up his bet and to observe strictly what he takes to be the rules
of the game.
Breaking all the records is first and foremost being faced with the
world as often as possible. How can that be done without contradictions
and without playing on words? For on the one hand the absurd teaches
that all experiences are unimportant, and on the other it urges toward
the greatest quantity of experiences. How, then, can one fail to do as
so many of those men I was speaking of earlier—choose the form of life
that brings us the most possible of that human matter, thereby
introducing a scale of values that on the other hand one claims to
reject?
But again it is the absurd and its contradictory life that teaches us.
For the mistake is thinking that that quantity of experiences depends on
the circumstances of our life when it depends solely on us. Here we have
to be over-simple. To two men living the same number of years, the world
always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be
conscious of them. Being aware of one’s life, one’s revolt, one’s
freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum. Where
lucidity dominates, the scale of values becomes useless. Let’s be even
more simple. Let us say that the sole obstacle, the sole deficiency to
be made good, is constituted by premature death. Thus it is that no
depth, no emotion, no passion, and no sacrifice could render equal in
the eyes of the absurd man (even if he wished it so) a conscious life of
forty years and a lucidity spread over sixty years.[13] Madness and
death are his irreparables. Man does not choose. The absurd and the
extra life it involves therefore do not defend on man’s will, but on its
contrary, which is death.[14] Weighing words carefully, it is altogether
a question of luck. One just has to be able to consent to this. There
will never be any substitute for twenty years of life and experience.
By what is an odd inconsistency in such an alert race, the Greeks
claimed that those who died young were beloved of the gods. And that is
true only if you are willing to believe that entering the ridiculous
world of the gods is forever losing the purest of joys, which is
feeling, and feeling on this earth. The present and the succession of
presents before a constantly conscious soul is the ideal of the absurd
man. But the word “ideal” rings false in this connection. It is not even
his vocation, but merely the third consequence of his reasoning. Having
started from an anguished awareness of the inhuman, the meditation on
the absurd returns at the end of its itinerary to the very heart of the
passionate flames of human revolt.[15]
Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my
freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I
transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death—and I
refuse suicide. I know, to be sure, the dull resonance that vibrates
throughout these days. Yet I have but a word to say: that it is
necessary. When Nietzsche writes: “It clearly seems that the chief thing
in heaven and on earth is to obey at length and in a single direction:
in the long run there results something for which it is worth the
trouble of living on this earth as, for example, virtue, art, music, the
dance, reason, the mind— something that transfigures, something
delicate, mad, or divine,” he elucidates the rule of a really
distinguished code of ethics. But he also points the way of the absurd
man. Obeying the flame is both the easiest and the hardest thing to do.
However, it is good for man to judge himself occasionally. He is alone
in being able to do so.
“Prayer,” says Alain, “is when night descends over thought.”
“But the mind must meet the night,” reply the mystics and the
existentials. Yes, indeed, but not that night that is born under closed
eyelids and through the mere will of man—dark, impenetrable night that
the mind calls up in order to plunge into it.
If it must encounter a night, let it be rather that of despair, which
remains lucid—polar night, vigil of the mind, whence will arise perhaps
that white and virginal brightness which outlines every object in the
light of the intelligence. At that degree, equivalence encounters
passionate understanding. Then it is no longer even a question of
judging the existential leap. It resumes its place amid the age-old
fresco of human attitudes. For the spectator, if he is conscious, that
leap is still absurd. In so far as it thinks it solves the paradox, it
reinstates it intact. On this score, it is stirring. On this score,
everything resumes its place and the absurd world is reborn in all its
splendor and diversity.
But it is bad to stop, hard to be satisfied with a single way of seeing,
to go without contradiction, perhaps the most subtle of all spiritual
forces. The preceding merely defines a way of thinking.
But the point is to live.
If Stavrogin believes, he does not think he believes. If he does not
believe, he does not think he does not believe.
—The Possessed
My field,” said Goethe, “is time.” That is indeed the absurd speech.
What, in fact, is the absurd man? He who, without negating it, does
nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he
prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live
without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him
of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt
devoid of future, and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his
adventure within the span of his lifetime. That is his field, that is
his action, which he shields from any judgment but his own. A greater
life cannot mean for him another life. That would be unfair. I am not
even speaking here of that paltry eternity that is called posterity. Mme
Roland relied on herself. That rashness was taught a lesson. Posterity
is glad to quote her remark, but forgets to judge it. Mme Roland is
indifferent to posterity.
There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people
behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has
no need of rules. There is but one moral code that the absurd man can
accept, the one that is not separated from God: the one that is
dictated. But it so happens that he lives outside that God. As for the
others (I mean also immoralism), the absurd man sees nothing in them but
justifications and he has nothing to justify. I start out here from the
principle of his innocence.
That innocence is to be feared.
“Everything is permitted,” exclaims Ivan Karamazov. That, too, smacks of
the absurd. But on condition that it not be taken in the vulgar sense. I
don’t know whether or not it has been sufficiently pointed out that it
is not an outburst of relief or of joy, but rather a bitter
acknowledgment of a fact. The certainty of a God giving a meaning to
life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with
impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice,
and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate;
it binds. It does not authorize all actions. “Everything is permitted”
does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers an
equivalence on the consequences of those actions. It does not recommend
crime, for this would be childish, but it restores to remorse its
futility. Likewise, if all experiences are indifferent, that of duty is
as legitimate as any other. One can be virtuous through a whim.
All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has
consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd
merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is
ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible persons, but
there are no guilty ones, in its opinion. At very most, such a mind will
consent to use past experience as a basis for its future actions. Time
will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both
limited and bulging with possibilities, everything in himself, except
his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate
from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive
to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd
mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as,
rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.
The few following images are of this type. They prolong the absurd
reasoning by giving it a specific attitude and their warmth.
Do I need to develop the idea that an example is not necessarily an
example to be followed (even less so, if possible, in the absurd world)
and that these illustrations are not therefore models?
Besides the fact that a certain vocation is required for this, one
becomes ridiculous, with all due allowance, when drawing from Rousseau
the conclusion that one must walk on all fours and from Nietzsche that
one must maltreat one’s mother. “It is essential to be absurd,” writes a
modern author, “it is not essential to be a dupe.”
The attitudes of which I shall treat can assume their whole meaning only
through consideration of their contraries. A sub- clerk in the post
office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them.
All experiences are indifferent in this regard.
There are some that do either a service or a disservice to man.
They do him a service if he is conscious. Otherwise, that has no
importance: a man’s failures imply judgment, not of circumstances, but
of himself.
I am choosing solely men who aim only to expend themselves or whom I see
to be expending themselves. That has no further implications. For the
moment I want to speak only of a world in which thoughts, like lives,
are devoid of future. Everything that makes man work and get excited
utilizes hope. The sole thought that is not mendacious is therefore a
sterile thought. In the absurd world the value of a notion or of a life
is measured by its sterility.
If it were sufficient to love, things would be too easy. The more one
loves, the stronger the absurd grows. It is not through lack of love
that Don Juan goes from woman to woman. It is ridiculous to represent
him as a mystic in quest of total love. But it is indeed because he
loves them with the same passion and each time with his whole self that
he must repeat his gift and his profound quest.
Whence each woman hopes to give him what no one has ever given him. Each
time they are utterly wrong and merely manage to make him feel the need
of that repetition. “At last,” exclaims one of them, “I have given you
love.” Can we be surprised that Don Juan laughs at this? “At last? No,”
he says, “but once more.” Why should it be essential to love rarely in
order to love much?
Is Don Juan melancholy? This is not likely. I shall barely have recourse
to the legend. That laugh, the conquering insolence, that playfulness
and love of the theater are all clear and joyous. Every healthy creature
tends to multiply himself. So it is with Don Juan.
But, furthermore, melancholy people have two reasons for being so: they
don’t know or they hope. Don Juan knows and does not hope. He reminds
one of those artists who know their limits, never go beyond them, and in
that precarious interval in which they take their spiritual stand enjoy
all the wonderful ease of masters. And that is indeed genius: the
intelligence that knows its frontiers. Up to the frontier of physical
death Don Juan is ignorant of melancholy. The moment he knows, his laugh
bursts forth and makes one forgive everything. He was melancholy at the
time when he hoped. Today, on the mouth of that woman he recognizes the
bitter and comforting taste of the only knowledge. Bitter?
Barely: that necessary imperfection that makes happiness perceptible!
It is quite false to try to see in Don Juan a man brought up on
Ecclesiastes. For nothing is vanity to him except the hope of another
life. He proves this because he gambles that other life against heaven
itself. Longing for desire killed by satisfaction, that commonplace of
the impotent man, does not belong to him. That is all right for Faust,
who believed in God enough to sell himself to the devil. For Don Juan
the thing is simpler. Molina’s Burlador ever replies to the threats of
hell: “What a long respite you give me!” What comes after death is
futile, and what a long succession of days for whoever knows how to be
alive! Faust craved worldly goods; the poor man had only to stretch out
his hand. It already amounted to selling his soul when he was unable to
gladden it. As for satiety, Don Juan insists upon it, on the contrary.
If he leaves a woman it is not absolutely because he has ceased to
desire her. A beautiful woman is always desirable. But he desires
another, and no, this is not the same thing.
This life gratifies his every wish, and nothing is worse than losing it.
This madman is a great wise man. But men who live on hope do not thrive
in this universe where kindness yields to generosity, affection to
virile silence, and communion to solitary courage. And all hasten to
say: “He was a weakling, an idealist or a saint.” One has to disparage
the greatness that insults.
People are sufficiently annoyed (or that smile of complicity that
debases what it admires) by Don Juan’s speeches and by that same remark
that he uses on all women. But to anyone who seeks quantity in his joys,
the only thing that matters is efficacy. What is the use of complicating
the passwords that have stood the test? No one, neither the woman nor
the man, listens to them, but rather to the voice that pronounces them.
They are the rule, the convention, and the courtesy. After they are
spoken the most important still remains to be done. Don Juan is already
getting ready for it. Why should he give himself a problem in morality?
He is not like Milosz’s Manara, who damns himself through a desire to be
a saint. Hell for him is a thing to be provoked. He has but one reply to
divine wrath, and that is human honor: “I have honor,” he says to the
Commander, “and I am keeping my promise because I am a knight.” But it
would be just as great an error to make an immoralist of him. In this
regard, he is “like everyone else”: he has the moral code of his likes
and dislikes. Don Juan can be properly understood only by constant
reference to what he commonly symbolizes: the ordinary seducer and the
sexual athlete. He is an ordinary seducer.[16] Except for the difference
that he is conscious, and that is why he is absurd. A seducer who has
become lucid will not change for all that. Seducing is his condition in
life. Only in novels does one change condition or become better. Yet it
can be said that at the same time nothing is changed and everything is
transformed. What Don Juan realizes in action is an ethic of quantity,
whereas the saint, on the contrary, tends toward quality.
Not to believe in the profound meaning of things belongs to the absurd
man. As for those cordial or wonder-struck faces, he eyes them, stores
them up, and does not pause over them. Time keeps up with him. The
absurd man is he who is not apart from time. Don Juan does not think of
“collecting” women. He exhausts their number and with them his chances
of life. “Collecting” amounts to being capable of living off one’s past.
But he rejects regret, that other form of hope. He is incapable of
looking at portraits.
Is he selfish for all that? In his way, probably. But here, too, it is
essential to understand one another. There are those who are made for
living and those who are made for loving. At least Don Juan would be
inclined to say so. But he would do so in a very few words such as he is
capable of choosing. For the love we are speaking of here is clothed in
illusions of the eternal. As all the specialists in passion teach us,
there is no eternal love but what is thwarted. There is scarcely any
passion without struggle. Such a love culminates only in the ultimate
contradiction of death. One must be Werther or nothing.
There, too, there are several ways of committing suicide, one of which
is the total gift and forget-fulness of self. Don Juan, as well as
anyone else, knows that this can be stirring. But he is one of the very
few who know that this is not the important thing. He knows just as well
that those who turn away from all personal life through a great love
enrich themselves perhaps but certainly impoverish those their love has
chosen. A mother or a passionate wife necessarily has a closed heart,
for it is turned away from the world.
A single emotion, a single creature, a single face, but all is devoured.
Quite a different love disturbs Don Juan, and this one is liberating. It
brings with it all the faces in the world, and its tremor comes from the
fact that it knows itself to be mortal. Don Juan has chosen to be
nothing.
For him it is a matter of seeing clearly. We call love what binds us to
certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for
which books and legends are responsible. But of love I know only that
mixture of desire, affection, and intelligence that binds me to this or
that creature. That compound is not the same for another person. I do
not have the right to cover all these experiences with the same name.
This exempts one from conducting them with the same gestures. The absurd
man multiplies here again what he cannot unify. Thus he discovers a new
way of being which liberates him at least as much as it liberates those
who approach him. There is no noble love but that which recognizes
itself to be both short-lived and exceptional. All those deaths and all
those rebirths gathered together as in a sheaf make up for Don Juan the
flowering of his life. It is his way of giving and of vivifying. I let
it be decided whether or not one can speak of selfishness.
I think at this point of all those who absolutely insist that Don Juan
be punished. Not only in another life, but even in this one. I think of
all those tales, legends, and laughs about the aged Don Juan. But Don
Juan is already ready. To a conscious man old age and what it portends
are not a surprise. Indeed, he is conscious only in so far as he does
not conceal its horror from himself. There was in Athens a temple
dedicated to old age. Children were taken there. As for Don Juan, the
more people laugh at him, the more his figure stands out. Thereby he
rejects the one the romantics lent him. No one wants to laugh at that
tormented, pitiful Don Juan. He is pitied; heaven itself will redeem
him? But that’s not it. In the universe of which Don Juan has a glimpse,
ridicule too is included.
He would consider it normal to be chastised. That is the rule of the
game. And, indeed, it is typical of his nobility to have accepted all
the rules of the game. Yet he knows he is right and that there can be no
question of punishment. A fate is not a punishment.
That is his crime, and how easy it is to understand why the men of God
call down punishment on his head. He achieves a knowledge without
illusions which negates everything they profess. Loving and possessing,
conquering and consuming—that is his way of knowing.
(There is significance in that favorite Scriptural word that calls the
carnal act “knowing.”) He is their worst enemy to the extent that he is
ignorant of them. A chronicler relates that the true Burlador died
assassinated by Fransciscans who wanted “to put an end to the excesses
and blasphemies of Don Juan, whose birth assured him impunity.” Then
they proclaimed that heaven had struck him down. No one has proved that
strange end. Nor has anyone proved the contrary. But without wondering
if it is probable, I can say that it is logical. I want merely to single
out at this point the word “birth” and to play on words: it was the fact
of living that assured his innocence. It was from death alone that he
derived a guilt now become legendary.
What else does that stone Commander signify, that cold statue set in
motion to punish the blood and courage that dared to think?
All the powers of eternal Reason, of order, of universal morality, all
the foreign grandeur of a God open to wrath are summed up in him. That
gigantic and soulless stone merely symbolizes the forces that Don Juan
negated forever. But the Commander’s mission stops there. The thunder
and lightning can return to the imitation heaven whence they were called
forth. The real tragedy takes place quite apart from them. No, it was
not under a stone hand that Don Juan met his death. I am inclined to
believe in the legendary bravado, in that mad laughter of the healthy
man provoking a non- existent God. But, above all, I believe that on
that evening when Don Juan was waiting at Anna’s the Commander didn’t
come, and that after midnight the blasphemer must have felt the dreadful
bitterness of those who have been right. I accept even more readily the
account of his life that has him eventually burying himself in a
monastery. Not that the edifying aspect of the story can he considered
probable. What refuge can he go ask of God? But this symbolizes rather
the logical outcome of a life completely imbued with the absurd, the
grim ending of an existence turned toward short lived joys. At this
point sensual pleasure winds up in asceticism. It is essential to
realize that they may be, as it were, the two aspects of the same
destitution. What more ghastly image can be called up than that of a man
betrayed by his body who, simply because he did not die in time, lives
out the comedy while awaiting the end, face to face with that God he
does not adore, serving him as he served life, kneeling before a void
and arms outstretched toward a heaven without eloquence that he knows to
he also without depth?
I see Don Juan in a cell of one of those Spanish monasteries lost on a
hilltop. And if he contemplates anything at all, it is not the ghosts of
past loves, but perhaps, through a narrow slit in the sun- baked wall,
some silent Spanish plain, a noble, soulless land in which he recognizes
himself. Yes, it is on this melancholy and radiant image that the
curtain must be rung down. The ultimate end, awaited but never desired,
the ultimate end is negligible.
“The play’s the thing,” says Hamlet, “wherein I’ll catch the conscience
of the king.”
“Catch” is indeed the word. For conscience moves swiftly or withdraws
within itself. It has to be caught on the wing, at that barely
perceptible moment when it glances fleetingly at itself. The everyday
man does not enjoy tarrying. Everything, on the contrary, hurries him
onward. But at the same time nothing interests him more than himself,
especially his potentialities. Whence his interest in the theater, in
the show, where so many fates are offered him, where he can accept the
poetry without feeling the sorrow. There at least can be recognized the
thoughtless man, and he continues to hasten toward some hope or other.
The absurd man begins where that one leaves off, where, ceasing to
admire the play, the mind wants to enter in. Entering into all these
lives, experiencing them in their diversity, amounts to acting them out.
I am not saying that actors in general obey that impulse, that they are
absurd men, but that their fate is an absurd fate which might charm and
attract a lucid heart. It is necessary to establish this in order to
grasp without misunderstanding what will follow.
The actor’s realm is that of the fleeting. Of all kinds of fame, it is
known, his is the most ephemeral. At least, this is said in
conversation. But all kinds of fame are ephemeral. From the point of
view of Sirius, Goethe’s works in ten thousand years will be dust and
his name forgotten. Perhaps a handful of archaeologists will look for
“evidence” as to our era. That idea has always contained a lesson.
Seriously meditated upon, it reduces our perturbations to the profound
nobility that is found in indifference.
Above all, it directs our concerns toward what is most certain— that is,
toward the immediate. Of all kinds of fame the least deceptive is the
one that is lived.
Hence the actor has chosen multiple fame, the fame that is hallowed and
tested. From the fact that everything is to die someday he draws the
best conclusion. An actor succeeds or does not succeed. A writer has
some hope even if he is not appreciated.
He assumes that his works will bear witness to what he was. At best the
actor will leave us a photograph, and nothing of what he was himself,
his gestures and his silences, his gasping or his panting with love,
will come down to us. For him, not to be known is not to act, and not
acting is dying a hundred times with all the creatures he would have
brought to life or resuscitated.
Why should we be surprised to find a fleeting fame built upon the most
ephemeral of creations? The actor has three hours to be Iago or Alceste,
Phedre or Gloucester. In that short space of time he makes them come to
life and die on fifty square yards of boards.
Never has the absurd been so well illustrated or at such length.
What more revelatory epitome can be imagined than those marvelous lives,
those exceptional and total destinies unfolding for a few hours within a
stage set? Off the stage, Sigismundo ceases to count. Two hours later he
is seen dining out.
Then it is, perhaps, that life is a dream. But after Sigismundo comes
another. The hero suffering from uncertainty takes the place of the man
roaring for his revenge. By thus sweeping over centuries and minds, by
miming man as he can be and as he is, the actor has much in common with
that other absurd individual, the traveler. Like him, he drains
something and is constantly on the move. He is a traveler in time and,
for the best, the hunted traveler, pursued by souls. If ever the ethics
of quantity could find sustenance, it is indeed on that strange stage.
To what degree the actor benefits from the characters is hard to say.
But that is not the important thing. It is merely a matter of knowing
how far he identifies himself with those irreplaceable lives. It often
happens that he carries them with him, that they somewhat overflow the
time and place in which they were born. They accompany the actor, who
cannot very readily separate himself from what he has been. Occasionally
when reaching for his glass he resumes Hamlet’s gesture of raising his
cup. No, the distance separating him from the creatures into whom he
infuses life is not so great. He abundantly illustrates every month or
every day that so suggestive truth that there is no frontier between
what a man wants to be and what he is. Always concerned with better
representing, he demonstrates to what a degree appearing creates being.
For that is his art—to simulate absolutely, to project himself as deeply
as possible into lives that are not his own. At the end of his effort
his vocation becomes clear: to apply himself wholeheartedly to being
nothing or to being several. The narrower the limits allotted him for
creating his character, the more necessary his talent. He will die in
three hours under the mask he has assumed today. Within three hours he
must experience and express a whole exceptional life.
That is called losing oneself to find oneself. In those three hours he
travels the whole course of the dead-end path that the man in the
audience takes a lifetime to cover.
A mime of the ephemeral, the actor trains and perfects himself only in
appearances. The theatrical convention is that the heart expresses
itself and communicates itself only through gestures and in the body—or
through the voice, which is as much of the soul as of the body. The rule
of that art insists that everything be magnified and translated into
flesh. If it were essential on the stage to love as people really love,
to employ that irreplaceable voice of the heart, to look as people
contemplate in life, our speech would be in code. But here silences must
make themselves heard. Love speaks up louder, and immobility itself
becomes spectacular. The body is king, Not everyone can be “theatrical,”
and this unjustly maligned word covers a whole aesthetic and a whole
ethic. Half a man’s life is spent in implying, in turning away, and in
keeping silent. Here the actor is the intruder. He breaks the spell
chaining that soul, and at last the passions can rush onto their stage.
They speak in every gesture; they live only through shouts and cries.
Thus the actor creates his characters for display. He outlines or
sculptures them and slips into their imaginary form, transfusing his
blood into their phantoms. I am of course speaking of great drama, the
kind that gives the actor an opportunity to fulfill his wholly physical
fate. Take Shakespeare, for instance. In that impulsive drama the
physical passions lead the dance. They explain everything. Without them
all would collapse. Never would King Lear keep the appointment set by
madness without the brutal gesture that exiles Cordelia and condemns
Edgar. It is just that the unfolding of that tragedy should thenceforth
be dominated by madness. Souls are given over to the demons and their
saraband.
No fewer than four madmen: one by trade, another by intention, and the
last two through suffering—four disordered bodies, four unutterable
aspects of a single condition.
The very scale of the human body is inadequate. The mask and the buskin,
the make-up that reduces and accentuates the face in its essential
elements, the costume that exaggerates and simplifies— that universe
sacrifices everything to appearance and is made solely for the eye.
Through an absurd miracle, it is the body that also brings knowledge. I
should never really understand Iago unless I played his part. It is not
enough to hear him, for I grasp him only at the moment when I see him.
Of the absurd character the actor consequently has the monotony, that
single, oppressive silhouette, simultaneously strange and familiar, that
he carries about from hero to hero. There, too, the great dramatic work
contributes to this unity of tone.[17] This is where the actor
contradicts himself: the same and yet so various, so many souls summed
up in a single body. Yet it is the absurd contradiction itself, that
individual who wants to achieve everything and live everything, that
useless attempt, that ineffectual persistence. What always contradicts
itself nevertheless joins in him. He is at that point where body and
mind converge, where the mind, tired of its defeats, turns toward its
most faithful ally. “And blest are those,” says Hamlet, “whose blood and
judgment are so well commingled that they are not a pipe for fortune’s
finger to sound what stop she please.”
How could the Church have failed to condemn such a practice on the part
of the actor? She repudiated in that art the heretical multiplication of
souls, the emotional debauch, the scandalous presumption of a mind that
objects to living but one life and hurls itself into all forms of
excess. She proscribed in them that preference for the present and that
triumph of Proteus which are the negation of everything she teaches.
Eternity is not a game. A mind foolish enough to prefer a comedy to
eternity has lost its salvation. Between “everywhere” and “forever”
there is no compromise. Whence that much maligned profession can give
rise to a tremendous spiritual conflict. “What matters,” said Nietzsche,
“is not eternal life but eternal vivacity.” All drama is, in fact, in
this choice. Celimene against Elianthe, the whole subject in the absurd
consequence of a nature carried to its extreme, and the verse itself,
the “bad verse,” barely accented like the monotony of the character’s
nature.
Adrienne Lecouvreur on her deathbed was willing to confess and receive
communion, but refused to abjure her profession. She thereby lost the
benefit of the confession. Did this not amount, in effect, to choosing
her absorbing passion in preference to God?
And that woman in the death throes refusing in tears to repudiate what
she called her art gave evidence of a greatness that she never achieved
behind the footlights. This was her finest role and the hardest one to
play. Choosing between heaven and a ridiculous fidelity, preferring
oneself to eternity or losing oneself in God is the age-old tragedy in
which each must play his part.
The actors of the era knew they were excommunicated.
Entering the profession amounted to choosing Hell. And the Church
discerned in them her worst enemies. A few men of letters protest:
“What! Refuse the last rites to Moliere!” But that was just, and
especially in one who died onstage and finished under the actor’s
make-up a life entirely devoted to dispersion. In his case genius is
invoked, which excuses everything. But genius excuses nothing, just
because it refuses to do so.
The actor knew at that time what punishment was in store for him. But
what significance could such vague threats have compared to the final
punishment that life itself was reserving for him? This was the one that
he felt in advance and accepted wholly.
To the actor as to the absurd man, a premature death is irreparable.
Nothing can make up for the sum of faces and centuries he would
otherwise have traversed. But in any case, one has to die. For the actor
is doubtless everywhere, but time sweeps him along, too, and makes its
impression with him.
It requires but a little imagination to feel what an actor’s fate means.
It is in time that he makes up and enumerates his characters. It is in
time likewise that he learns to dominate them.
The greater number of different lives he has lived, the more aloof he
can be from them. The time comes when he must die to the stage and for
the world. What he has lived faces him. He sees clearly. He feels the
harrowing and irreplaceable quality of that adventure. He knows and can
now die. There are homes for aged actors.
“No,” says the conqueror, “don’t assume that because I love action I
have had to forget how to think. On the contrary I can throughly define
what I believe. For I believe it firmly and I see it surely and clearly.
Beware of those who say: ‘I know this too well to be able to express
it.’ For if they cannot do so, this is because they don’t know it or
because out of laziness they stopped at the outer crust.
“I have not many opinions. At the end of a life man notices that he has
spent years becoming sure of a single truth. But a single truth, if it
is obvious, is enough to guide an existence. As for me, I decidedly have
something to say about the individual. One must speak of him bluntly
and, if need be, with the appropriate contempt.
“A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through
those he says. There are many that I shall keep to myself. But I firmly
believe that all those who have judged the individual have done so with
much less experience than we on which to base their judgment. The
intelligence, the stirring intelligence perhaps foresaw what it was
essential to note. But the era, its ruins, and its blood overwhelm us
with facts. It was possible for ancient nations, and even for more
recent ones down to our machine age, to weigh one against the other the
virtues of society and of the individual, to try to find out which was
to serve the other. To begin with, that was possible by virtue of that
stubborn aberration in man’s heart according to which human beings were
created to serve or be served. In the second place, it was possible
because neither society nor the individual had yet revealed all their
ability.
“I have seen bright minds express astonishment at the masterpieces of
Dutch painters born at the height of the bloody wars in Flanders, be
amazed by the prayers of Silesian mystics brought up during the
frightful Thirty Years’ War. Eternal values survive secular turmoils
before their astonished eyes. But there has been progress since. The
painters of today are deprived of such serenity. Even if they have
basically the heart the creator needs—I mean the closed heart—it is of
no use; for everyone, including the saint himself, is mobilized. This is
perhaps what I have felt most deeply. At every form that miscarries in
the trenches, at every outline, metaphor, or prayer crushed under steel,
the eternal loses a round. Conscious that I cannot stand aloof from my
time, I have decided to be an integral part of it. This is why I esteem
the individual only because he strikes me as ridiculous and humiliated.
Knowing that there are no victorious causes, I have a liking for lost
causes: they require an uncontaminated soul, equal to its defeat as to
its temporary victories. For anyone who feels bound up with this world’s
fate, the clash of civilizations has something agonizing about it. I
have made that anguish mine at the same time that I wanted to join in.
Between history and the eternal I have chosen history because I like
certainties. Of it, at least, I am certain, and how can I deny this
force crushing me?
“There always comes a time when one must choose between contemplation
and action. This is called becoming a man. Such wrenches are dreadful.
But for a proud heart there can be no compromise. There is God or time,
that cross or this sword. This world has a higher meaning that
transcends its worries, or nothing is true but those worries. One must
live with time and die with it, or else elude it for a greater life. I
know that one can compromise and live in the world while believing in
the eternal. That is called accepting. But I loathe this term and want
all or nothing. If I choose action, don’t think that contemplation is
like an unknown country to me. But it cannot give me everything, and,
deprived of the eternal, I want to ally myself with time. I do not want
to put down to my account either nostalgia or bitterness, and I merely
want to see clearly. I tell you, tomorrow you will be mobilized. For you
and for me that is a liberation. The individual can do nothing and yet
he can do everything. In that wonderful unattached state you understand
why I exalt and crush him at one and the same time. It is the world that
pulverizes him and I who liberate him. I provide him with all his
rights.
“Conquerors know that action is in itself useless. There is but one
useful action, that of remaking man and the earth. I shall never remake
men. But one must do ’as if.’ For the path of struggle leads me to the
flesh. Even humiliated, the flesh is my only certainty. I can live only
on it. The creature is my native land. This is why I have chosen this
absurd and ineffectual effort. This is why I am on the side of the
struggle. The epoch lends itself to this, as I have said. Hitherto the
greatness of a conqueror was geographical. It was measured by the extent
of the conquered territories. There is a reason why the word has changed
in meaning and has ceased to signify the victorious general. The
greatness has changed camp. It lies in protest and the blind-alley
sacrifice. There, too, it is not through a preference for defeat.
Victory would be desirable. But there is but one victory, and it is
eternal. That is the one I shall never have. That is where I stumble and
cling. A revolution is always accomplished against the gods, beginning
with the revolution of Prometheus, the first of modern conquerors. It is
man’s demands made against his fate; the demands of the poor are but a
pretext. Yet I can seize that spirit only in its historical act, and
that is where I make contact with it. Don’t assume, however, that I take
pleasure in it: opposite the essential contradiction, I maintain my
human contradiction. I establish my lucidity in the midst of what
negates it. I exalt man be-fore what crushes him, and my freedom, my
revolt, and my passion come together then in that tension, that
lucidity, and that vast repetition.
“Yes, man is his own end. And he is his only end. If he aims to be
something, it is in this life. Now I know it only too well.
Conquerors sometimes talk of vanquishing and overcoming. But it is
always ‘overcoming oneself’ that they mean. You are well aware of what
that means. Every man has felt himself to be the equal of a god at
certain moments. At least, this is the way it is expressed.
But this comes from the fact that in a flash he felt the amazing
grandeur of the human mind. The conquerors are merely those among men
who are conscious enough of their strength to be sure of living
constantly on those heights and fully aware of that grandeur. It is a
question of arithmetic, of more or less. The conquerors are capable of
the more. But they are capable of no more than man himself when he
wants. This is why they never leave the human crucible, plunging into
the seething soul of revolutions.
“There they find the creature mutilated, but they also encounter there
the only values they like and admire, man and his silence.
This is both their destitution and their wealth. There is but one luxury
for them—that of human relations. How can one fail to realize that in
this vulnerable universe everything that is human and solely human
assumes a more vivid meaning? Taut faces, threatened fraternity, such
strong and chaste friendship among men—these are the true riches because
they are transitory. In their midst the mind is most aware of its powers
and limitations. That is to say, its efficacity. Some have spoken of
genius. But genius is easy to say; I prefer the intelligence. It must be
said that it can be magnificent then. It lights up this desert and
dominates it. It knows its obligations and illustrates them. It will die
at the same time as this body. But knowing this constitutes its freedom.
“We are not ignorant of the fact that all churches are against us. A
heart so keyed up eludes the eternal, and all churches, divine or
political, lay claim to the eternal. Happiness and courage, retribution
or justice are secondary ends for them. It is a doctrine they bring, and
one must subscribe to it. But I have no concern with ideas or with the
eternal. The truths that come within my scope can be touched with the
hand. I cannot separate from them.
This is why you cannot base anything on me: nothing of the conqueror
lasts, not even his doctrines.
“At the end of all that, despite everything, is death. We know also that
it ends everything. This is why those cemeteries all over Europe, which
obsess some among us, are hideous. People beautify only what they love,
and death repels us and tires our patience. It, too, is to be conquered.
The last Carrara, a prisoner in Padua emptied by the plague and besieged
by the Venetians, ran screaming through the halls of his deserted
palace: he was calling on the devil and asking him for death. This was a
way of overcoming it. And it is likewise a mark of courage
characteristic of the Occident to have made so ugly the places where
death thinks itself honored. In the rebel s universe, death exalts
injustice. It is the supreme abuse.
“Others, without compromising either, have chosen the eternal and
denounced the illusion of this world. Their cemeteries smile amid
numerous flowers and birds. That suits the conqueror and gives him a
clear image of what he has rejected. He has chosen, on the contrary, the
black iron fence or the potter’s field. The best among the men of God
occasionally are seized with fright mingled with consideration and pity
for minds that can live with such an image of their death. Yet those
minds derive their strength and justification from this. Our fate stands
before us and we provoke him. Less out of pride than out of awareness of
our ineffectual condition. We, too, sometimes feel pity for ourselves.
It is the only compassion that seems acceptable to us: a feeling that
perhaps you hardly understand and that seems to you scarcely virile. Yet
the most daring among us are the ones who feel it. But we call the lucid
ones virile and we do not want a strength that is apart from lucidity.”
Let me repeat that these images do not propose moral codes and involve
no judgments: they are sketches. They merely represent a style of life.
The lover, the actor, or the adventurer plays the absurd. But equally
well, if he wishes, the chaste man, the civil servant, or the president
of the Republic. It is enough to know and to mask nothing. In Italian
museums are sometimes found little painted screens that the priest used
to hold in front of the face of condemned men to hide the scaffold from
them. The leap in all its forms, rushing into the divine or the eternal,
surrendering to the illusions of the everyday or of the idea—all these
screens hide the absurd. But there are civil servants without screens,
and they are the ones of whom I mean to speak. I have chosen the most
extreme ones. At this level the absurd gives them a royal power. It is
true that those princes are without a kingdom.
But they have this advantage over others: they know that all royalties
are illusory. They know that is their whole nobility, and it is useless
to speak in relation to them of hidden misfortune or the ashes of
disillusion. Being deprived of hope is not despairing. The flames of
earth are surely worth celestial perfumes. Neither I nor anyone can
judge them here. They are not striving to be better; they are attempting
to be consistent. If the term “wise man” can be applied to the man who
lives on what he has without speculating on what he has not, then they
are wise men. One of them, a conqueror but in the realm of mind, a Don
Juan but of knowledge, an actor but of the intelligence, knows this
better than anyone:
“You nowise deserve a privilege on earth and in heaven for having
brought to perfection your dear little meek sheep; you nonetheless
continue to be at best a ridiculous dear little sheep with horns and
nothing more—even supposing that you do not burst with vanity and do not
create a scandal by posing as a judge.”
In any case, it was essential to restore to the absurd reasoning more
cordial examples. The imagination can add many others, inseparable from
time and exile, who likewise know how to live in harmony with a universe
without future and without weakness.
This absurd, godless world is, then, peopled with men who think clearly
and have ceased to hope. And I have not yet spoken of the most absurd
character, who is the creator.
All those lives maintained in the rarefied air of the absurd could not
persevere without some profound and constant thought to infuse its
strength into them. Right here, it can be only a strange feeling of
fidelity. Conscious men have been seen to fulfill their task amid the
most stupid of wars without considering themselves in contradiction.
This is because it was essential to elude nothing.
There is thus a metaphysical honor in enduring the world’s absurdity.
Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, absurd revolt are tributes that
man pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he is defeated in
advance.
It is merely a matter of being faithful to the rule of the battle.
That thought may suffice to sustain a mind; it has supported and still
supports whole civilizations. War cannot be negated. One must live it or
die of it. So it is with the absurd: it is a question of breathing with
it, of recognizing its lessons and recovering their flesh. In this
regard the absurd joy par excellence is creation. “Art and nothing but
art,” said Nietzsche; “we have art in order not to die of the truth.”
In the experience that I am attempting to describe and to stress on
several modes, it is certain that a new torment arises wherever another
dies. The childish chasing after forgetfulness, the appeal of
satisfaction are now devoid of echo. But the constant tension that keeps
man face to face with the world, the ordered delirium that urges him to
be receptive to everything leave him another fever. In this universe the
work of art is then the sole chance of keeping his consciousness and of
fixing its adventures. Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious
quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers,
and of anxieties, signifies nothing else. At the same time, it has no
more significance than the continual and imperceptible creation in which
the actor, the conqueror, and all absurd men indulge every day of their
lives. All try their hands at miming, at repeating, and at recreating
the reality that is theirs. We always end up by having the appearance of
our truths. All existence for a man turned away from the eternal is but
a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. Creation is the great mime.
Such men know to begin with, and then their whole effort is to examine,
to enlarge, and to enrich the ephemeral island on which they have just
landed. But first they must know. For the absurd discovery coincides
with a pause in which future passions are prepared and justified. Even
men without a gospel have their Mount of Olives. And one must not fall
asleep on theirs either. For the absurd man it is not a matter of
explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything
begins with lucid indifference.
Describing—that is the last ambition of an absurd thought.
Science likewise, having reached the end of its paradoxes, ceases to
propound and stops to contemplate and sketch the ever virgin landscape
of phenomena. The heart learns thus that the emotion delighting us when
we see the world’s aspects comes to us not from its depth but from their
diversity. Explanation is useless, but the sensation remains and, with
it, the constant attractions of a universe inexhaustible in quantity.
The place of the work of art can be understood at this point.
It marks both the death of an experience and its multiplication.
It is a sort of monotonous and passionate repetition of the themes
already orchestrated by the world: the body, inexhaustible image on the
pediment of temples, forms or colors, number or grief. It is therefore
not indifferent, as a conclusion, to encounter once again the principal
themes of this essay in the wonderful and childish world of the creator.
It would be wrong to see a symbol in it and to think that the work of
art can be considered at last as a refuge for the absurd. It is itself
an absurd phenomenon, and we are concerned merely with its description.
It does not offer an escape for the intellectual ailment. Rather, it is
one of the symptoms of that ailment which reflects it throughout a man’s
whole thought.
But for the first time it makes the mind get outside of itself and
places it in opposition to others, not for it to get lost but to show it
clearly the blind path that all have entered upon. In the time of the
absurd reasoning, creation follows indifference and discovery. It marks
the point from which absurd passions spring and where the reasoning
stops. Its place in this essay is justified in this way.
It will suffice to bring to light a few themes common to the creator and
the thinker in order to find in the work of art all the contradictions
of thought involved in the absurd. Indeed, it is not so much identical
conclusions that prove minds to be related as the contradictions that
are common to them. So it is with thought and creation. I hardly need to
say that the same anguish urges man to these two attitudes. This is
where they coincide in the beginning.
But among all the thoughts that start from the absurd, I have seen that
very few remain within it. And through their deviations or infidelities
I have best been able to measure what belonged to the absurd. Similarly
I must wonder: is an absurd work of art possible?
It would be impossible to insist too much on the arbitrary nature of the
former opposition between art and philosophy. If you insist on taking it
in too limited a sense, it is certainly false. If you mean merely that
these two disciplines each have their peculiar climate, that is probably
true but remains vague. The only acceptable argument used to lie in the
contradiction brought up between the philosopher enclosed within his
system and the artist placed before his work. But this was pertinent for
a certain form of art and of philosophy which we consider secondary
here. The idea of an art detached from its creator is not only outmoded;
it is false.
In opposition to the artist, it is pointed out that no philosopher ever
created several systems. But that is true in so far, indeed, as no
artist ever expressed more than one thing under different aspects.
The instantaneous perfection of art, the necessity for its renewal— this
is true only through a preconceived notion. For the work of art likewise
is a construction and everyone knows how monotonous the great creators
can be. For the same reason as the thinker, the artist commits himself
and becomes himself in his work. That osmosis raises the most important
of aesthetic problems.
Moreover, to anyone who is convinced of the mind’s singleness of
purpose, nothing is more futile than these distinctions based on methods
and objects. There are no frontiers between the disciplines that man
sets himself for understanding and loving. They interlock, and the same
anxiety merges them.
It is necessary to state this to begin with. For an absurd work of art
to be possible, thought in its most lucid form must be involved in it.
But at the same time thought must not be apparent except as the
regulating intelligence. This paradox can be explained according to the
absurd. The work of art is born of the intelligence’s refusal to reason
the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal. It is lucid thought
that provokes it, but in that very act that thought repudiates itself.
It will not yield to the temptation of adding to what is described a
deeper meaning that it knows to be illegitimate. The work of art
embodies a drama of the intelligence, but it proves this only
indirectly. The absurd work requires an artist conscious of these
limitations and an art in which the concrete signifies nothing more than
itself. It cannot be the end, the meaning, and the consolation of a
life. Creating or not creating changes nothing. The absurd creator does
not prize his work. He could repudiate it. He does sometimes repudiate
it. An Abyssinia suffices for this, as in the case of Rimbaud.
At the same time a rule of aesthetics can be seen in this. The true work
of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the one that says
“less.” There is a certain relationship between the global experience of
the artist and the work that reflects that experience, between Wilhelm
Meister and Goethe’s maturity. That relationship is bad when the work
aims to give the whole experience in the lace-paper of an explanatory
literature. That relationship is good when the work is but a piece cut
out of experience, a facet of the diamond in which the inner luster is
epitomized without being limited. In the first case there is overloading
and pretension to the eternal. In the second, a fecund work because of a
whole implied experience, the wealth of which is suspected. The problem
for the absurd artist is to acquire this savoir-vivre which transcends
savoir-faire. And in the end, the great artist under this climate is,
above all, a great living being, it being understood that living in this
case is just as much experiencing as reflecting. The work then embodies
an intellectual drama. The absurd work illustrates thought’s renouncing
of its prestige and its resignation to being no more than the
intelligence that works up appearances and covers with images what has
no reason. If the world were clear, art would not exist.
I am not speaking here of the arts of form or color in which description
alone prevails in its splendid modesty.[18] Expression begins where
thought ends. Those adolescents with empty eyesockets who people temples
and museums—their philosophy has been expressed in gestures. For an
absurd man it is more educative than all libraries. Under another aspect
the same is true for music. If any art is devoid of lessons, it is
certainly music. It is too closely related to mathematics not to have
borrowed their gratuitousness. That game the mind plays with itself
according to set and measured laws takes place in the sonorous compass
that belongs to us and beyond which the vibrations nevertheless meet in
an inhuman universe. There is no purer sensation. These examples are too
easy. The absurd man recognizes as his own these harmonies and these
forms.
But I should like to speak here of a work in which the temptation to
explain remains greatest, in which illusion offers itself automatically,
in which conclusion is almost inevitable. I mean fictional creation. I
propose to inquire whether or not the absurd can hold its own there.
To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one’s own world,
which comes to the same thing). It is starting out from the basic
disagreement that separates man from his experience in order to find a
common ground according to one’s nostalgia, a universe hedged with
reasons or lighted up with analogies but which, in any case, gives an
opportunity to rescind the unbearable divorce. The philosopher, even if
he is Kant, is a creator. He has his characters, his symbols, and his
secret action. He has his plot endings. On the contrary, the lead taken
by the novel over poetry and the essay merely represents, despite
appearances, a greater intellectualization of the art. Let there be no
mistake about it; I am speaking of the greatest. The fecundity and the
importance of a literary form are often measured by the trash it
contains. The number of bad novels must not make us forget the value of
the best. These, indeed, carry with them their universe. The novel has
its logic, its reasonings, its intuition, and its postulates. It also
has its requirements of clarity.[19]
The classical opposition of which I was speaking above is even less
justified in this particular case. It held in the time when it was easy
to separate philosophy from its authors. Today when thought has ceased
to lay claim to the universal, when its best history would be that of
its repentances, we know that the system, when it is worth while, cannot
be separated from its author. The Ethics itself, in one of its aspects,
is but a long and reasoned personal confession. Abstract thought at last
returns to its prop of flesh.
And, likewise, the fictional activities of the body and of the passions
are regulated a little more according to the requirements of a vision of
the world. The writer has given up telling “stories” and creates his
universe. The great novelists are philosophical novelists—that is, the
contrary of thesis-writers. For instance, Balzac, Sade, Melville,
Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Proust, Malraux, Kafka, to cite but a few.
But in fact the preference they have shown for writing in images rather
than in reasoned arguments is revelatory of a certain thought that is
common to them all, convinced of the uselessness of any principle of
explanation and sure of the educative message of perceptible appearance.
They consider the work of art both as an end and a beginning. It is the
outcome of an often unexpressed philosophy, its illustration and its
consummation. But it is complete only through the implications of that
philosophy. It justifies at last that variant of an old theme that a
little thought estranges from life whereas much thought reconciles to
life.
Incapable of refining the real, thought pauses to mimic it. The novel in
question is the instrument of that simultaneously relative and
inexhaustible knowledge, so like that of love. Of love, fictional
creation has the initial wonder and the fecund rumination.
These at least are the charms I see in it at the outset. But I saw them
likewise in those princes of humiliated thought whose suicides I was
later able to witness.
What interests me, indeed, is knowing and describing the force that
leads them back toward the common path of illusion. The same method will
consequently help me here. The fact of having already utilized it will
allow me to shorten my argument and to sum it up without delay in a
particular example. I want to know whether, accepting a life without
appeal, one can also agree to work and create without appeal and what is
the way leading to these liberties. I want to liberate my universe of
its phantoms and to people it solely with flesh-and-blood truths whose
presence I cannot deny. I can perform absurd work, choose the creative
attitude rather than another. But an absurd attitude, if it is to remain
so, must remain aware of its gratuitousness. So it is with the work of
art. If the commandments of the absurd are not respected, if the work
does not illustrate divorce and revolt, if it sacrifices to illusions
and arouses hope, it ceases to be gratuitous. I can no longer detach
myself from it. My life may find a meaning in it, but that is trifling.
It ceases to be that exercise in detachment and passion which crowns the
splendor and futility of a man’s life.
In the creation in which the temptation to explain is the strongest, can
one overcome that temptation? In the fictional world in which awareness
of the real world is keenest, can I remain faithful to the absurd
without sacrificing to the desire to judge? So many questions to be
taken into consideration in a last effort. It must be already clear what
they signify. They are the last scruples of an awareness that fears to
forsake its initial and difficult lesson in favor of a final illusion.
What holds for creation, looked upon as one of the possible attitudes
for the man conscious of the absurd, holds for all the styles of life
open to him. The conqueror or the actor, the creator or Don Juan may
forget that their exercise in living could not do without awareness of
its mad character. One becomes accustomed so quickly. A man wants to
earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a
life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten;
the means are taken for the end. Likewise, the whole effort of this
conqueror will be diverted to ambition, which was but a way toward a
greater life. Don Juan in turn will likewise yield to his fate, be
satisfied with that existence whose nobility is of value only through
revolt. For one it is awareness and for the other, revolt; in both cases
the absurd has disappeared. There is so much stubborn hope in the human
heart. The most destitute men often end up by accepting illusion. That
approval prompted by the need for peace inwardly parallels the
existential consent. There are thus gods of light and idols of mud. But
it is essential to find the middle path leading to the faces of man.
So far, the failures of the absurd exigence have best informed us as to
what it is. In the same way, if we are to be informed, it will suffice
to notice that fictional creation can present the same ambiguity as
certain philosophies. Hence I can choose as illustration a work
comprising everything that denotes awareness of the absurd, having a
clear starting-point and a lucid climate. Its consequences will
enlighten us. If the absurd is not respected in it, we shall know by
what expedient illusion enters in. A particular example, a theme, a
creator’s fidelity will suffice, then. This involves the same analysis
that has already been made at greater length.
I shall examine a favorite theme of Dostoevsky. I might just as well
have studied other works.[20] But in this work the problem is treated
directly, in the sense of nobility and emotion, as for the existential
philosophies already discussed. This parallelism serves my purpose.
All of Dostoevsky’s heroes question themselves as to the meaning of
life. In this they are modern: they do not fear ridicule.
What distinguishes modern sensibility from classical sensibility is that
the latter thrives on moral problems and the former on metaphysical
problems. In Dostoevsky’s novels the question is propounded with such
intensity that it can only invite extreme solutions. Existence is
illusory or it is eternal. If Dostoevsky were satisfied with this
inquiry, he would be a philosopher. But he illustrates the consequences
that such intellectual pastimes may have in a man’s life, and in this
regard he is an artist. Among those consequences, his attention is
arrested particularly by the last one, which he himself calls logical
suicide in his Diary of a Writer. In the installments for December 1876,
indeed, he imagines the reasoning of “logical suicide.” Convinced that
human existence is an utter absurdity for anyone without faith in
immortality, the desperate man comes to the following conclusions:
“Since in reply to my questions about happiness, I am told, through the
intermediary of my consciousness, that I cannot be happy except in
harmony with the great all, which I cannot conceive and shall never be
in a position to conceive, it is evident ...”
“Since, finally, in this connection, I assume both the role of the
plaintiff and that of the defendant, of the accused and of the judge,
and since I consider this comedy perpetrated by nature altogether
stupid, and since I even deem it humiliating for me to deign to play it
...”
“In my indisputable capacity of plaintiff and defendant, of judge and
accused, I condemn that nature which, with such impudent nerve, brought
me into being in order to suffer—I condemn it to be annihilated with
me.”
There remains a little humor in that position. This suicide kills
himself because, on the metaphysical plane, he is vexed. In a certain
sense he is taking his revenge. This is his way of proving that he “will
not be had.” It is known, however, that the same theme is embodied, but
with the most wonderful generality, in Kirilov of The Possessed,
likewise an advocate of logical suicide.
Kirilov the engineer declares somewhere that he wants to take his own
life because it “is his idea.” Obviously the word must be taken in its
proper sense. It is for an idea, a thought, that he is getting ready for
death. This is the superior suicide. Progressively, in a series of
scenes in which Kirilov’s mask is gradually illuminated, the fatal
thought driving him is revealed to us. The engineer, in fact, goes back
to the arguments of the Diary. He feels that God is necessary and that
he must exist. But he knows that he does not and cannot exist. “Why do
you not realize,” he exclaims, “that this is sufficient reason for
killing oneself?” That attitude involves likewise for him some of the
absurd consequences. Through indifference he accepts letting his suicide
be used to the advantage of a cause he despises. “I decided last night
that I didn’t care.” And finally he prepares his deed with a mixed
feeling of revolt and freedom. “I shall kill myself in order to assert
my insubordination, my new and dreadful liberty.” It is no longer a
question of revenge, but of revolt. Kirilov is consequently an absurd
character—yet with this essential reservation: he kills himself. But he
himself explains this contradiction, and in such a way that at the same
time he reveals the absurd secret in all its purity. In truth, he adds
to his fatal logic an extraordinary ambition which gives the character
its full perspective: he wants to kill himself to become god.
The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov
is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself.
Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd,
but it is what is needed. The interesting thing, however, is to give a
meaning to that divinity brought to earth. That amounts to clarifying
the premise: “If God does not exist, I am god,” which still remains
rather obscure. It is important to note at the outset that the man who
flaunts that mad claim is indeed of this world. He performs his
gymnastics every morning to preserve his health. He is stirred by the
joy of Chatov recovering his wife. On a sheet of paper to be found after
his death he wants to draw a face sticking out his tongue at “them.” He
is childish and irascible, passionate, methodical, and sensitive. Of the
superman he has nothing but the logic and the obsession, whereas of man
he has the whole catalogue. Yet it is he who speaks calmly of his
divinity. He is not mad, or else Dostoevsky is. Consequently it is not a
megalomaniac’s illusion that excites him. And taking the words in their
specific sense would, in this instance, be ridiculous. Kirilov himself
helps us to understand. In reply to a question from Stavrogin, he makes
clear that he is not talking of a god-man.
It might be thought that this springs from concern to distinguish
himself from Christ. But in reality it is a matter of annexing Christ.
Kirilov in fact fancies for a moment that Jesus at his death did not
find himself in Paradise. He found out then that his torture had been
useless.
“The laws of nature,” says the engineer, “made Christ live in the midst
of falsehood and die for a falsehood.”
Solely in this sense Jesus indeed personifies the whole human drama. He
is the complete man, being the one who realized the most absurd
condition. He is not the God-man but the man-god.
And, like him, each of us can be crucified and victimized—and is to a
certain degree.
The divinity in question is therefore altogether terrestrial. “For three
years,” says Kirilov, “I sought the attribute of my divinity and I have
found it. The attribute of my divinity is independence.”
Now can be seen the meaning of Kirilov’s premise: “If God does not
exist, I am god.” To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not
to serve an immortal being. Above all, of course, it is drawing all the
inferences from that painful independence. If God exists, all depends on
him and we can do nothing against his will.
If he does not exist, everything depends on us. For Kirilov, as for
Nietzsche, to kill God is to become god oneself; it is to realize on
this earth the eternal life of which the Gospel speaks.[21] But if this
metaphysical crime is enough for man’s fulfillment, why add suicide? Why
kill oneself and leave this world after having won freedom? That is
contradictory. Kirilov is well aware of this, for he adds: “If you feel
that, you are a tsar and, far from killing yourself, you will live
covered with glory.” But men in general do not know it. They do not feel
“that.” As in the time of Prometheus, they entertain blind hopes.[22]
They need to be shown the way and cannot do without preaching.
Consequently, Kirilov must kill himself out of love for humanity. He
must show his brothers a royal and difficult path on which he will be
the first. It is a pedagogical suicide. Kirilov sacrifices himself,
then. But if he is crucified, he will not be victimized. He remains the
man-god, convinced of a death without future, imbued with evangelical
melancholy. “I,” he says, “am unhappy because I am obliged to assert my
freedom.”
But once he is dead and men are at last enlightened, this earth will be
peopled with tsars and lighted up with human glory.
Kirilov’s pistol shot will be the signal for the last revolution. Thus,
it is not despair that urges him to death, but love of his neighbor for
his own sake. Before terminating in blood an indescribable spiritual
adventure, Kirilov makes a remark as old as human suffering: “All is
well.”
This theme of suicide in Dostoevsky, then, is indeed an absurd theme.
Let us merely note before going on that Kirilov reappears in other
characters who themselves set in motion additional absurd themes.
Stavrogin and Ivan Karamazov try out the absurd truths in practical
life. They are the ones liberated by Kirilov’s death. They try their
skill at being tsars. Stavrogin leads an “ironic” life, and it is well
known in what regard. He arouses hatred around him. And yet the key to
the character is found in his farewell letter: “I have not been able to
detest anything.” He is a tsar in indifference. Ivan is likewise by
refusing to surrender the royal powers of the mind.
To those who, like his brother, prove by their lives that it is
essential to humiliate oneself in order to believe, he might reply that
the condition is shameful. His key word is: “Everything is permitted,”
with the appropriate shade of melancholy. Of course, like Nietzsche, the
most famous of God’s assassins, he ends in madness. But this is a risk
worth running, and, faced with such tragic ends, the essential impulse
of the absurd mind is to ask:
“What does that prove?”
Thus the novels, like the Diary, propound the absurd question.
They establish logic unto death, exaltation, “dreadful” freedom, the
glory of the tsars become human. All is well, everything is permitted,
and nothing is hateful—these are absurd judgments. But what an amazing
creation in which those creatures of fire and ice seem so familiar to
us. The passionate world of indifference that rumbles in their hearts
does not seem at all monstrous to us. We recognize in it our everyday
anxieties. And probably no one so much as Dostoevsky has managed to give
the absurd world such familiar and tormenting charms.
Yet what is his conclusion? Two quotations will show the complete
metaphysical reversal that leads the writer to other revelations. The
argument of the one who commits logical suicide having provoked protests
from the critics, Dostoevsky in the following installments of the Diary
amplifies his position and concludes thus:
“If faith in immortality is so necessary to the human being (that
without it he comes to the point of killing himself), it must therefore
be the normal state of humanity. Since this is the case, the immortality
of the human soul exists without any doubt.” Then again in the last
pages of his last novel, at the conclusion of that gigantic combat with
God, some children ask Aliocha: “Karamazov, is it true what religion
says, that we shall rise from the dead, that we shall see one another
again?” And Aliocha answers: “Certainly, we shall see one another again,
we shall joyfully tell one another everything that has happened.’’
Thus Kirilov, Stavrogin, and Ivan are defeated. The Brothers Karamazov
replies to The Possessed. And it is indeed a conclusion.
Aliocha’s case is not ambiguous, as is that of Prince Muichkin. Ill, the
latter lives in a perpetual present, tinged with smiles and
indifference, and that blissful state might be the eternal life of which
the Prince speaks. On the contrary, Aliocha clearly says:
“We shall meet again.” There is no longer any question of suicide and of
madness. What is the use, for anyone who is sure of immortality and of
its joys? Man exchanges his divinity for happiness. “We shall joyfully
tell one another everything that has happened.” Thus again Kirilov’s
pistol rang out somewhere in Russia, but the world continued to cherish
its blind hopes. Men did not understand “that.”
Consequently, it is not an absurd novelist addressing us, but an
existential novelist. Here, too, the leap is touching and gives its
nobility to the art that inspires it. It is a stirring acquiescence,
riddled with doubts, uncertain and ardent. Speaking of The Brothers
Karamazov, Dostoevsky wrote: “The chief question that will be pursued
throughout this book is the very one from which I have suffered
consciously or unconsciously all life long: the existence of God.” It is
hard to believe that a novel sufficed to transform into joyful certainty
the suffering of a lifetime. One commentator[23] correctly pointed out
that Dostoevsky is on Ivan’s side and that the affirmative chapters took
three months of effort whereas what he called “the blasphemies” were
written in three weeks in a state of excitement. There is not one of his
characters who does not have that thorn in the flesh, who does not
aggravate it or seek a remedy for it in sensation or immortality.[24] In
any case, let us remain with this doubt. Here is a work which, in a
chiaroscuro more gripping than the light of day, permits us to seize
man’s struggle against his hopes. Having reached the end, the creator
makes his choice against his characters. That contradiction thus allows
us to make a distinction. It is not an absurd work that is involved
here, but a work that propounds the absurd problem. Dostoevsky’s reply
is humiliation, “shame” according to Stavrogin. An absurd work, on the
contrary, does not provide a reply; that is the whole difference. Let us
note this carefully in conclusion: what contradicts the absurd in that
work is not its Christian character, but rather its announcing a future
life. It is possible to be Christian and absurd. There are examples of
Christians who do not believe in a future life. In regard to the work of
art, it should therefore be possible to define one of the directions of
the absurd analysis that could have been anticipated in the preceding
pages. It leads to propounding “the absurdity of the Gospel.” It throws
light upon this idea, fertile in repercussions, that convictions do not
prevent incredulity. On the contrary, it is easy to see that the author
of The Possessed, familiar with these paths, in conclusion took a quite
different way. The surprising reply of the creator to his characters, of
Do-stoevsky to Kirilov, can indeed be summed up thus: existence is
illusory and it is eternal.
At this point I perceive, therefore, that hope cannot be eluded forever
and that it can beset even those who wanted to be free of it.
This is the interest I find in the works discussed up to this point. I
could, at least in the realm of creation, list some truly absurd
works.[25] But everything must have a beginning. The object of this
quest is a certain fidelity. The Church has been so harsh with heretics
only because she deemed that there is no worse enemy than a child who
has gone astray. But the record of Gnostic effronteries and the
persistence of Manichean currents have contributed more to the
construction of orthodox dogma than all the prayers. With due allowance,
the same is true of the absurd.
One recognizes one’s course by discovering the paths that stray from it.
At the very conclusion of the absurd reasoning, in one of the attitudes
dictated by its logic, it is not a matter of indifference to find hope
coming back in under one of its most touching guises.
That shows the difficulty of the absurd ascesis. Above all, it shows the
necessity of unfailing alertness and thus confirms the general plan of
this essay.
But if it is still too early to list absurd works, at least a conclusion
can be reached as to the creative attitude, one of those which can
complete absurd existence. Art can never be so well served as by a
negative thought. Its dark and humiliated proceedings are as necessary
to the understanding of a great work as black is to white. To work and
create “for nothing,” to sculpture in clay, to know that one’s creation
has no future, to see one’s work destroyed in a day while being aware
that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for
centuries—this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions.
Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and
magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must
give the void its colors.
This leads to a special conception of the work of art. Too often the
work of a creator is looked upon as a series of isolated testimonies.
Thus, artist and man of letters are confused. A profound thought is in a
constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and
assumes its shape, likewise, a man’s sole creation is strengthened in
its successive and multiple aspects: his works. One after another, they
complement one an-other, correct or overtake one another, contradict one
another too. If something brings creation to an end, it is not the
victorious and illusory cry of the blinded artist: “I have said
everything,” but the death of the creator which closes his experience
and the book of his genius.
That effort, that superhuman consciousness are not necessarily apparent
to the reader. There is no mystery in human creation. Will performs this
miracle. But at least there is no true creation without a secret. To be
sure, a succession of works can be but a series of approximations of the
same thought. But it is possible to conceive of another type of creator
proceeding by juxtaposition. Their works may seem to be devoid of
interrelations. To a certain degree, they are contradictory.
But viewed all together, they resume their natural grouping.
From death, for instance, they derive their definitive significance.
They receive their most obvious light from the very life of their
author. At the moment of death, the succession of his works is but a
collection of failures. But if those failures all have the same
resonance, the creator has managed to repeat the image of his own
condition, to make the air echo with the sterile secret he possesses.
The effort to dominate is considerable here. But human intelligence is
up to much more. It will merely indicate clearly the voluntary aspect of
creation. Elsewhere I have brought out the fact that human will had no
other purpose than to maintain awareness.
But that could not do without discipline. Of all the schools of patience
and lucidity, creation is the most effective. It is also the staggering
evidence of man’s sole dignity: the dogged revolt against his condition,
perseverance in an effort considered sterile.
It calls for a daily effort, self-mastery, a precise estimate of the
limits of truth, measure, and strength. It constitutes an ascesis. All
that “for nothing,” in order to repeat and mark time. But perhaps the
great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it
demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his
phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality.
Let there be no mistake in aesthetics. It is not patient inquiry, the
unceasing, sterile illustration of a thesis that I am calling for here.
Quite the contrary, if I have made myself clearly understood.
The thesis-novel, the work that proves, the most hateful of all, is the
one that most often is inspired by a smug thought. You demonstrate the
truth you feel sure of possessing. But those are ideas one launches, and
ideas are the contrary of thought. Those creators are philosophers,
ashamed of themselves. Those I am speaking of or whom I imagine are, on
the contrary, lucid thinkers.
At a certain point where thought turns back on itself, they raise up the
images of their works like the obvious symbols of a limited, mortal, and
rebellious thought.
They perhaps prove something. But those proofs are ones that the
novelists provide for themselves rather than for the world in general.
The essential is that the novelists should triumph in the concrete and
that this constitute their nobility. This wholly carnal triumph has been
prepared for them by a thought in which abstract powers have been
humiliated. When they are completely so, at the same time the flesh
makes the creation shine forth in all its absurd luster. After all,
ironic philosophies produce passionate works.
Any thought that abandons unity glorifies diversity. And diversity is
the home of art. The only thought to liberate the mind is that which
leaves it alone, certain of its limits and of its impending end. No
doctrine tempts it. It awaits the ripening of the work and of life.
Detached from it, the work will once more give a barely muffled voice to
a soul Forever freed from hope. Or it will give voice to nothing if the
creator, tired of his activity, intends to turn away. That is
equivalent.
Thus, I ask of absurd creation what I required from thought— revolt,
freedom, and diversity. Later on it will manifest its utter futility. In
that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight
each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the
greatest of his strengths. The required diligence, the doggedness and
lucidity thus resemble the conqueror’s attitude. To create is likewise
to give a shape to one’s fate. For all these characters, their work
defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught
us this: there is no frontier between being and appearing.
Let me repeat. None of all this has any real meaning. On the way to that
liberty, there is still a progress to be made. The final effort for
these related minds, creator or conqueror, is to manage to free
themselves also from their undertakings: succeed in granting that the
very work, whether it be conquest, love, or creation, may well not be;
consummate thus the utter futility of any individual life. Indeed, that
gives them more freedom in the realization of that work, just as
becoming aware of the absurdity of life authorized them to plunge into
it with every excess.
All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that
single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A
world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the
illusion of another world. The outcome of his thought, ceasing to be
renunciatory, flowers in images. It frolics— in myths, to be sure, but
myths with no other depth than that of human suffering and, like it,
inexhaustible. Not the divine fable that amuses and blinds, but the
terrestrial face, gesture, and drama in which are summed up a difficult
wisdom and an ephemeral passion.
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top
of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They
had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment
than futile and hopeless labor.
If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of
mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to
practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this.
Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of
the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in
regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. AEgina, the daughter of
AEsopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that
disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction,
offered to tell about it on condition that AEsopus would give water to
the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the
benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer
tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not
endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god
of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.
It is said also that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to
test his wife’s love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the
middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And
there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained
from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife.
But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and
sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the
infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail.
Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling
sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary.
Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching
him from his joys, led him forcibly back to the underworld, where his
rock was ready for him.
You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as
much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods,
his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable
penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing
nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this
earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are
made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth,
one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge
stone, to roll it and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees
the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder
bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with
arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands.
At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time
without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone
rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have
to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face
that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man
going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of
which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which
returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness.
At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks
toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger
than his rock.
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where
would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding
upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at the same
tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the
rare moments when it becomes conscious.
Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the
whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during
his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same
time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by
scorn.
If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take
place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus
returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the
images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness
becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in man’s heart:
this is the rock’s victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief
is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing
truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, CEdipus at the outset obeys
fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy
begins.
Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only
bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a
tremendous remark rings out: “Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age
and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.”
Sophocles’ CEdipus, like Dostoevsky’s Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for
the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.
One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual
of happiness. “What! by such narrow ways—?”
There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons
of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say
that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens
as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness. “I
conclude that all is well,” says CEdipus, and that remark is sacred. It
echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is
not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had
come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile
sufferings. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among
men.
All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him.
His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates
his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored
to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up.
Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the
necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow,
and it is es-sential to know the night.
The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. If
there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there
is but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the
rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle
moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning
toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of
unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under
his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the
wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who
knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is
still rolling.
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s
burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the
gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well.
This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile
nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that
night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself
toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine
Sisyphus happy.
The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to reread.
His endings, or his absence of endings, suggest explanations which,
however, are not revealed in clear language but, before they seem
justified, require that the story be reread from another point of view.
Sometimes there is a double possibility of interpretation, whence
appears the necessity for two readings. This is what the author wanted.
But it would be wrong to try to interpret everything in Kafka in detail.
A symbol is always in general and, however precise its translation, an
artist can restore to it only its movement: there is no word-for-word
rendering. Moreover, nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic
work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes
him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing. In this regard,
the surest means of getting hold of it is not to provoke it, to begin
the work without a preconceived attitude and not to look for its hidden
currents. For Kafka in particular it is fair to agree to his rules, to
approach the drama through its externals and the novel through its form.
At first glance and for a casual reader, they are disturbing adventures
that carry off quaking and dogged characters into pursuit of problems
they never formulate. In The Trial, Joseph K. is accused. But he doesn’t
know of what. He is doubtless eager to defend himself, but he doesn’t
know why. The lawyers find his case difficult. Meanwhile, he does not
neglect to love, to eat, or to read his paper. Then he is judged. But
the courtroom is very dark.
He doesn’t understand much. He merely assumes that he is condemned, but
to what he barely wonders. At times he suspects just the same, and he
continues living. Some time later two well- dressed and polite gentlemen
come to get him and invite him to follow them. Most courteously they
lead him into a wretched suburb, put his head on a stone, and slit his
throat. Before dying the condemned man says merely: “Like a dog.”
You see that it is hard to speak of a symbol in a tale whose most
obvious quality just happens to be naturalness. But naturalness is a
hard category to understand. There are works in which the event seems
natural to the reader. But there are others (rarer, to be sure) in which
the character considers natural what happens to him. By an odd but
obvious paradox, the more extraordinary the character’s adventures are,
the more noticeable will be the naturalness of the story: it is in
proportion to the divergence we feel between the strangeness of a man’s
life and the simplicity with which that man accepts it. It seems that
this naturalness is Kafka’s. And, precisely, one is well aware what The
Trial means. People have spoken of an image of the human condition. To
be sure. Yet it is both simpler and more complex. I mean that the
significance of the novel is more particular and more personal to Kafka.
To a certain degree, he is the one who does the talking, even though it
is me he confesses. He lives and he is condemned. He learns this on the
first pages of the novel he is pursuing in this world, and if he tries
to cope with this, he nonetheless does so without surprise. He will
never show sufficient astonishment at this lack of astonishment. It is
by such contradictions that the first signs of the absurd work are
recognized. The mind projects into the concrete its spiritual tragedy.
And it can do so solely by means of a perpetual paradox which confers on
colors the power to express the void and on daily gestures the strength
to translate eternal ambitions.
Likewise, The Castle is perhaps a theology in action, but it is first of
all the individual adventure of a soul in quest of its grace, of a man
who asks of this world’s objects their royal secret and of women the
signs of the god that sleeps in them. Metamorphosis, in turn, certainly
represents the horrible imagery of an ethic of lucidity. But it is also
the product of that incalculable amazement man feels at being conscious
of the beast he becomes effortlessly.
In this fundamental ambiguity lies Kafka’s secret. These perpetual
oscillations between the natural and the extraordinary, the individual
and the universal, the tragic and the everyday, the absurd and the
logical, are found throughout his work and give it both its resonance
and its meaning. These are the paradoxes that must be enumerated, the
contradictions that must be strengthened, in order to understand the
absurd work.
A symbol, indeed, assumes two planes, two worlds of ideas and
sensations, and a dictionary of correspondences between them.
This lexicon is the hardest thing to draw up. But awaking to the two
worlds brought face to face is tantamount to getting on the trail of
their secret relationships. In Kafka these two worlds are that of
everyday life on the one hand and, on the other, that of supernatural
anxiety.[26] It seems that we are witnessing here an interminable
exploitation of Nietzsche’s remark: “Great problems are in the street.”
There is in the human condition (and this is a commonplace of all
literatures) a basic absurdity as well as an implacable nobility.
The two coincide, as is natural. Both of them are represented, let me
repeat, in the ridiculous divorce separating our spiritual excesses and
the ephemeral joys of the body. The absurd thing is that it should be
the soul of this body which it transcends so inordinately. Whoever would
like to represent this absurdity must give it life in a series of
parallel contrasts. Thus it is that Kafka expresses tragedy by the
everyday and the absurd by the logical. An actor lends more force to a
tragic character the more careful he is not to exaggerate it. If he is
moderate, the horror he inspires will be immoderate. In this regard
Greek tragedy is rich in lessons.
In a tragic work fate always makes itself felt better in the guise of
logic and naturalness. CEdipus’s fate is announced in advance. It is
decided supernaturally that he will commit the murder and the incest.
The drama’s whole effort is to show the logical system which, from
deduction to deduction, will crown the hero’s misfortune. Merely to
announce to us that uncommon fate is scarcely horrible, because it is
improbable. But if its necessity is demonstrated to us in the framework
of everyday life, society, state, familiar emotion, then the horror is
hallowed. In that revolt that shakes man and makes him say: “That is not
possible,” there is an element of desperate certainty that “that” can
be.
This is the whole secret of Greek tragedy, or at least of one of its
aspects. For there is another which, by a reverse method, would help us
to understand Kafka better. The human heart has a tiresome tendency to
label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way,
is without reason, since it is inevitable.
Modern man, however, takes the credit for it himself, when he doesn’t
fail to recognize it. Much could be said, on the contrary, about the
privileged fates of Greek tragedy and those favored in legend who, like
Ulysses, in the midst of the worst adventures are saved from themselves.
It was not so easy to return to Ithaca.
What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins
the logical and the everyday to the tragic. This is why Samsa, the hero
of Metamorphosis, is a traveling salesman. This is why the only thing
that disturbs him in the strange adventure that makes a vermin of him is
that his boss will be angry at his absence.
Legs and feelers grow out on him, his spine arches up, white spots
appear on his belly and—I shall not say that this does not astonish him,
for the effect would be spoiled—but it causes him a “slight annoyance.”
The whole art of Kafka is in that distinction. In his central work, The
Castle, the details of everyday life stand out, and yet in that strange
novel in which nothing concludes and everything begins over again, it is
the essential adventure of a soul in quest of its grace that is
represented. That translation of the problem into action, that
coincidence of the general and the particular are recognized likewise in
the little artifices that belong to every great creator. In The Trial
the hero might have been named Schmidt or Franz Kafka. But he is named
Joseph K. He is not Kafka and yet he is Kafka. He is an average
European. He is like everybody else. But he is also the entity K. who is
the x of this flesh-and-blood equation.
Likewise, if Kafka wants to express the absurd, he will make use of
consistency. You know the story of the crazy man who was fishing in a
bathtub. A doctor with ideas as to psychiatric treatments asked him “if
they were biting,” to which he received the harsh reply: “Of course not,
you fool, since this is a bathtub.”
That story belongs to the baroque type. But in it can be grasped quite
clearly to what a degree the absurd effect is linked to an excess of
logic. Kafka’s world is in truth an indescribable universe in which man
allows himself the tormenting luxury of fishing in a bathtub, knowing
that nothing will come of it.
Consequently, I recognize here a work that is absurd in its principles.
As for The Trial, for instance, I can indeed say that it is a complete
success. Flesh wins out.
Nothing is lacking, neither the unexpressed revolt (but it is what is
writing), nor lucid and mute despair (but it is what is creating), nor
that amazing freedom of manner which the characters of the novel
exemplify until their ultimate death.
Yet this world is not so closed as it seems. Into this universe devoid
of progress, Kafka is going to introduce hope in a strange form. In this
regard The Trial and The Castle do not follow the same direction. They
complement each other. The barely perceptible progression from one to
the other represents a tremendous conquest in the realm of evasion. The
Trial propounds a problem which The Castle, to a certain degree, solves.
The first describes according to a quasi scientific method and without
concluding. The second, to a certain degree, explains. The Trial
diagnoses, and The Castle imagines a treatment. But the remedy proposed
here does not cure. It merely brings the malady back into normal life.
It helps to accept it. In a certain sense (let us think of Kierkegaard),
it makes people cherish it. The Land Surveyor K. cannot imagine another
anxiety than the one that is tormenting him. The very people around him
become attached to that void and that nameless pain, as if suffering
assumed in this case a privileged aspect. “How I need you,” Frieda says
to K. “How forsaken I feel, since knowing you, when you are not with
me.” This subtle remedy that makes us love what crushes us and makes
hope spring up in a world without issue, this sudden “leap” through
which everything is changed, is the secret of the existential revolution
and of The Castle itself.
Few works are more rigorous in their development than The Castle. K. is
named Land Surveyor to the Castle and he arrives in the village. But
from the village to the Castle it is impossible to communicate. For
hundreds of pages K. persists in seeking his way, makes every advance,
uses trickery and expedients, never gets angry, and with disconcerting
good will tries to assume the duties entrusted to him. Each chapter is a
new frustration. And also a new beginning. It is not logic, but
consistent method. The scope of that insistence constitutes the work’s
tragic quality. When K. telephones to the Castle, he hears confused,
mingled voices, vague laughs, distant invitations. That is enough to
feed his hope, like those few signs appearing in summer skies or those
evening anticipations which make up our reason for living. Here is found
the secret of the melancholy peculiar to Kafka. The same, in truth, that
is found in Proust’s work or in the landscape of Plotinus: a nostalgia
for a lost paradise.
“I become very sad,” says Olga, “when Barnabas tells me in the morning
that he is going to the Castle: that probably futile trip, that probably
wasted day, that probably empty hope.”
“Probably”—on this implication Kafka gambles his entire work. But
nothing avails; the quest of the eternal here is meticulous. And those
inspired automata, Kafka’s characters, provide us with a precise image
of what we should be if we were deprived of our distractions[27] and
utterly consigned to the humiliations of the divine.
In The Castle that surrender to the everyday becomes an ethic.
The great hope of K. is to get the Castle to adopt him. Unable to
achieve this alone, his whole effort is to deserve this favor by
becoming an inhabitant of the village, by losing the status of foreigner
that everyone makes him feel. What he wants is an occupation, a home,
the life of a healthy, normal man. He can’t stand his madness any
longer. He wants to be reasonable. He wants to cast off the peculiar
curse that makes him a stranger to the village. The episode of Frieda is
significant in this regard. If he takes as his mistress this woman who
has known one of the Castle’s officials, this is because of her past. He
derives from her something that transcends him while being aware of what
makes her forever unworthy of the Castle. This makes one think of
Kierkegaard’s strange love for Regina Olsen. In certain men, the fire of
eternity consuming them is great enough for them to burn in it the very
heart of those closest to them. The fatal mistake that consists in
giving to God what is not God’s is likewise the subject of this episode
of The Castle. But for Kafka it seems that this is not a mistake. It is
a doctrine and a “leap.” There is nothing that is not God’s.
Even more significant is the fact that the Land Surveyor breaks with
Frieda in order to go toward the Barnabas sisters. For the Barnabas
family is the only one in the village that is utterly forsaken by the
Castle and by the village itself. Amalia, the elder sister, has rejected
the shameful propositions made her by one of the Castle’s officials. The
immoral curse that followed has forever cast her out from the love of
God. Being incapable of losing one’s honor for God amounts to making
oneself unworthy of his grace.
You recognize a theme familiar to existential philosophy: truth contrary
to morality. At this point things are far-reaching. For the path pursued
by Kafka’s hero from Frieda to the Barnabas sisters is the very one that
leads from trusting love to the deification of the absurd. Here again
Kafka’s thought runs parallel to Kierkegaard. It is not surprising that
the “Barnabas story” is placed at the end of the book. The Land
Surveyor’s last attempt is to recapture God through what negates him, to
recognize him, not according to our categories of goodness and beauty,
but behind the empty and hideous aspects of his indifference, of his
injustice, and of his hatred. That stranger who asks the Castle to adopt
him is at the end of his voyage a little more exiled because this time
he is unfaithful to himself, forsaking morality, logic, and intellectual
truths in order to try to enter, endowed solely with his mad hope, the
desert of divine grace.[28]
The word “hope” used here is not ridiculous. On the contrary, the more
tragic the condition described by Kafka, the firmer and more aggressive
that hope becomes. The more truly absurd The Trial is, the more moving
and illegitimate the impassioned “leap” of The Castle seems. But we find
here again in a pure state the paradox of existential thought as it is
expressed, for instance, by Kierkegaard: “Earthly hope must be killed;
only then can one be saved by true hope,”[29]which can be translated:
“One has to have written The Trial to undertake The Castle.”
Most of those who have spoken of Kafka have indeed defined his work as a
desperate cry with no recourse left to man. But this calls for review.
There is hope and hope. To me the optimistic work of Henri Bordeaux
seems peculiarly discouraging. This is because it has nothing for the
discriminating. Malraux’s thought, on the other hand, is always bracing.
But in these two cases neither the same hope nor the same despair is at
issue. I see merely that the absurd work itself may lead to the
infidelity I want to avoid. The work which was but an ineffectual
repetition of a sterile condition, a lucid glorification ol the
ephemeral, becomes here a cradle of illusions. It explains, it gives a
shape to hope. The creator can no longer divorce himself from it. It is
not the tragic game it was to be. It gives a meaning to the author’s
life.
It is strange in any case that works of related inspiration like those
of Kafka, Kierkegaard, or Chestov—those, in short, of existential
novelists and philosophers completely oriented toward the Absurd and its
consequences—should in the long run lead to that tremendous cry of hope.
They embrace the God that consumes them. It is through humility that
hope enters in. For the absurd of this existence assures them a little
more of supernatural reality. If the course of this life leads to God,
there is an outcome after all. And the perseverance, the insistence with
which Kierkegaard, Chestov, and Kafka’s heroes repeat their itineraries
are a special warrant of the uplifting power of that certainty.[30]
Kafka refuses his god moral nobility, evidence, virtue, coherence, but
only the better to fall into his arms. The absurd is recognized,
accepted, and man is resigned to it, but from then on we know that it
has ceased to be the absurd. Within the limits of the human condition,
what greater hope than the hope that allows an escape from that
condition? As I see once more, existential thought in this regard (and
contrary to current opinion) is steeped in a vast hope. The very hope
which at the time of early Christianity and the spreading of the good
news inflamed the ancient world. But in that leap that characterizes all
existential thought, in that insistence, in that surveying of a divinity
devoid of surface, how can one fail to see the mark of a lucidity that
repudiates itself? It is merely claimed that this is pride abdicating to
save itself. Such a repudiation would be fecund. But this does not
change that. The moral value of lucidity cannot be diminished in my eyes
by calling it sterile like all pride. For a truth also, by its very
definition, is sterile. All facts are. In a world where everything is
given and nothing is explained, the fecundity of a value or of a
metaphysic is a notion devoid of meaning.
In any case, you see here in what tradition of thought Kafka’s work
takes its place. It would indeed be intelligent to consider as
inevitable the progression leading from The Trial to The Castle. Joseph
K. and the Land Surveyor K. are merely two poles that attract Kafka.[31]
I shall speak like him and say that his work is probably not absurd. But
that should not deter us from seeing its nobility and universality. They
come from the fact that he managed to represent so fully the everyday
passage from hope to grief and from desperate wisdom to intentional
blindness. His work is universal (a really absurd work is not universal)
to the extent to which it represents the emotionally moving face of man
fleeing humanity, deriving from his contradictions reasons for
believing, reasons for hoping from his fecund despairs, and calling life
his terrifying apprenticeship in death. It is universal because its
inspiration is religious. As in all religions, man is freed of the
weight of his own life. But if I know that, if I can even admire it, I
also know that I am not seeking what is universal, but what is true.
The two may well not coincide.
This particular view will be better understood if I say that truly
hopeless thought just happens to be defined by the opposite criteria and
that the tragic work might be the work that, after all future hope is
exiled, describes the life of a happy man. The more exciting life is,
the more absurd is the idea of losing it. This is perhaps the secret of
that proud aridity felt in Nietzsche’s work. In this connection,
Nietzsche appears to be the only artist to have derived the extreme
consequences of an aesthetic of the Absurd, inasmuch as his final
message lies in a sterile and conquering lucidity and an obstinate
negation of any supernatural consolation.
The preceding should nevertheless suffice to bring out the capital
importance of Kafka in the framework of this essay. Here we are carried
to the confines of human thought. In the fullest sense of the word, it
can be said that everything in that work is essential. In any case, it
propounds the absurd problem altogether.
If one wants to compare these conclusions with our initial remarks, the
content with the form, the secret meaning of The Castle with the natural
art in which it is molded, K.’s passionate, proud quest with the
everyday setting against which it takes place, then one will realize
what may be its greatness. For if nostalgia is the mark of the human,
perhaps no one has given such flesh and volume to these phantoms of
regret. But at the same time will be sensed what exceptional nobility
the absurd work calls for, which is perhaps not found here. If the
nature of art is to bind the general to the particular, ephemeral
eternity of a drop of water to the play of its lights, it is even truer
to judge the greatness of the absurd writer by the distance he is able
to introduce between these two worlds. His secret consists in being able
to find the exact point where they meet in their greatest disproportion.
And, to tell the truth, this geometrical locus of man and the inhuman is
seen everywhere by the pure in heart. If Faust and Don Quixote are
eminent creations of art, this is because of the immeasurable nobilities
they point out to us with their earthly hands. Yet a moment always comes
when the mind negates the truths that those hands can touch. A moment
comes when the creation ceases to be taken tragically; it is merely
taken seriously.
Then man is concerned with hope. But that is not his business. His
business is to turn away from subterfuge. Yet this is just what I find
at the conclusion of the vehement proceedings Kafka institutes against
the whole universe. His unbelievable verdict is this hideous and
upsetting world in which the very moles dare to hope.[32]
for JACQUES HEURGON
The loves we share with a city are often secret loves. Old walled towns
like Paris, Prague, and even Florence are closed in on themselves and
hence limit the world that belongs to them. But Algiers (together with
certain other privileged places such as cities on the sea) opens to the
sky like a mouth or a wound. In Algiers one loves the commonplaces: the
sea at the end of every street, a certain volume of sunlight, the beauty
of the race. And, as always, in that unashamed offering there is a
secret fragrance. In Paris it is possible to be homesick for space and a
beating of wings. Here at least man is gratified in every wish and, sure
of his desires, can at last measure his possessions.
Probably one has to live in Algiers for some time in order to realize
how paralyzing an excess of nature’s bounty can be. There is nothing
here for whoever would learn, educate himself, or better himself. This
country has no lessons to teach. It neither promises nor affords
glimpses. It is satisfied to give, but in abundance. It is completely
accessible to the eyes, and you know it the moment you enjoy it. Its
pleasures are without remedy and its joys without hope. Above all, it
requires clairvoyant souls—that is, without solace. It insists upon
one’s performing an act of lucidity as one performs an act of faith.
Strange country that gives the man it nourishes both his splendor and
his misery! It is not surprising that the sensual riches granted to a
sensitive man of these regions should coincide with the most extreme
destitution. No truth fails to carry with it its bitterness. How can one
be surprised, then, if I never feel more affection for the face of this
country than amid its poorest men?
During their entire youth men find here a life in proportion to their
beauty. Then, later on, the downhill slope and obscurity. They wagered
on the flesh, but knowing they were to lose. In Algiers whoever is young
and alive finds sanctuary and occasion for triumphs everywhere: in the
bay, the sun, the red and white games on the seaward terraces, the
flowers and sports stadiums, the cool- legged girls. But for whoever has
lost his youth there is nothing to cling to and nowhere where melancholy
can escape itself.
Elsewhere, Italian terraces, European cloisters, or the profile of the
Provencal hills—all places where man can flee his humanity and gently
liberate himself from himself. But everything here calls for solitude
and the blood of young men. Goethe on his deathbed calls for light and
this is a historic remark. At Belcourt and Bab-el-Oued old men seated in
the depths of cafes listen to the bragging of young men with plastered
hair.
Summer betrays these beginnings and ends to us in Algiers.
During those months the city is deserted. But the poor remain, and the
sky. We join the former as they go down toward the harbor and man’s
treasures: warmth of the water and the brown bodies of women. In the
evening, sated with such wealth, they return to the oilcloth and
kerosene lamp that constitute the whole setting of their life.
In Algiers no one says “go for a swim,” but rather “indulge in a swim.”
The implications are clear. People swim in the harbor and go to rest on
the buoys. Anyone who passes near a buoy where a pretty girl already is
sunning herself shouts to his friends: “I tell you it’s a seagull.”
These are healthy amusements. They must obviously constitute the ideal
of those youths, since most of them continue the same life in the
winter, undressing every day at noon for a frugal lunch in the sun. Not
that they have read the boring sermons of the nudists, those Protestants
of the flesh (there is a theory of the body quite as tiresome as that of
the mind). But they are simply “comfortable in the sunlight.” The
importance of this custom for our epoch can never be overestimated. For
the first time in two thousand years the body has appeared naked on
beaches.
For twenty centuries men have striven to give decency to Greek insolence
and naivete, to diminish the flesh and complicate dress.
Today, despite that history, young men running on Mediterranean beaches
repeat the gestures of the athletes of Delos. And living thus among
bodies and through one’s body, one becomes aware that it has its
connotations, its life, and, to risk nonsense, a psychology of its
own.[33] The body’s evolution, like that of the mind, has its history,
its vicissitudes, its progress, and its deficiency. With this
distinction, however: color. When you frequent the beach in summer you
become aware of a simultaneous progression of all skins from white to
golden to tanned, ending up in a tobacco color which marks the extreme
limit of the effort of transformation of which the body is capable.
Above the harbor stands the set of white cubes of the Kasbah. When you
are at water level, against the sharp while background of the Arab town
the bodies describe a copper-colored frieze. And as the month of August
progresses and the sun grows, the white of the houses becomes more
blinding and skins take on a darker warmth. How can one fail to
participate, then, in that dialogue of stone and flesh in tune with the
sun and seasons? The whole morning has been spent in diving, in bursts
of laughter amid splashing water, in vigorous paddles around the red and
black freighters (those from Norway with all the scents of wood, those
that come from Germany full of the smell of oil, those that go up and
down the coast and smell of wine and old casks). At the hour when the
sun overflows from every corner of the sky at once, the orange canoe
loaded with brown bodies brings us home in a mad race. And when, having
suddenly interrupted the cadenced beat of the double paddle’s
bright-colored wings, we glide slowly in the calm water of the inner
harbor, how can I fail to feel that I am piloting through the smooth
waters a savage cargo of gods in whom I recognize my brothers?
But at the other end of the city summer is already offering us, by way
of contrast, its other riches: I mean its silence and its boredom. That
silence is not always of the same quality, depending on whether it
springs from the shade or the sunlight. There is the silence of noon on
the Place du Gouvernement. In the shade of the trees surrounding it,
Arabs sell for five sous glasses of iced lemonade flavored with
orange-flowers. Their cry “Cool, cool” can be heard across the empty
square. After their cry silence again falls under the burning sun: in
the vendor’s jug the ice moves and I can hear its tinkle. There is the
silence of the siesta. In the streets of the Marine, in front of the
dirty barbershops it can be measured in the melodious buzzing of flies
behind the hollow reed curtains.
Elsewhere, in the Moorish cafes of the Kasbah the body is silent, unable
to tear itself away, to leave the glass of tea and rediscover time with
the pulsing of its own blood. But, above all, there is the silence of
summer evenings.
Those brief moments when day topples into night must be peopled with
secret signs and summons for my Algiers to be so closely linked to them.
When I spend some time far from that town, I imagine its twilights as
promises of happiness. On the hills above the city there are paths among
the mastics and olive trees.
And toward them my heart turns at such moments. I see flights of black
birds rise against the green horizon. In the sky suddenly divested of
its sun something relaxes. A whole little nation of red clouds stretches
out until it is absorbed in the air. Almost immediately afterward
appears the first star that had been seen taking shape and consistency
in the depth of the sky. And then suddenly, all consuming, night. What
exceptional quality do the fugitive Algerian evenings possess to be able
to release so many things in me? I haven’t time to tire of that
sweetness they leave on my lips before it has disappeared into night. Is
this the secret of its persistence? This country’s affection is
overwhelming and furtive.
But during the moment it is present, one’s heart at least surrenders
completely to it. At Padovani Beach the dance hall is open every day.
And in that huge rectangular box with its entire side open to the sea,
the poor young people of the neighborhood dance until evening. Often I
used to await there a moment of exceptional beauty. During the day the
hall is protected by sloping wooden awnings. When the sun goes down they
are raised. Then the hall is filled with an odd green light born of the
double shell of the sky and the sea. When one is seated far from the
windows, one sees only the sky and, silhouetted against it, the faces of
the dancers passing in succession. Sometimes a waltz is being played,
and against the green background the black profiles whirl obstinately
like those cut-out silhouettes that are attached to a phonograph’s
turntable. Night comes rapidly after this, and with it the lights. But I
am unable to relate the thrill and secrecy that subtle instant holds for
me. I recall at least a magnificent tall girl who had danced all
afternoon. She was wearing a jasmine garland on her tight blue dress,
wet with perspiration from the small of her back to her legs.
She was laughing as she danced and throwing back her head. As she passed
the tables, she left behind her a mingled scent of flowers and flesh.
When evening came, I could no longer see her body pressed tight to her
partner, but against the sky whirled alternating spots of white jasmine
and black hair, and when she would throw back her swelling breast I
would hear her laugh and see her partner’s profile suddenly plunge
forward. I owe to such evenings the idea I have of innocence. In any
case, I learn not to separate these creatures bursting with violent
energy from the sky where their desires whirl.
In the neighborhood movies in Algiers peppermint lozenges are sometimes
sold with, stamped in red, all that is necessary to the awakening of
love: (1) questions: “When will you marry me?” “Do you love me?” and (2)
replies: “Madly,” “Next spring.” After having prepared the way, you pass
them to your neighbor, who answers likewise or else turns a deaf ear. At
Belcourt marriages have been arranged this way and whole lives been
pledged by the mere exchange of peppermint lozenges. And this really
depicts the childlike people of this region.
The distinguishing mark of youth is perhaps a magnificent vocation for
facile joys. But, above all, it is a haste to live that borders on
waste. At Belcourt, as at Bab-el-Oued, people get married young. They go
to work early and in ten years exhaust the experience of a lifetime. A
thirty-year-old workman has already played all the cards in his hand. He
awaits the end between his wife and his children. His joys have been
sudden and merciless, as has been his life. One realizes that he is born
of this country where everything is given to be taken away. In that
plenty and profusion life follows the sweep of great passions, sudden,
exacting, and generous. It is not to be built up, but to be burned up.
Stopping to think and becoming better are out of the question. The
notion of hell, for instance, is merely a funny joke here. Such
imaginings are allowed only to the very virtuous. And I really think
that virtue is a meaningless word in all Algeria. Not that these men
lack principles. They have their code, and a very special one. You are
not disrespectful to your mother. You see that your wife is respected in
the street. You show consideration for a pregnant woman. You don’t
double up on an adversary, because “that looks bad.” Whoever does not
observe these elementary commandments “is not a man,” and the question
is decided. This strikes me as fair and strong. There are still many of
us who automatically observe this code of the street, the only
disinterested one I know. But at the same time the shopkeeper’s ethics
are unknown. I have always seen faces around me filled with pity at the
sight of a man between two policemen. And before knowing whether the man
had stolen, killed his father, or was merely a nonconformist, they would
say:
“The poor fellow,” or else, with a hint of admiration: “He’s a pirate,
all right.”
There are races born for pride and life. They are the ones that nourish
the strangest vocation for boredom. It is also among them that the
attitude toward death is the most repulsive. Aside from sensual
pleasure, the amusements of this race are among the silliest. A society
of bowlers and association banquets, the three- franc movies and parish
feasts have for years provided the recreation of those over thirty.
Algiers Sundays are among the most sinister. How, then, could this race
devoid of spirituality clothe in myths the profound horror of its life?
Everything related to death is either ridiculous or hateful here. This
populace without religion and without idols dies alone after having
lived in a crowd.
I know no more hideous spot than the cemetery on Boulevard Bru, opposite
one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. An accumulation of
bad taste among the black fencings allows a dreadful melancholy to rise
from this spot where death shows her true likeness. “Everything fades,”
say the heart-shaped ex-votos, “except memory.” And all insist on that
paltry eternity provided us cheaply by the hearts of those who loved us.
The same words fit all despairs. Addressed to the dead man, they speak
to him in the second person (our memory will never forsake you);
lugubrious pretense which attributes a body and desires to what is at
best a black liquid. Elsewhere, amid a deadly profusion of marble
flowers and birds, this bold assertion: “Never will your grave be
without flowers.” But never fear: the inscription surrounds a gilded
stucco bouquet, very time-saving for the living (like those immortelles
which owe their pompous name to the gratitude of those who still jump
onto moving buses). Inasmuch as it is essential to keep up with the
times, the classic warbler is sometimes replaced by an astounding pearl
airplane piloted by a silly angel who, without regard for logic, is
provided with an impressive pair of wings.
Yet how to bring out that these images of death are never separated from
life? Here the values are closely linked. The favorite joke of Algerian
undertakers, when driving an empty hearse, is to shout: “Want a ride,
sister?” to any pretty girls they meet on the way. There is no objection
to seeing a symbol in this, even if somewhat untoward. It may seem
blasphemous, likewise, to reply to the announcement of a death while
winking one’s left eye: “Poor fellow, he’ll never sing again,” or, like
that woman of Oran who bad never loved her husband: “God gave him to me
and God has taken him from me.” But, all in all, I see nothing sacred in
death and am well aware, on the other hand, of the distance there is
between fear and respect. Everything here suggests the horror of dying
in a country that invites one to live. And yet it is under the very
walls of this cemetery that the young of Belcourt have their
assignations and that the girls offer themselves to kisses and caresses.
I am well aware that such a race cannot be accepted by all.
Here intelligence has no place as in Italy. This race is indifferent to
the mind. It has a cult for and admiration of the body. Whence its
strength, its innocent cynicism, and a puerile vanity which explains why
it is so severely judged. It is commonly blamed for its “mentality”—that
is, a way of seeing and of living. And it is true that a certain
intensity of life is inseparable from injustice. Yet here is a rate
without past, without tradition, and yet not without poetry—but a poetry
whose quality I know well, harsh, carnal, far from tenderness, that of
their very sky, the only one in truth to move me and bring me inner
peace. The contrary of a civilized nation is a creative nation. I have
the mad hope that, without knowing it perhaps, these barbarians lounging
on beaches are actually modeling the image of a culture in which the
greatness of man will at last find its true likeness. This race, wholly
cast into its present, lives without myths, without solace. It has put
all its possessions on this earth and therefore remains without defense
against death. All the gifts of physical beauty have been lavished on
it. And with them, the strange avidity that always accompanies that
wealth without future. Everything that is done here shows a horror of
stability and a disregard for the future. People are in haste to live,
and if an art were to be born here it would obey that hatred of
permanence that made the Dorians fashion their first column in wood. And
yet, yes, one can find measure as well as excess in the violent and keen
face of this race, in this summer sky with nothing tender in it, before
which all truths can be uttered and on which no deceptive divinity has
traced the signs of hope or of redemption.
Between this sky and these faces turned toward it, nothing on which to
hang a mythology, a literature, an ethic, or a religion, but stones,
flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch.
To feel one’s attachment to a certain region, one’s love for a certain
group of men, to know that there is always a spot where one’s heart will
feel at peace these are many certainties for a single human life. And
yet this is not enough. But at certain moments everything yearns for
that spiritual home. “Yes, we must go back there—there, indeed.” Is
there anything odd in finding on earth that union that Plotinus longed
for? Unity is expressed here in terms of sun and sea. The heart is
sensitive to it through a certain savor of flesh which constitutes its
bitterness and its grandeur. I learn that there is no superhuman
happiness, no eternity outside the sweep of days. These paltry and
essential belongings, these relative truths are the only ones to stir
me. As for the others, the “ideal” truths, I have not enough soul to
understand them. Not that one must be an animal, but I find no meaning
in the happiness of angels. I know simply that this sky will last longer
than I. And what shall I call eternity except what will continue after
my death? I am not expressing here the creature’s satisfaction with his
condition. It is quite a different matter. It is not always easy to be a
man, still less to be a pure man. But being pure is recovering that
spiritual home where one can feel the world’s relationship, where one’s
pulse- beats coincide with the violent throbbing of the two-o’clock sun.
It is well known that one’s native land is always recognized at the
moment of losing it. For those who are too uneasy about themselves,
their native land is the one that negates them. I should not like to be
brutal or seem extravagant. But, after all, what negates me in this life
is first of all what kills me. Everything that exalts life at the same
time increases its absurdity. In the Algerian summer I learn that one
thing only is more tragic than suffering, and that is the life of a
happy man. But it may be also the way to a greater life because it leads
to not cheating.
Many, in fact, feign love of life to evade love itself. They try their
skill at enjoyment and at “indulging in experiences.” But this is
illusory. It requires a rare vocation to be a sensualist. The life of a
man is fulfilled without the aid of his mind, with its backward and
forward movements, at one and the same time its solitude and its
presences. To see these men of Belcourt working, protecting their wives
and children, and often without a reproach, I think one can feel a
secret shame. To be sure, I have no illusions about it.
There is not much love in the lives I am speaking of. I ought to say
that not much remains. But at least they have evaded nothing.
There are words I have never really understood, such as “sin.” Yet I
believe these men have never sinned against life. For if there is a sin
against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as
in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of
this life. These men have not cheated. Gods of summer they were at
twenty by their enthusiasm for life, and they still are, deprived of all
hope. I have seen two of them die. They were full of horror, but silent.
It is better thus. From Pandora’s box, where all the ills of humanity
swarmed, the Greeks drew out hope after all the others, as the most
dreadful of all. I know no more stirring symbol; for, contrary to the
general belief, hope equals resignation.
And to live is not to resign oneself. This, at least, is the bitter
lesson of Algerian summers. But already the season is wavering and
summer totters. The first September rains, after such violence and
hardening, are like the liberated earth’s first tears, as if for a few
days this country tried its hand at tenderness. Yet at the same period
the carob trees cover all of Algeria with a scent of love. In the
evening or after the rain, the whole earth, its womb moist with a seed
redolent of bitter almond, rests after having given herself to the sun
all summer long. And again that scent hallows the union of man and earth
and awakens in us the only really virile love in this world: ephemeral
and noble.
(1936)
for PIERRE GALINDO
This essay dates from 1939. The reader will have to bear this in mind to
judge of the present-day Oran. Impassioned protests from that beautiful
city assure me, as a matter of fact, that all the imperfections have
been (or will be) remedied. On the other hand, the beauties extolled in
this essay have been jealously respected.
Happy and realistic city, Oran has no further need of writers: she is
awaiting tourists.
(1953)
There are no more deserts. There are no more islands. Yet there is a
need for them. In order to understand the world, one has to turn away
from it on occasion; in order to serve men better, one has to hold them
at a distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary
to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage
gauges its strength? There remain big cities. Simply, certain conditions
are required.
The cities Europe offers us are too full of the din of the past. A
practiced ear can make out the flapping of wings, a fluttering of souls.
The giddy whirl of centuries, of revolutions, of fame can be felt there.
There one cannot forget that the Occident was forged in a series of
uproars. All that does not make for enough silence. Paris is often a
desert for the heart, but at certain moments from the heights of
Pere-Lachaise there blows a revolutionary wind that suddenly fills that
desert with flags and fallen glories. So it is with certain Spanish
towns, with Florence or with Prague.
Salzburg would be peaceful without Mozart. But from time to time there
rings out over the Salzach the great proud cry of Don Juan as he plunges
toward hell. Vienna seems more silent; she is a youngster among cities.
Her stones are no older than three centuries and their youth is ignorant
of melancholy. But Vienna stands at a crossroads of history. Around her
echoes the clash of empires. Certain evenings when the sky is suffused
with blood, the stone horses on the Ring monuments seem to take wing. In
that fleeting moment when everything is reminiscent of power and
history, can he distinctly heard, under the charge of the Polish
squadrons, the crashing fall of the Ottoman Empire. That does not make
for enough silence either.
To be sure, it is just that solitude amid others that men come looking
for in European cities. At least, men with a purpose in life.
There they can choose their company, take it or leave it. How many minds
have been tempered in the trip between their hotel room and the old
stones of the Ile Saint Louis! It is true that others have died there of
isolation. As for the first, at any rate, there they found their reasons
for growing and asserting themselves. They were alone and they weren’t
alone. Centuries of history and beauty, the ardent testimony of a
thousand lives of the past accompanied them along the Seine and spoke to
them both of traditions and of conquests. But their youth urged them to
invite such company. There comes a time, there come periods, when it is
unwelcome. “It’s between us two!” exclaims Rasti-gnac, facing the vast
mustiness of Paris. Two, yes, but that is still too many!
The desert itself has assumed significance; it has been glutted with
poetry. For all the world’s sorrows it is a hallowed spot. But at
certain moments the heart wants nothing so much as spots devoid of
poetry. Descartes, planning to meditate, chose his desert: the most
mercantile city of his era. There he found his solitude and the occasion
for perhaps the greatest of our virile poems: “The first [precept] was
never to accept anything as true unless I knew it to be obviously so.”
It is possible to have less ambition and the same nostalgia. But during
the last three centuries Amsterdam has spawned museums. In order to flee
poetry and yet recapture the peace of stones, other deserts are needed,
other spots without soul and without reprieve. Oran is one of these.
I have often heard the people of Oran complain: “There is no interesting
circle.” No, indeed! You wouldn’t want one! A few right-thinking people
tried to introduce the customs of another world into this desert,
faithful to the principle that it is impossible to advance art or ideas
without grouping together.[34] The result is such that the only
instructive circles remain those of poker-players, boxing enthusiasts,
bowlers, and the local associations. There at least the unsophisticated
prevails. After all, there exists a certain nobility that does not lend
itself to the lofty. It is sterile by nature.
And those who want to find it leave the “circles” and go out into the
street.
The streets of Oran are doomed to dust, pebbles, and heat. If it rains,
there is a deluge and a sea of mud. But rain or shine, the shops have
the same extravagant and absurd look. All the bad taste of Europe and
the Orient has managed to converge in them. One finds, helter-skelter,
marble greyhounds, ballerinas with swans, versions of Diana the huntress
in green galalith, discus-throwers and reapers, everything that is used
for birthday and wedding gifts, the whole race of painful figurines
constantly called forth by a commercial and playful genie on our
mantelpieces. But such perseverance in bad taste takes on a baroque
aspect that makes one forgive all. Here, presented in a casket of dust,
are the contents of a show window: frightful plaster models of deformed
feet, a group of Rembrandt drawings “sacrificed at 150 francs each,”
practical jokes, tricolored wallets, an eighteenth-century pastel, a
mechanical donkey made of plush, bottles of Provence water for
preserving green olives, and a wretched wooden virgin with an indecent
smile.
(So that no one can go away ignorant, the “management” has propped at
its base a card saying: “Wooden Virgin.”) There can be found in Oran:
1) Cafes with filter-glazed counters sprinkled with the legs and wings
of flies, the proprietor always smiling despite his always empty cafe. A
small black coffee used to cost twelve sous and a large one eighteen.
2) Photographers’ studios where there has been no progress in technique
since the invention of sensitized paper. They exhibit a strange fauna
impossible to encounter in the streets, from the pseudo-sailor leaning
on a console table to the marriageable girl, badly dressed and arms
dangling, standing in front of a sylvan background. It is possible to
assume that these are not portraits from life: they are creations.
3) An edifying abundance of funeral establishments. It is not that
people die more in Oran than elsewhere, but I fancy merely that more is
made of it.
The attractive naivete of this nation of merchants is displayed even in
their advertising. I read, in the handbill of an Oran movie theater, the
advertisement for a third-rate film. I note the adjectives “sumptuous,”
splendid, extraordinary, amazing, staggering, and “tremendous.” At the
end the management informs the public of the considerable sacrifices it
has undertaken to be able to present this startling “realization.”
Nevertheless, the price of tickets will not be increased.
It would be wrong to assume that this is merely a manifestation of that
love of exaggeration characteristic of the south. Rather, the authors of
this marvelous handbill are revealing their sense of psychology. It is
essential to overcome the indifference and profound apathy felt in this
country the moment there is any question of choosing between two shows,
two careers, and, often, even two women. People make up their minds only
when forced to do so. And advertising is well aware of this. It will
assume American proportions, having the same reasons, both here and
there, for getting desperate.
The streets of Oran inform us as to the two essential pleasures of the
local youth: getting one’s shoes shined and displaying those same shoes
on the boulevard. In order to have a clear idea of the first of these
delights, one has to entrust one’s shoes, at ten o’clock on a Sunday
morning, to the shoe-shiners in Boulevard Gal-lieni. Perched on high
armchairs, one can enjoy that peculiar satisfaction produced, even upon
a rank outsider, by the sight of men in love with their job, as the
shoe-shiners of Oran obviously are.
Everything is worked over in detail. Several brushes, three kinds of
cloths, the polish mixed with gasoline. One might think the operation is
finished when a perfect shine comes to life under the soft brush. But
the same insistent hand covers the glossy surface again with polish,
rubs it, dulls it, makes the cream penetrate the heart of the leather,
and then brings forth, under the same brush, a double and really
definitive gloss sprung from the depths of the leather. The wonders
achieved in this way are then exhibited to the connoisseurs. In order to
appreciate such pleasures of the boulevard, you ought to see the
masquerade of youth taking place every evening on the main arteries of
the city. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty the young people of
Oran “Society” borrow their models of elegance from American films and
put on their fancy dress before going out to dinner. With wavy, oiled
hair protruding from under a felt hat slanted over the left ear and
peaked over the right eye, the neck encircled by a collar big enough to
accommodate the straggling hair, the microscopic knot of the necktie
kept in place by a regulation pin, with thigh-length coat and waist
close to the hips, with light-colored and noticeably short trousers,
with dazzlingly shiny triple-soled shoes, every evening those youths
make the sidewalks ring with their metal- tipped soles. In all things
they are bent on imitating the bearing, forthrightness, and superiority
of Mr. Clark Gable. For this reason the local carpers commonly nickname
those youths, by favor of a casual pronunciation, “Clarques.”
At any rate, the main boulevards of Oran are invaded late in the
afternoon by an army of attractive adolescents who go to the greatest
trouble to look like a bad lot. Inasmuch as the girls of Oran feel
traditionally engaged to these softhearted gangsters, they likewise
flaunt the make-up and elegance of popular American actresses.
Consequently, the same wits call them “Marlenes.” Thus on the evening
boulevards when the sound of birds rises skyward from the palm trees,
dozens of Clarques and Marlenes meet, eye and size up one another, happy
to be alive and to cut a figure, indulging for an hour in the
intoxication of perfect existences.
There can then be witnessed, the jealous say, the meetings of the
American Commission. But in these words lies the bitterness of those
over thirty who have no connection with such diversions.
They fail to appreciate those daily congresses of youth and romance.
These are, in truth, the parliaments of birds that are met in Hindu
literature. But no one on the boulevards of Oran debates the problem of
being or worries about the way to perfection. There remains nothing but
flappings of wings, plumed struttings, coquettish and victorious graces,
a great burst of carefree song that disappears with the night.
From here I can hear Klestakov: “I shall soon have to be concerned with
something lofty.” Alas, he is quite capable of it! If he were urged, he
would people this desert within a few years. But for the moment a
somewhat secret soul must liberate itself in this facile city with its
parade of painted girls unable, nevertheless, to simulate emotion,
feigning coyness so badly that the pretense is immediately obvious. Be
concerned with something lofty! Just see:
Santa-Cruz cut out of the rock, the mountains, the flat sea, the violent
wind and the sun, the great cranes of the harbor, the trains, the
hangars, the quays, and the huge ramps climbing up the city’s rock, and
in the city itself these diversions and this boredom, this hubbub and
this solitude. Perhaps, indeed, all this is not sufficiently lofty. But
the great value of such overpopulated islands is that in them the heart
strips bare. Silence is no longer possible except in noisy cities. From
Amsterdam Descartes writes to the aged Guez de Balzac: “I go out walking
every day amid the confusion of a great crowd, with as much freedom and
tranquillity as you could do on your garden paths.”[35]
Obliged to live facing a wonderful landscape, the people of Oran have
overcome this fearful ordeal by covering their city with very ugly
constructions. One expects to find a city open to the sea, washed and
refreshed by the evening breeze. And aside from the Spanish quarter,[36]
one finds a walled town that turns its back to the sea, that has been
built up by turning back on itself like a snail. Oran is a great
circular yellow wall covered over with a leaden sky. In the beginning
you wander in the labyrinth, seeking the sea like the sign of Ariadne.
But you turn round and round in pale and oppressive streets, and
eventually the Minotaur devours the people of Oran: the Minotaur is
boredom. For some time the citizens of Oran have given up wandering.
They have accepted being eaten.
It is impossible to know what stone is without coming to Oran.
In that dustiest of cities, the pebble is king. It is so much
appreciated that shopkeepers exhibit it in their show windows to hold
papers in place or even for mere display. Piles of them are set up along
the streets, doubtless for the eyes’ delight, since a year later the
pile is still there. Whatever elsewhere derives its poetry from the
vegetable kingdom here takes on a stone face. The hundred or so trees
that can be found in the business section have been carefully covered
with dust. They are petrified plants whose branches give off an acrid,
dusty smell. In Algiers the Arab cemeteries have a well-known
mellowness. In Oran, above the Ras-el-Ain ravine, facing the sea this
time, flat against the blue sky, are fields of chalky, friable pebbles
in which the sun blinds with its fires. Amid these bare bones of the
earth a purple geranium, from time to time, contributes its life and
fresh blood to the landscape. The whole city has solidified in a stony
matrix. Seen from Les Planteurs, the depth of the cliffs surrounding it
is so great that the landscape becomes unreal, so mineral it is. Man is
outlawed from it. So much heavy beauty seems to come from another world.
If the desert can be defined as a soulless place where the sky alone is
king, then Oran is awaiting her prophets. All around and above the city
the brutal nature of Africa is indeed clad in her burning charms. She
bursts the unfortunate stage setting with which she is covered; she
shrieks forth between all the houses and over all the roofs. If one
climbs one of the roads up the mountain of Santa-Cruz, the first thing
to be visible is the scattered colored cubes of Oran. But a little
higher and already the jagged cliffs that surround the plateau crouch in
the sea like red beasts. Still a little higher and a great vortex of sun
and wind sweeps over, airs out, and obscures the untidy city scattered
in disorder all over a rocky landscape. The opposition here is between
magnificent human anarchy and the permanence of an unchanging sea. This
is enough to make a staggering scent of life rise toward the
mountainside road.
There is something implacable about the desert. The mineral sky of Oran,
her streets and trees in their coating of dust— everything contributes
to creating this dense and impassible universe in which the heart and
mind are never distracted from themselves, nor from their sole object,
which is man. I am speaking here of difficult places of retreat. Books
are written on Florence or Athens. Those cities have formed so many
European minds that they must have a meaning. They have the means of
moving to tears or of uplifting. They quiet a certain spiritual hunger
whose bread is memory. But can one be moved by a city where nothing
attracts the mind, where the very ugliness is anonymous, where the past
is reduced to nothing? Emptiness, boredom, an indifferent sky, what are
the charms of such places?
Doubtless solitude and, perhaps, the human creature.
For a certain race of men, wherever the human creature is beautiful is a
bitter native land. Oran is one of its thousand capitals.
The Central Sporting Club, on rue du Fondouk in Oran, is giving an
evening of boxing which it insists will be appreciated by real
enthusiasts. Interpreted, this means that the boxers on the bill are far
from being stars, that some of them are entering the ring for the first
time, and that consequently you can count, if not on the skill, at least
on the courage of the opponents. A native having thrilled me with the
firm promise that “blood would flow,” I find myself that evening among
the real enthusiasts.
Apparently the latter never insist on comfort. To be sure, a ring has
been set up at the back of a sort of whitewashed garage, covered with
corrugated iron and violently lighted. Folding chairs have been lined up
in a square around the ropes. These are the “honor rings.” Most of the
length of the hall has been filled with seats, and behind them opens a
large free space called “lounge” by reason of the fact that not one of
the five hundred persons in it could take out a handkerchief without
causing serious accidents. In this rectangular box live and breathe some
thousand men and two or three women—the kind who, according to my
neighbor, always insist on “attracting attention.” Everybody is sweating
fiercely.
While waiting for the fights of the “young hopefuls” a gigantic
phonograph grinds out a Tino Rossi record. This is the sentimental song
before the murder.
The patience of a true enthusiast is unlimited. The fight announced for
nine o’clock has not even begun at nine thirty and no one has protested.
The spring weather is warm and the smell of a humanity in shirt sleeves
is exciting. Lively discussion goes on among the periodic explosions of
lemon-soda corks and the tireless lament of the Corsican singer. A few
late arrivals are wedged into the audience when a spotlight throws a
blinding light onto the ring.
The fights of the young hopefuls begin.
The young hopefuls, or beginners, who are fighting for the fun of it,
are always eager to prove this by massacring each other at the earliest
opportunity, in defiance of technique. They were never able to last more
than three rounds. The hero of the evening in this regard is young “Kid
Airplane,” who in regular life sells lottery tickets on cafe terraces.
His opponent, indeed, hurtled awkwardly out of the ring at the beginning
of the second round after contact with a fist wielded like a propeller.
The crowd got somewhat excited, but this is still an act of courtesy.
Gravely it breathes in the hallowed air of the embrocation. It watches
these series of slow rites and unregulated sacrifices, made even more
authentic by the propitiatory designs, on the white wall, of the
fighters’ shadows. These are the deliberate ceremonial prologues of a
savage religion. The trance will not come until later.
And it so happens that the loudspeaker announces Amar, “the tough
Oranese who has never disarmed,” against Perez, “the slugger from
Algiers.” An uninitiate would misinterpret the yelling that greets the
introduction of the boxers in the ring. He would imagine some
sensational combat in which the boxers were to settle a personal quarrel
known to the public. To tell the truth, it is a quarrel they are going
to settle. But it is the one that for the past hundred years has
mortally separated Algiers and Oran. Back in history, these two North
African cities would have already bled each other white as Pisa and
Florence did in happier times. Their rivalry is all the stronger just
because it probably has no basis.
Having every reason to like each other, they loathe each other
proportionately. The Oranese accuse the citizens of Algiers of “sham.”
The people of Algiers imply that the Oranese are rustic. These are
bloodier insults than they might seem because they are metaphysical. And
unable to lay siege to each other, Oran and Algiers meet, compete, and
insult each other on the field of sports, statistics, and public works.
Thus a page of history is unfolding in the ring. And the tough Oranese,
backed by a thousand yelling voices, is defending against Perez a way of
life and the pride of a province. Truth forces me to admit that Amar is
not conducting his discussion well. His argument has a flaw: he lacks
reach. The slugger from Algiers, on the contrary, has the required reach
in his argument. It lands persuasively between his contradictor’s eyes.
The Oranese bleeds magnificently amid the vociferations of a wild
audience. Despite the repeated encouragements of the gallery and of my
neighbor, despite the dauntless shouts of “Kill him!”, “Floor him!”, the
insidious “Below the belt,”
“Oh, the referee missed that one!”, the optimistic “He’s pooped,” “He
can’t take any more,” nevertheless the man from Algiers is proclaimed
the winner on points amid interminable catcalls. My neighbor, who is
inclined to talk of sportsmanship, applauds ostensibly, while slipping
to me in a voice made faint by so many shouts: “So that he won’t be able
to say back there that we of Oran are savages.”
But throughout the audience, fights not included on the program have
already broken out. Chairs are brandished, the police clear a path,
excitement is at its height. In order to calm these good people and
contribute to the return of silence, the “management,” without losing a
moment, commissions the loudspeaker to boom out “Sambre-et-Meuse.” For a
few minutes the audience has a really warlike look. Confused clusters of
com-batants and voluntary referees sway in the grip of policemen; the
gallery exults and calls for the rest of the program with wild cries,
cock-a- doodle-doo’s, and mocking catcalls drowned in the irresistible
flood from the military band.
But the announcement or the big fight is enough to restore calm. This
takes place suddenly, without flourishes, just as actors leave the stage
once the play is finished. With the greatest unconcern, hats are dusted
off, chairs are put back in place, and without transition all faces
assume the kindly expression of the respectable member of the audience
who has paid for his ticket to a family concert.
The last fight pits a French champion of the Navy against an Oran boxer.
This time the difference in reach is to the advantage of the latter. But
his superiorities, during the first rounds, do not stir the crowd. They
are sleeping off the effects of their first excitement; they are
sobering up. They are still short of breath. If they applaud, there is
no passion in it. They hiss without animosity.
The audience is divided into two camps, as is appropriate in the
interest of fairness. But each individual’s choice obeys that
indifference that follows on great expenditures of energy. If the
Frenchman holds his own, if the Oranese forgets that one doesn’t lead
with the head, the boxer is bent under a volley of hisses, but
immediately pulled upright again by a burst of applause. Not until the
seventh round does sport rise to the surface again, at the same time
that the real enthusiasts begin to emerge from their fatigue.
The Frenchman, to tell the truth, has touched the mat and, eager to win
back points, has hurled himself on his opponent. “What did I tell you?”
said my neighbor; “it’s going to be a fight to the finish.”
Indeed, it is a fight to the finish. Covered with sweat under the
pitiless light, both boxers open their guard, close their eyes as they
hit, shove with shoulders and knees, swap their blood, and snort with
rage. As one man, the audience has stood up and punctuates the efforts
of its two heroes. It receives the blows, returns them, echoes them in a
thousand hollow, panting voices. The same ones who had chosen their
favorite in indifference cling to their choice through obstinacy and
defend it passionately. Every ten seconds a shout from my neighbor
pierces my right ear: “Go to it, gob; come on, Navy!” while another man
in front of us shouts to the Oranese:
“Anda! hombre!” The man and the gob go to it, and together with them, in
this temple of whitewash, iron, and cement, an audience completely given
over to gods with cauliflower ears. Every blow that gives a dull sound
on the shining pectorals echoes in vast vibrations in the very body of
the crowd, which, with the boxers, is making its last effort.
In such an atmosphere a draw is badly received. Indeed, it runs counter
to a quite Manichean tendency in the audience. There is good and there
is evil, the winner and the loser. One must be either right or wrong.
The conclusion of this impeccable logic is immediately provided by two
thousand energetic lungs accusing the judges of being sold, or bought.
But the gob has walked over and embraced his rival in the ring, drinking
in his fraternal sweat.
This is enough to make the audience, reversing its view, burst out in
sudden applause. My neighbor is right: they are not savages.
The crowd pouring out, under a sky full of silence and stars, has just
fought the most exhausting fight. It keeps quiet and disappears
furtively, without any energy left for post mortems.
There is good and there is evil; that religion is merciless. The band of
faithful is now no more than a group of black-and-white shadows
disappearing into the night. For force and violence are solitary gods.
They contribute nothing to memory. On the contrary, they distribute
their miracles by the handful in the present. They are made for this
race without past which celebrates its communions around the prize ring.
These are rather difficult rites but ones that simplify everything. Good
and evil, winner and loser.
At Corinth two temples stood side by side, the temple of Violence and
the temple of Necessity.
For many reasons due as much to economics as to metaphysics, it may be
said that the Oranese style, if there is one, forcefully and clearly
appears in the extraordinary edifice called the Maison du Colon. Oran
hardly lacks monuments. The city has its quota of imperial marshals,
ministers, and local benefactors. They are found on dusty little
squares, resigned to rain and sun, they too converted to stone and
boredom. But, in any case, they represent contributions from the
outside. In that happy barbary they are the regrettable marks of
civilization.
Oran, on the other hand, has raised up her altars and rostra to her own
honor. In the very heart of the mercantile city, having to construct a
common home for the innumerable agricultural organizations that keep
this country alive, the people of Oran conceived the idea of building
solidly a convincing image of their virtues: the Maison du Colon. To
judge from the edifice, those virtues are three in number: boldness in
taste, love of violence, and a feeling for historical syntheses. Egypt,
Byzantium, and Munich collaborated in the delicate construction of a
piece of pastry in the shape of a bowl upside down. Multicolored stones,
most vigorous in effect, have been brought in to outline the roof. These
mosaics are so exuberantly persuasive that at first you see nothing but
an amorphous effulgence. But with a closer view and your attention
called to it, you discover that they have a meaning: a graceful
colonist, wearing a bow tie and white pith helmet, is receiving the
homage of a procession of slaves dressed in classical style.[37] The
edifice and its colored illustrations have been set down in the middle
of a square in the to-and-fro of the little two-car trams whose filth is
one of the charms of the city.
Oran greatly cherishes also the two lions of its Place d’Armes, or
parade ground. Since 1888 they have been sitting in state on opposite
sides of the municipal stairs. Their author was named ( ain. They have
majesty and a stubby torso. It is said that at night they get down from
their pedestal one after the other, silently pace around the dark
square, and on occasion uninate at length under the big, dusty ficus
trees. These, of course, are rumors to which the people of Oran lend an
indulgent ear. But it is unlikely.
Despite a certain amount of research, I have not been able to get
interested in Cain. I merely learned that he had the reputation of being
a skillful animal-sculptor. Yet I often think of him. This is an
intellectual bent that comes naturally in Oran. Here is a sonorously
named artist who left an unimportant work here.
Several hundred thousand people are familiar with the easygoing beasts
he put in front of a pretentious town hall. This is one way of
succeeding in art. To be sure, these two lions, like thousands of works
of the same type, are proof of something else than talent.
Others have created “The Night Watch,” “Saint Francis Receiving the
Stigmata,” “David,” or the Pharsalian bas-relief called “The
Glorification of the Flower.” Cain, on the other hand, set up two
hilarious snouts on the square of a mercantile province overseas.
But the David will go down one day with Florence and the lions will
perhaps be saved from the catastrophe. Let me repeat, they are proof of
something else.
Can one state this idea clearly? In this work there are insignificance
and solidity. Spirit counts for nothing and matter for a great deal.
Mediocrity insists upon lasting by all means, including bronze. It is
refused a right to eternity, and every day it takes that right. Is it
not eternity itself? In any event, such perseverance is capable of
stirring, and it involves its lesson, that of all the monuments of Oran,
and of Oran herself. An hour a day, every so often, it forces you to pay
attention to something that has no importance. The mind profits from
such recurrences. In a sense this is its hygiene, and since it
absolutely needs its moments of humility, it seems to me that this
chance to indulge in stupidity is better than others. Everything that is
ephemeral wants to last. Let us say that everything wants to last. Human
productions mean nothing else, and in this regard Cain’s lions have the
same chances as the ruins of Angkor. This disposes one toward modesty.
There are other Oranese monuments. Or at least they deserve this name
because they, too, stand for their city, and perhaps in a more
significant way. They are the public works at present covering the coast
for some ten kilometers. Apparently it is a matter of transforming the
most luminous of bays into a gigantic harbor. In reality it is one more
chance for man to come to grips with stone.
In the paintings of certain Flemish masters a theme of strikingly
general application recurs insistently: the building of the Tower of
Babel. Vast landscapes, rocks climbing up to heaven, steep slopes
teeming with workmen, animals, ladders, strange machines, cords,
pulleys. Man, moreover, is there only to give scale to the inhuman scope
of the construction. This is what the Oran coast makes one think of,
west of the city.
Clinging to vast slopes, rails, dump-cars, cranes, tiny trains ... Under
a broiling sun, toy-like locomotives round huge blocks of stone amid
whistles, dust, and smoke. Day and night a nation of ants bustles about
on the smoking carcass of the mountain.
Clinging all up and down a single cord against the side of the cliff,
dozens of men, their bellies pushing against the handles of automatic
drills, vibrate in empty space all day long and break off whole masses
of rock that hurtle down in dust and rumbling.
Farther on, dump-carts tip their loads over the slopes; and the rocks,
suddenly poured seaward, bound and roll into the water, each large lump
followed by a scattering of lighter stones. At regular intervals, at
dead of night or in broad daylight, detonations shake the whole mountain
and stir up the sea itself.
Man, in this vast construction field, makes a frontal attack on stone.
And if one could forget, for a moment at least, the harsh slavery that
makes this work possible, one would have to admire.
These stones, torn from the mountain, serve man in his plans. They pile
up under the first waves, gradually emerge, and finally take their place
to form a jetty, soon covered with men and machines which advance, day
after day, toward the open sea. Without stopping, huge steel jaws bite
into the cliff’s belly, turn round, and disgorge into the water their
overflowing gravel. As the coastal cliff is lowered, the whole coast
encroaches irresistibly on the sea.
Of course, destroying stone is not possible. It is merely moved from one
place to another. In any case, it will last longer than the men who use
it. For the moment, it satisfies their will to action.
That in itself is probably useless. But moving things about is the work
of men; one must choose doing that or nothing.[38] Obviously the people
of Oran have chosen. In front of that indifferent bay, for many years
more they will pile up stones along the coast. In a hundred
years—tomorrow, in other words—they will have to begin again. But today
these heaps of rocks testify for the men in masks of dust and sweat who
move about among them. The true monuments of Oran are still her stones.
It seems that the people of Oran are like that friend of Flaubert who,
on the point of death, casting a last glance at this irreplaceable
earth, exclaimed:
“Close the window; it’s too beautiful.” They have closed the window,
they have walled themselves in, they have cast out the landscape. But
Flaubert’s friend, Le Poittevin, died, and after him days continued to
be added to days. Likewise, beyond the yellow walls of Oran, land and
sea continue their indifferent dialogue. That permanence in the world
has always had contrary charms for man. It drives him to despair and
excites him. The world never says but one thing; first it interests,
then it bores. But eventually it wins out by dint of obstinacy. It is
always right.
Already, at the very gates of Oran, nature raises its voice. In the
direction of Canastel there are vast wastelands covered with fragrant
brush. There sun and wind speak only of solitude. Above Oran there is
the mountain of Santa-Cruz, the plateau and the myriad ravines leading
to it. Roads, once carriageable, cling to the slopes overhanging the
sea. In the month of January some are covered with flowers. Daisies and
buttercups turn them into sumptuous paths, embroidered in yellow and
white. About Sant- Cruzz everything has been said. But if I were to
speak of it, I should forget the sacred processions that climb the
rugged hill on feast days, in order to recall other pilgrimages.
Solitary, they walk in the red stone, rise above the motionless bay, and
come to dedicate to nakedness a luminous, perfect hour.
Oran has also its deserts of sand: its beaches. Those encountered near
the gates are deserted only in winter and spring.
Then they are plateaus covered with asphodels, peopled with bare little
cottages among the flowers. The sea rumbles a bit, down below. Yet
already the sun, the faint breeze, the whiteness of the asphodels, the
sharp blue of the sky, everything makes one fancy summer—the golden
youth then covering the beach, the long hours on the sand and the sudden
softness of evening. Each year on these shores there is a new harvest of
girls in flower. Apparently they have but one season. The following
year, other cordial blossoms take their place, which, the summer before,
were still little girls with bodies as hard as buds. At eleven a.m.,
coming down from the plateau, all that young flesh, lightly clothed in
motley materials, breaks on the sand like a multicolored wave.
One has to go farther (strangely close, however, to that spot where two
hundred thousand men are laboring) to discover a still virgin landscape:
long, deserted dunes where the passage of men has left no other trace
than a worm-eaten hut. From time to time an Arab shepherd drives along
the top of the dunes the black and beige spots of his flock of goats. On
the beaches of the Oran country every summer morning seems to be the
first in the world.
Each twilight seems to be the last, solemn agony, announced at sunset by
a final glow that darkens every hue. The sea is ultramarine, the road
the color of clotted blood, the beach yellow.
Everything disappears with the green sun; an hour later the dunes are
bathed in moonlight. Then there are incomparable nights under a rain of
stars. Occasionally storms sweep over them, and the lightning flashes
flow along the dunes, whiten the sky, and give the sand and one’s eyes
orange-colored glints.
But this cannot be shared. One has to have lived it. So much solitude
and nobility give these places an unforgettable aspect. In the warm
moment before daybreak, after confronting the first bitter, black waves,
a new creature breasts night’s heavy, enveloping water. The memory of
those joys does not make me regret them, and thus I recognize that they
were good. After so many years they still last, somewhere in this heart
which finds unswerving loyalty so difficult. And I know that today, if I
were to go to the deserted dune, the same sky would pour down on me its
cargo of breezes and stars. These are lands of innocence.
But innocence needs sand and stones. And man has forgotten how to live
among them. At least it seems so, for he has taken refuge in this
extraordinary city where boredom sleeps.
Nevertheless, that very confrontation constitutes the value of Oran.
The capital of boredom, besieged by innocence and beauty, it is
surrounded by an army in which every stone is a soldier. In the city,
and at certain hours, however, what a temptation to go over to the
enemy! What a temptation to identify oneself with those stones, to melt
into that burning and impassive universe that defies history and its
ferments! That is doubtless futile. But there is in every man a profound
instinct which is neither that of destruction nor that of creation. It
is merely a matter of resembling nothing. In the shadow of the warm
walls of Oran, on its dusty asphalt, that invitation is sometimes heard.
It seems that, for a time, the minds that yield to it are never
disappointed. This is the darkness of Eurydice and the sleep of Isis.
Here are the deserts where thought will collect itself, the cool hand of
evening on a troubled heart. On this Mount of Olives, vigil is futile;
the mind recalls and approves the sleeping Apostles. Were they really
wrong? They nonetheless had their revelation.
Just think of Sakyamuni in the desert. He remained there for years on
end, squatting motionless with his eyes on heaven. The very gods envied
him that wisdom and that stone-like destiny. In his outstretched hands
the swallows had made their nest. But one day they flew away, answering
the call of distant lands. And he who had stifled in himself desire and
will, fame and suffering, began to cry. It happens thus that flowers
grow on rocks. Yes, let us accept stone when it is necessary. That
secret and that rapture we ask of faces can also be given us by stone.
To be sure, this cannot last. But what can last, after all? The secret
of faces fades away, and there we are, cast back to the chain of
desires. And if stone can do no more for us than the human heart, at
least it can do just as much.
“Oh, to be nothing!” For thousands of years this great cry has roused
millions of men to revolt against desire and pain. Its dying echoes have
reached this far, across centuries and oceans, to the oldest sea in the
world. They still reverberate dully against the compact cliffs of Oran.
Everybody in this country follows this advice without knowing it. Of
course, it is almost futile.
Nothingness cannot be achieved any more than the absolute can.
But since we receive as favors the eternal signs brought us by roses or
by human suffering, let us not refuse either the rare invitations to
sleep that the earth addresses us. Each has as much truth as the other.
This, perhaps, is the Ariadne’s thread of this somnambulist and frantic
city. Here one learns the virtues, provisional to be sure, of a certain
kind of boredom. In order to be spared, one must say “yes” to the
Minotaur. This is an old and fecund wisdom. Above the sea, silent at the
base of the red cliffs, it is enough to maintain a delicate equilibrium
halfway between the two massive headlands which, on the right and left,
dip into the clear water. In the puffing of a coast-guard vessel
crawling along the water far out bathed in radiant light, is distinctly
heard the muffled call of inhuman and glittering forces: it is the
Minotaur’s farewell.
It is noon; the very day is being weighed in the balance. His rite
accomplished, the traveler receives the reward of his liberation: the
little stone, dry and smooth as an asphodel, that he picks up on the
cliff. For the initiate the world is no heavier to bear than this stone.
Atlas’s task is easy; it is sufficient to choose one’s hour.
Then one realizes that for an hour, a month, a year, these shores can
indulge in freedom. They welcome pell-mell, without even looking at
them, the monk, the civil servant, or the conqueror.
There are days when I expected to meet, in the streets of Oran,
Descartes or Cesare Borgia. That did not happen. But perhaps another
will be more fortunate. A great deed, a great work, virile meditation
used to call for the solitude of sands or of the convent.
There were kept the spiritual vigils of arms. Where could they be better
celebrated now than in the emptiness of a big city established for some
time in unintellectual beauty?
Here is the little stone, smooth as an asphodel. It is at the beginning
of everything. Flowers, tears (if you insist), departures, and struggles
are for tomorrow. In the middle of the day when the sky opens its
fountains of light in the vast, sonorous space, all the headlands of the
coast look like a fleet about to set out. Those heavy galleons of rock
and light are trembling on their keels as if they were preparing to
steer for sunlit isles. O mornings in the country of Oran! From the high
plateaus the swallows plunge into huge troughs where the air is
seething. The whole coast is ready for departure; a shiver of adventure
ripples through it. Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall leave together.
(1939)
The mediterranean sun has something tragic about it, quite different
from the tragedy of fogs. Certain evenings at the base of the seaside
mountains, night falls over the flawless curve of a little bay, and
there rises from the silent waters a sense of anguished fulfillment. In
such spots one can understand that if the Greeks knew despair, they
always did so through beauty and its stifling quality. In that gilded
calamity, tragedy reaches its highest point.
Our time, on the other hand, has fed its despair on ugliness and
convulsions. This is why Europe would be vile, if suffering could ever
be so. We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her. First
difference, but one that has a history. Greek thought always took refuge
behind the conception of limits. It never carried anything to extremes,
neither the sacred nor reason, because it negated nothing, neither the
sacred nor reason. It took everything into consideration, balancing
shadow with light. Our Europe, on the other hand, off in the pursuit of
totality, is the child of disproportion. She negates beauty, as she
negates whatever she does not glorify. And, through all her diverse
ways, she glorifies but one thing, which is the future rule of reason.
In her madness she extends the eternal limits, and at that very moment
dark Erinyes fall upon her and tear her to pieces. Nemesis, the goddess
of measure and not of revenge, keeps watch. All those who overstep the
limit are pitilessly punished by her.
The Greeks, who for centuries questioned themselves as to what is just,
could understand nothing of our idea of justice. For them equity implied
a limit, whereas our whole continent is convulsed in its search for a
justice that must be total. At the dawn of Greek thought Hera-clitus was
already imagining that justice sets limits for the physical universe
itself:
“The sun will not overstep his measures; if he does, the Erinyes, the
handmaids of justice, will find him out.”1 We who have cast the universe
and spirit out of our sphere laugh at that threat. In a drunken sky we
light up the suns we want. But nonetheless the boundaries exist, and we
know it. In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have
left behind, which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors.
Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations,
inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.
A fragment attributed to the same Heraclitus simply states:
“Presumption, regression of progress.” And, many centuries after the man
of Ephesus, Socrates, facing the threat of being condemned to death,
acknowledged only this one superiority in himself: what he did not know
he did not claim to know. The most exemplary life and thought of those
centuries close on a proud confession of ignorance. Forgetting that, we
have forgotten our virility. We have preferred the power that apes
greatness, first Alexander and then the Roman conquerors whom the
authors of our schoolbooks, through some incomparable vulgarity, teach
us to admire. We, too, have conquered, moved boundaries, mastered heaven
and earth. Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up by
ruling over a desert. What imagination could we have left for that
higher equilibrium in which nature balanced history, beauty, virtue, and
which applied the music of numbers even to blood-tragedy? We turn our
backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a
smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from
them is the color of printer’s ink.
This is why it is improper to proclaim today that we are the sons of
Greece. Or else we are the renegade sons. Placing history on the throne
of God, we are progressing toward theocracy like those whom the Greeks
called Barbarians and whom they fought to death in the waters of
Salamis. In order to realize how we differ, one must turn to him among
our philosophers who is the true rival of Plato. “Only the modern city,”
Hegel dares write, “offers the mind a field in which it can become aware
of itself.” We are thus living in the period of big cities.
Deliberately, the world has been amputated of all that constitutes its
permanence: nature, the sea, hilltops, evening meditation. Consciousness
is to be found only in the streets, because history is to be found only
in the streets—this is the edict. And consequently our most significant
works show the same bias. Landscapes are not to be found in great
European literature since Dostoevsky. History explains neither the
natural universe that existed before it nor the beauty that exists above
it. Hence it chose to be ignorant of them. Whereas Plato contained
everything—nonsense, reason, and myth—our philosophers contain nothing
but nonsense or reason because they have closed their eyes to the rest.
The mole is meditating.
It is Christianity that began substituting the tragedy of the soul for
contemplation of the world. But, at least, Christianity referred to a
spiritual nature and thereby preserved a certain fixity. With God dead,
there remains only history and power. For some time the entire effort of
our philosophers has aimed solely at replacing the notion of human
nature with that of situation, and replacing ancient harmony with the
disorderly advance of chance or reason’s pitiless progress. Whereas the
Greeks gave to will the boundaries of reason, we have come to put the
will’s impulse in the very center of reason, which has, as a result,
become deadly. For the Greeks, values pre-existed all action, of which
they definitely set the limits. Modern philosophy places its values at
the end of action. They are not but are becoming, and we shall know them
fully only at the completion of history. With values, all limit
disappears, and since conceptions differ as to what they will be, since
all struggles, without the brake of those same values, spread
indefinitely, today’s Messianisms confront one another and their clamors
mingle in the clash of empires. Disproportion is a conflagration,
according to Heraclitus. The conflagration is spreading; Nietzsche is
outdistanced. Europe no longer philosophizes by striking a hammer, but
by shooting a cannon.
Nature is still there, however. She contrasts her calm skies and her
reasons with the madness of men. Until the atom too catches fire and
history ends in the triumph of reason and the agony of the species. But
the Greeks never said that the limit could not he overstepped. They said
it existed and that whoever dared to exceed it was mercilessly struck
down. Nothing in present history can contradict them.
The historical spirit and the artist both want to remake the world. But
the artist, through an obligation of his nature, knows his limits, which
the historical spirit fails to recognize. This is why the latter’s aim
is tyranny whereas the former’s passion is freedom. All those who are
struggling for freedom today are ultimately fighting for beauty. Of
course, it is not a question of defending beauty for itself. Beauty
cannot do without man, and we shall not give our era its nobility and
serenity unless we follow it in its misfortune. Never again shall we be
hermits. But it is no less true that man cannot do without beauty, and
this is what our era pretends to want to disregard. It steels itself to
attain the absolute and authority; it wants to transfigure the world
before having exhausted it, to set it to rights before having understood
it. Whatever it may say, our era is deserting this world. Ulysses can
choose at Calypso’s bidding between immortality and the land of his
fathers. He chooses the land, and death with it. Such simple nobility is
foreign to us today.
Others will say that we lack humility; but, all things considered, this
word is ambiguous. Like Dostoevsky’s fools who boast of everything, soar
to heaven, and end up flaunting their shame in any public place, we
merely lack man’s pride, which is fidelity to his limits, lucid love of
his condition.
“I hate my time,” Saint-Exupery wrote shortly before his death, for
reasons not far removed from those I have spoken of. But, however
upsetting that exclamation, coming from him who loved men for their
admirable qualities, we shall not accept responsibility for it. Yet what
a temptation, at certain moments, to turn one’s back on this bleak,
fleshless world! But this time is ours, and we cannot live hating
ourselves. It has fallen so low only through the excess of its virtues
as well as through the extent of its vices. We shall fight for the
virtue that has a history. What virtue? The horses of Patroclus weep for
their master killed in battle. All is lost. But Achilles resumes the
fight, and victory is the outcome, because friendship has just been
assassinated: friendship is a virtue.
Admission of ignorance, rejection of fanaticism, the limits of the world
and of man, the beloved face, and finally beauty—this is where we shall
be on the side of the Greeks. In a certain sense, the direction history
will take is not the one we think. It lies in the struggle between
creation and inquisition. Despite the price which artists will pay for
their empty hands, we may hope for their victory. Once more the
philosophy of darkness will break and fade away over the dazzling sea. O
midday thought, the Trojan war is being fought far from the
battlefields! Once more the dreadful walls of the modern city will fall
to deliver up—“soul serene as the ocean’s calm”—the beauty of Helen.
(1948)
You have navigated with raging soul far from the paternal home, passing
beyond the sea’s double rocks, and you now inhabit a foreign land.
—Medea
For five days rain had been falling ceaselessly on Algiers and had
finally wet the sea itself. From an apparently inexhaustible sky,
constant downpours, viscous in their density, streamed down upon the
gulf. Gray and soft as a huge sponge, the sea rose slowly in the
ill-defined bay. But the surface of the water seemed almost motionless
under the steady rain. Only now and then a barely perceptible swelling
motion would raise above the sea’s surface a vague puff of smoke that
would come to dock in the harbor, under an arc of wet boulevards. The
city itself, all its white walls dripping, gave off a different steam
that went out to meet the first steam. Whichever way you turned, you
seemed to be breathing water, to be drinking the air.
In front of the soaked sea I walked and waited in that December Algiers,
which was for me the city of summers. I had fled Europe’s night, the
winter of faces. But the summer city herself had been emptied of her
laughter and offered me only bent and shining backs. In the evening, in
the crudely lighted cafes where I took refuge, I read my age in faces I
recognized without being able to name them. I merely knew that they had
been young with me and that they were no longer so.
Yet I persisted without very well knowing what I was waiting for, unless
perhaps the moment to go back to Tipasa. To be sure, it is sheer
madness, almost always punished, to return to the sites of one’s youth
and try to relive at forty what one loved or keenly enjoyed at twenty.
But I was forewarned of that madness. Once already I had returned to
Tipasa, soon after those war years that marked for me the end of youth.
I hoped, I think, to recapture there a freedom I could not forget. In
that spot, indeed, more than twenty years ago, I had spent whole
mornings wandering among the ruins, breathing in the wormwood, warming
myself against the stones, discovering little roses, soon plucked of
their petals, which outlive the spring. Only at noon, at the hour when
the cicadas themselves fell silent as if overcome, I would flee the
greedy glare of an all- consuming light. Sometimes at night I would
sleep open-eyed under a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.
Fifteen years later I found my ruins, a few feet from the first waves, I
followed the streets of the forgotten walled city through fields covered
with bitter trees, and on the slopes overlooking the hay I still
caressed the bread-colored columns. But the ruins were now surrounded
with barbed wire and could be entered only through certain openings. It
was also forbidden, for reasons which it appears that morality approves,
to walk there at night; by day one encountered an official guardian. It
just happened, that morning, that it was raining over the whole extent
of the ruins.
Disoriented, walking through the wet, solitary countryside, I tried at
least to recapture that strength, hitherto always at hand, that helps me
to accept what is when once I have admitted that I cannot change it. And
I could not, indeed, reverse the course of time and restore to the world
the appearance I had loved which had disappeared in a day, long before.
The second of September 1939, in fact, I had not gone to Greece, as I
was to do. War, on the contrary, had come to us, then it had spread over
Greece herself.
That distance, those years separating the warm ruins from the barbed
wire were to be found in me, too, that day as I stood before the
sarcophaguses full of black water or under the sodden tamarisks.
Originally brought up surrounded by beauty which was my only wealth, I
had begun in plenty. Then had come the barbed wire—I mean tyrannies,
war, police forces, the era of revolt. One had had to put oneself right
with the authorities of night: the day’s beauty was but a memory. And in
this muddy Tipasa the memory itself was becoming dim. It was indeed a
question of beauty, plenty, or youth! In the light from conflagrations
the world had suddenly shown its wrinkles and its wounds, old and new.
It had aged all at once, and we with it. I had come here looking for a
certain “lift”; but I realized that it inspires only the man who is
unaware that he is about to launch forward. No love without a little
innocence. Where was the innocence? Empires were tumbling down; nations
and men were tearing at one another’s throats; our hands were soiled.
Originally innocent without knowing it, we were now guilty without
meaning to be: the mystery was increasing with our knowledge. This is
why, O mockery, we were concerned with morality. Weak and disabled, I
was dreaming of virtue! In the days of innocence I didn’t even know that
morality existed. I knew it now, and I was not capable of living up to
its standard. On the promontory that I used to love, among the wet
columns of the ruined temple, I seemed to be walking behind someone
whose steps I could still hear on the stone slabs and mosaics but whom I
should never again overtake. I went back to Paris and remained several
years before returning home.
Yet I obscurely missed something during all those years. When one has
once had the good luck to love intensely, life is spent in trying to
recapture that ardor and that illumination. Forsaking beauty and the
sensual happiness attached to it, exclusively serving misfortune, calls
for a nobility I lack. But, after all, nothing is true that forces one
to exclude. Isolated beauty ends up simpering; solitary justice ends up
oppressing. Whoever aims to serve one exclusive of the other serves no
one, not even himself, and eventually serves injustice twice. A day
comes when, thanks to rigidity, nothing causes wonder any more,
everything is known, and life is spent in beginning over again. These
are the days of exile, of desiccated life, of dead souls. To come alive
again, one needs a special grace, self-forgetfulness, or a homeland.
Certain mornings, on turning a corner, a delightful dew falls on the
heart and then evaporates. But its coolness remains, and this is what
the heart requires always. I had to set out again.
And in Algiers a second time, still walking under the same downpour
which seemed not to have ceased since a departure I had thought
definitive, amid the same vast melancholy smelling of rain and sea,
despite this misty sky, these backs fleeing under the shower, these
cafes whose sulphureous light distorted faces, I persisted in hoping.
Didn’t I know, besides, that Algiers rains, despite their appearance of
never meaning to end, nonetheless stop in an instant, like those streams
in my country which rise in two hours, lay waste acres of land, and
suddenly dry up? One evening, in fact, the rain ceased. I waited one
night more. A limpid morning rose, dazzling, over the pure sea. From the
sky, fresh as a daisy, washed over and over again by the rains, reduced
by these repeated washings to its finest and clearest texture, emanated
a vibrant light that gave to each house and each tree a sharp outline,
an astonished newness. In the world’s morning the earth must have sprung
forth in such a light. I again took the road for Tipasa.
For me there is not a single one of those sixty-nine kilometers that is
not filled with memories and sensations. Turbulent childhood, adolescent
daydreams in the drone of the bus’s motor, mornings, unspoiled girls,
beaches, young muscles always at the peak of their effort, evening’s
slight anxiety in a sixteen-year-old heart, lust for life, fame, and
ever the same sky throughout the years, unfailing in strength and light,
itself insatiable, consuming one by one over a period of months the
victims stretched out in the form of crosses on the beach at the
deathlike hour of noon. Always the same sea, too, almost impalpable in
the morning light, which I again saw on the horizon as soon as the road,
leaving the Sahel and its bronze-colored vineyards, sloped down toward
the coast. But I did not stop to look at it. I wanted to see again the
Chenoua, that solid, heavy mountain cut out of a single block of stone,
which borders the bay of Tipasa to the west before dropping down into
the sea itself. It is seen from a distance, long before arriving, a
light, blue haze still confused with the sky. But gradually it is
condensed, as you advance toward it, until it takes on the color of the
surrounding waters, a huge motionless wave whose amazing leap upward has
been brutally solidified above the sea calmed all at once. Still nearer,
almost at the gates of Tipasa, here is its frowning bulk, brown and
green, here is the old mossy god that nothing will ever shake, a refuge
and harbor for its sons, of whom I am one.
While watching it I finally got through the barbed wire and found myself
among the ruins. And under the glorious December light, as happens but
once or twice in lives which ever after can consider themselves favored
to the full, I found exactly what I had come seeking, what, despite the
era and the world, was offered me, truly to me alone, in that forsaken
nature. From the forum strewn with olives could be seen the village down
below. No sound came from it; wisps of smoke rose in the limpid air. The
sea likewise was silent as if smothered under the unbroken shower of
dazzling, cold light. From the Chenoua a distant cock’s crow alone
celebrated the day’s fragile glory. In the direction of the ruins, as
far as the eye could see, there was nothing but pock-marked stones and
wormwood, trees and perfect columns in the transparence of the
crystalline air. It seemed as if the morning were stabilized, the sun
stopped for an incalculable moment. In this light and this silence,
years of wrath and night melted slowly away. I listened to an almost
forgotten sound within myself as if my heart, long stopped, were calmly
beginning to beat again. And awake now, I recognized one by one the
imperceptible sounds of which the silence was made up: the figured bass
of the birds, the sea’s faint, brief sighs at the foot of the rocks, the
vibration of the trees, the blind singing of the columns, the rustling
of the wormwood plants, the furtive lizards. I heard that; I also
listened to the happy torrents rising within me. It seemed to me that I
had at last come to harbor, for a moment at least, and that henceforth
that moment would be endless. But soon after, the sun rose visibly a
degree in the sky. A magpie preluded briefly, and at once, from all
directions, birds’ songs burst out with energy, jubilation, joyful
discordance, and infinite rapture. The day started up again. It was to
carry me to evening.
At noon on the half-sandy slopes covered with heliotropes like a foam
left by the furious waves of the last few days as they withdrew, I
watched the sea barely swelling at that hour with an exhausted motion,
and I satisfied the two thirsts one cannot long neglect without drying
up—I mean loving and admiring. For there is merely bad luck in not being
loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of
this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the
long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to
it. In the clamor in which we live, love is impossible and justice does
not suffice. This is why Europe hates daylight and is only able to set
injustice up against injustice. But in order to keep justice from
shriveling up like a beautiful orange fruit containing nothing but a
bitter, dry pulp, I discovered once more at Tipasa that one must keep
intact in oneself a freshness, a cool wellspring of joy, love the day
that escapes injustice, and return to combat having won that light. Here
I recaptured the former beauty, a young sky, and I measured my luck,
realizing at last that in the worst years of our madness the memory of
that sky had never left me. This was what in the end had kept me from
despairing. I had always known that the ruins of Tipasa were younger
than our new constructions or our bomb damage. There the world began
over again every day in an ever new light. O light! This is the cry of
all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their
fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle
of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible
summer.
I have again left Tipasa; I have returned to Europe and its struggles.
But the memory of that day still uplifts me and helps me to welcome
equally what delights and what crushes. In the difficult hour we are
living, what else can I desire than to exclude nothing and to learn how
to braid with white thread and black thread a single cord stretched to
the breaking-point? In everything I have done or said up to now, I seem
to recognize these two forces, even when they work at cross-purposes. I
have not been able to disown the light into which I was born and yet I
have not wanted to reject the servitudes of this time. It would be too
easy to contrast here with the sweet name of Tipasa other more sonorous
and crueler names. For men of today there is an inner way, which I know
well from having taken it in both directions, leading from the spiritual
hilltops to the capitals of crime. And doubtless one can always rest,
fall asleep on the hilltop or board with crime. But if one forgoes a
part of what is, one must forgo being oneself; one must forgo living or
loving otherwise than by proxy. There is thus a will to live without
rejecting anything of life, which is the virtue I honor most in this
world. From time to time, at least, it is true that I should like to
have practiced it. Inasmuch as few epochs require as much as ours that
one should be equal to the best as to the worst, I should like, indeed,
to shirk nothing and to keep faithfully a doubl memory. Yes, there is
beauty and there are the humiliated.
Whatever may be the difficulties of the undertaking, I should like never
to be unfaithful either to one or to the others.
But this still resembles a moral code, and we live for something that
goes farther than morality. If we could only name it, what silence! On
the hill of Sainte-Salsa, to the east of Tipasa, the evening is
inhabited. It is still light, to tell the truth, but in this light an
almost invisible fading announces the day’s end. A wind rises, young
like the night, and suddenly the waveless sea chooses a direction and
flows like a great barren river from one end of the horizon to the
other. The sky darkens. Then begins the mystery, the gods of night, the
beyond-pleasure. But how to translate this? The little coin I am
carrying away from here has a visible surface, a woman’s beautiful face
which repeats to me all I have learned in this day, and a worn surface
which I feel under my fingers during the return. What can that lipless
mouth be saying, except what I am told by another mysterious voice,
within me, which every day informs me of my ignorance and my happiness:
“The secret I am seeking lies hidden in a valley full of olive trees,
under the grass and the cold violets, around an old house that smells of
wood smoke. For more than twenty years I rambled over that valley and
others resembling it, I questioned mute goatherds, I knocked at the door
of deserted ruins. Occasionally, at the moment of the first star in the
still bright sky, under a shower of shimmering light, I thought I knew.
I did know, in truth. I still know, perhaps. But no one wants any of
this secret; I don’t want any myself, doubtless; and I cannot stand
apart from my people. I live in my family, which thinks it rules over
rich and hideous cities built of stones and mists. Day and night it
speaks up, and everything bows before it, which bows before nothing: it
is deaf to all secrets. Its power that carries me bores me,
nevertheless, and on occasion its shouts weary me. But its misfortune is
mine, and we are of the same blood. A cripple, likewise, an accomplice
and noisy, have I not shouted among the stones? Consequently, I strive
to forget, I walk in our cities of iron and fire, I smile bravely at the
night, I hail the storms, I shall be faithful. I have forgotten, in
truth: active and deaf, henceforth. But perhaps someday, when we are
ready to die of exhaustion and ignorance, I shall be able to disown our
garish tombs and go and stretch out in the valley, under the same light,
and learn for the last time what I know.”
(1952)
This would take considerable presumption or a vocation I lack.
Personally I don’t ask for any role and I have but one real vocation.
As a man, I have a preference for happiness; as an artist, it seems to
me that I still have characters to bring to life without the help of
wars or of law-courts. But I have been sought out, as each individual
has been sought out. Artists of the past could at least keep silent in
the face of tyranny. The tyrannies of today are improved; they no longer
admit of silence or neutrality. One has to take a stand, be either for
or against. Well, in that case, I am against. But this does not amount
to choosing the comfortable role of witness. It is merely accepting the
time as it is, minding one’s own business, in short. Moreover, you are
forgetting that today judges, accused, and witnesses exchange positions
with exemplary rapidity. My choice, if you think I am making one, would
at least be never to sit on a judge’s bench, or beneath it, like so many
of our philosophers. Aside from that, there is no dearth of
opportunities for action, in the relative. Trade-unionism is today the
first, and the most fruitful among them.
works an idealistic and romantic definition of the artist’s role?
However words are perverted, they provisionally keep their meaning. And
it is clear to me that the romantic is the one who chooses the perpetual
motion of history, the grandiose epic, and the announcement of a
miraculous event at the end of time. If I have tried to define
something, it is, on the contrary, simply the common existence of
history and of man, everyday life with the most possible light thrown
upon it, the dogged struggle against one’s own degradation and that of
others.
It is likewise idealism, and of the worse kind, to end up by hanging all
action and all truth on a meaning of history that is not implicit in
events and that, in any case, implies a mythical aim. Would it therefore
be realism to take as the laws of history the future—in other words,
just what is not yet history, something of whose nature we know nothing?
It seems to me, on the contrary, that I am arguing in favor of a true
realism against a mythology that is both illogical and deadly, and
against romantic nihilism whether it be bourgeois or allegedly
revolutionary. To tell the truth, far from being romantic, I believe in
the necessity of a rule and an order. I merely say that there can be no
question of just any rule whatsoever. And that it would be surprising if
the rule we need were given us by this disordered society, or, on the
other hand, by those doctrinaires who declare themselves liberated from
all rules and all scruples.
humanists. But for them human nature will be formed in the classless
society of the future.
To begin with, this proves that they reject at the present moment what
we all are: those humanists are accusers of man.
How can we be surprised that such a claim should have developed in the
world of court trials? They reject the man of today in the name of the
man of the future. That claim is religious in nature.
Why should it be more justified than the one which announces the kingdom
of heaven to come? In reality the end of history cannot have, within the
limits of our condition, any definable significance.
It can only be the object of a faith and of a new mystification. A
mystification that today is no less great than the one that of old based
colonial oppression on the necessity of saving the souls of infidels.
of the left?
You mean that is what separates those intellectuals from the left?
Traditionally the left has always been at war against injustice,
obscurantism, and oppression. It always thought that those phenomena
were interdependent. The idea that obscurantism can lead to justice, the
national interest to liberty, is quite recent. The truth is that certain
intellectuals of the left (not all, fortunately) are today hypnotized by
force and efficacy as our intellectuals of the right were before and
during the war. Their attitudes are different, but the act of
resignation is the same. The first wanted to be realistic nationalists;
the second want to be realistic socialists. In the end they betray
nationalism and socialism alike in the name of a realism henceforth
without content and adored as a pure, and illusory, technique of
efficacy.
This is a temptation that can, after all, be understood. But still,
however the question is looked at, the new position of the people who
call themselves, or think themselves, leftists consists in saying:
certain oppressions are justifiable because they follow the direction,
which cannot be justified, of history. Hence there are presumably
privileged executioners, and privileged by nothing.
This is about what was said in another context by Joseph de Maistre, who
has never been taken for an incendiary. But this is a thesis which,
personally, I shall always reject. Allow me to set up against it the
traditional point of view of what has been hitherto called the left: all
executioners are of the same family.
He is not asked either to write about co-operatives or, conversely, to
lull to sleep in himself the sufferings endured by others throughout
history. And since you have asked me to speak personally, I am going to
do so as simply as I can. Considered as artists, we perhaps have no need
to interfere in the affairs of the world. But considered as men, yes.
The miner who is exploited or shot down, the slaves in the camps, those
in the colonies, the legions of persecuted throughout the world—they
need all those who can speak to communicate their silence and to keep in
touch with them. I have not written, day after day, fighting articles
and texts, I have not taken part in the common struggles because I
desire the world to be covered with Greek statues and masterpieces. The
man who has such a desire does exist in me.
Except that he has something better to do in trying to instill life into
the creatures of his imagination. But from my first articles to my
latest book I have written so much, and perhaps too much, only because I
cannot keep from being drawn toward everyday life, toward those, whoever
they may be, who are humiliated and debased. They need to hope, and if
all keep silent or if they are given a choice between two kinds of
humiliation, they will be forever deprived of hope and we with them. It
seems to me impossible to endure that idea, nor can he who cannot endure
it lie down to sleep in his tower. Not through virtue, as you see, but
through a sort of almost organic intolerance, which you feel or do not
feel. Indeed, I see many who fail to feel it, but I cannot envy their
sleep. This does not mean, however, that we must sacrifice our artist’s
nature to some social preaching or other. I have said elsewhere why the
artist was more than ever necessary. But if we intervene as men, that
experience will have an effect upon our language. And if we are not
artists in our language first of all, what sort of artists are we? Even
if, militants in our lives, we speak in our works of deserts and of
selfish love, the mere fact that our lives are militant causes a special
tone of voice to people with men that desert and that love. I shall
certainly not choose the moment when we are beginning to leave nihilism
behind to stupidly deny the values of creation in favor of the values of
humanity, or vice versa.
In my mind neither one is ever separated from the other and I measure
the greatness of an artist (Moliere, Tolstoy, Melville) by the balance
he managed to maintain between the two. Today, under the pressure of
events, we are obliged to transport that tension into our lives
likewise. This is why so many artists, bending under the burden, take
refuge in the ivory tower or, conversely, in the social church. But as
for me, I see in both choices a like act of resignation. We must
simultaneously serve suffering and beauty.
The long patience, “The strength, the secret cunning such service calls
for are the virtues that establish the very renascence we need.
One word more. This undertaking, I know, cannot be accomplished without
dangers and bitterness. We must accept the dangers: the era of
chairbound artists is over. But we must reject the bitterness. One of
the temptations of the artist is to believe himself solitary, and in
truth he bears this shouted at him with a certain base delight. But this
is not true. He stands in the midst of all, in the same rank, neither
higher nor lower, with all those who are working and struggling. His
very vocation, in the face of oppression, is to open the prisons and to
give a voice to the sorrows and joys of all. This is where art, against
its enemies, justifies itself by proving precisely that it is no one’s
enemy. By itself art could probably not produce the renascence which
implies justice and liberty. But without it, that renascence would be
without forms and, consequently, would be nothing. Without culture, and
the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a
jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
(1953)
[1] From the point of view of the relative value of truth. On the other
hand, from the point of view of virile behavior, this scholar’s
fragility may well make us smile.
[2] Let us not miss this opportunity to point out the relative character
of this essay. Suicide may indeed be related to much more honorable
considerations— for example, the political suicides of protest, as they
were called, during the Chinese revolution.
[3] I have heard of an emulator of Peregrinos, a post-war writer who,
after having finished his first hook, committed suicide to attract
attention to his work. Attention was in fact attracted, but the book was
judged no good.
[4] But not in the proper sense. This is not a definition, but rather an
enumeration of the feelings that may admit of the absurd. Still, the
enumeration finished, the absurd has nevertheless not been exhausted.
[5] Apropos of the notion of exception particularly and against
Aristotle.
[6] It may be thought that I am neglecting here the essential problem,
that of faith. But I am not examining the philosophy of Kierkegaard or
of Chestov or, later on, of Husserl (this would call for a different
place and a different attitude of mind); I am simply borrowing a theme
from them and examining whether its consequences can fit the already
established rules. It is merely a matter of persistence.
[7] I did not say “excludes God,” which would still amount to asserting.
[8] Let me assert again: it is not the affirmation of God that is
questioned here, but rather the logic leading to that affirmation.
[9] Even the most rigorous epistemologies imply metaphysics. And to such
a degree that the metaphysic of many contemporary thinkers consists in
having nothing but an epistemology.
[10] A.—At that time reason had to adapt itself or die. It adapts
itself. With Plotinus, after being logical it becomes aesthetic.
Metaphor takes the place of the syllogism. B.—Moreover, this is not
Plotinus’ only contribution to phenomenology. This whole attitude is
already contained in the concept so dear to the Alexandrian thinker that
there is not only an idea of man but also an idea of Socrates.
[11] I am concerned here with a factual comparison, not with an apology
of humility. The absurd man is the contrary of the reconciled man.
[12] Quantity sometimes constitutes quality. If I can believe the latest
restatements of scientific theory, all matter is constituted by centers
of energy. Their greater or lesser quantity makes its specificity more
or less remarkable. A billion ions and one ion differ not only in
quantity but also in quality. It is easy to find an analogy in human
experience.
[13] Same reflection on a notion as different as the idea of eternal
nothingness. It neither adds anything to nor subtracts anything from
reality. In psychological experience of nothingness, it is by the
consideration of what will happen in two thousand years that our own
nothingness truly takes on meaning. In one of its aspects, eternal
nothingness is made up precisely of the sum of lives to come which will
not be ours.
[14] The will is only the agent here: it tends to maintain
consciousness. It provides a discipline of life, and that is
appreciable.
[15] What matters is coherence. We start out here from acceptance of the
world. But Oriental thought teaches that one can indulge in the same
effort of logic by choosing against the world. That is just as
legitimate and gives this essay its perspectives and its limits. But
when the negation of the world is pursued just as rigorously, one often
achieves ( in certain Vedantic schools) similar results regarding, for
instance, the indifference of works. In a book of great importance, Le
Choix, Jean Grenier establishes in this way a veritable “philosophy of
indifference.”
[16] In the fullest sense and with his faults. A healthy attitude also
includes faults.
[17] At this point I am thinking of Moliere’s Alceste. Everything is so
simple, so obvious and so coarse. Alceste against Philinte,
[18] It is curious to note that the most intellectual kind of painting,
the one that tries to reduce reality to its essential elements, is
ultimately but a visual delight. All it has kept of the world is its
color. (This is apparent particularly in Leger.)
[19] If you stop to think of it, this explains the worst novels. Almost
everybody considers himself capable of thinking and, to a certain
degree, whether right or wrong, really does think. Very few, on the
contrary, can fancy themselves poets or artists in words. But from the
moment when thought won out over style, the mob invaded the novel. That
is not such a great evil as is said. The best are led to make greater
demands upon themselves. As for those who succumb, they did not deserve
to survive.
[20] Malraux’s work, for instance. But it would have been necessary to
deal at the same time with the social question which in fact cannot be
avoided by absurd thought (even though that thought may put forward
several solutions, very different from one another). One must, however,
limit oneself.
[21] “Stavrogin: ‘Do you believe in eternal life in the other world?’
Kirilov: ‘No, but in eternal life in this world.’”
[22] “Man simply invented God in order not to kill himself. That is the
summary of universal history down to this moment.”
[23] Boris de Schloezer.
[24] Gide’s curious and penetrating remark: almost all Dostoevsky’s
heroes are polygamous.
[25] Melville’s Moby Dick, for instance.
[26] It is worth noting that the works of Kafka can quite as
legitimately be interpreted in the sense of a social criticism (for
instance in The Trial). It is probable, moreover, that there is no need
to choose. Both interpretations are good. In absurd terms, as we have
seen, revolt against men is also directed against God: great revolutions
are always metaphysical.
[27] In The Castle it seems that “distractions” in the Pascalian sense
are represented by the assistants who “distract” K. from his anxiety. If
Frieda eventually becomes the mistress of one of the assistants, this is
because she prefers the stage setting to truth, everyday life to shared
anguish.
[28] This is obviously true only of the unfinished version of The Castle
that Kafka left us. But it is doubtful that the writer would have
destroyed in the last chapters his novel’s unity of tone.
[29] Purity of heart.
[30] The only character without hope in The Castle is Amalia. She is the
one with whom the Land Surveyor is most violently contrasted.
[31] On the two aspects of Kafka’s thought, compare “In the Penal
Colony,” published by the Cahiers du Sud (and in America by Partisan
Review— translator’s note): “Guilt [‘of man’ is understood] is never
doubtful” and a fragment of The Castle (Momus’s report): “The guilt of
the Land Surveyor K. is hard to establish.”
[32] What is offered above is obviously an interpretation of Kafka’s
work. But it is only fair to add that nothing prevents its being
considered, aside from any interpretation, from a purely aesthetic point
of view. For instance, B. Groethuysen in his remarkable preface to The
Trial limits himself, more wisely than we, to following merely the
painful fancies of what he calls, most strikingly, a daydreamer. It is
the fate and perhaps the greatness of that work that it offers
everything and confirms nothing.
[33] May I take the ridiculous position of saying that I do not like the
way Gide exalts the body? He asks it to restrain its desire to make it
keener. Thus he comes dangerously near to those who in brothel slang are
called involved or brain-workers. Christianity also wants to suspend
desire. But, more natural, it sees a mortification in this. My friend
Vincent, who is a cooper and junior breast-stroke champion, has an even
clearer view. He drinks when he is thirsty, if he desires a woman tries
to go to bed with her, and would marry her if he loved her (this hasn’t
yet happened). Afterward he always says: “I feel better”— and this sums
up vigorously any apology that might be made for satiety.
[34] Gogol’s Klestakov is met in Oran. He yawns and then: “I feel I
shall soon have to be concerned with something lofty.”
[35] Doubtless in memory of these good words, an Oran lecture-and-
discussion group has been founded under the name of Cogito-Club.
[36] And the new boulevard called Front-de-Mer.
[37] Another quality of the Algerian race is, as you see, candor.
[38] This essay deals with a certain temptation. It is essential to have
known it. One can then act or not, but with full knowledge of the facts.