[In the following essay, Glicksberg examines Camus' attitude toward nihilist philosophy as evinced in his work, contending that his fiction is actually “protests against the fate of meaninglessness.”]

Camus simply lived through and documented what Nietzsche saw looming up in the twentieth century: namely, the nihilism which would result while the technological world adapted to its horrifying discovery that God was very, very dead, and that there was no ultimate and absolute meaning to either human life or the universe: they simply were.¹

There is nothing more incontestable than the fact that Meursault, in certain of his aspects, embodies that temptation toward an active nihilism and impersonality which constitutes, among others, one of the permanent characteristics of Camus's work.²

Camus had never expressed any nihilistic point of view as being his own. On the contrary, from the outset his explicit intention had been to counteract in his works what he felt were dangerous nihilistic tendencies of the twentieth century.³

An equally impressive example of the dialectic that transforms a philosophy of the absurd into a call for rebellion against the nihilist imperative is to be found in the career of Albert Camus. Like Malraux but in a spirit of inquiry characteristically his own, a spirit that sought to define with lucidity the complex process whereby nihilism could be transcended without necessitating the abandonment of the myth of the absurd, Camus set out on a quest for meaning that would justify the pilgrimage of man on earth. Though his explorations at the beginning of his quest led him to adopt nihilistic conclusions, he was never happy in or reconciled to his role as prophet of the absurd. His so-called nihilistic works—The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, Caligula, and The Misunderstanding—are protests against the fate of meaninglessness. Camus's development as a writer strikingly illustrates the paradox that nihilism carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution. If the writer carries despair to its utmost limit, he is, in effect, trying to go beyond it. As Camus declared in an essay published in 1950: “A literature of despair is a contradiction in terms.”⁴ And he went on to say: “In the darkest depths of our nihilism I have sought only for the means to transcend nihilism.”⁵

This furnishes the most rewarding clue to his life and work. He would be the resolute spokesman of the truth, but the truth he beheld entailed the elmination of the absolutes of the past. Mankind would have to give up the old, comforting illusions. There was no ideal of perfection to pursue, no divinely ordained destiny to fulfill. Not that rationalism could supplant the repudiated religious faith. The blood-soaked history of the twentieth century demolished the quaint fiction that man was preeminently a rational creature. The rise of Fascism and the horrors of Belsen and Auschwitz demonstrated the inhumanity of man to man. The outbreak of the Second World War deepened Camus's sense of the irremediable absurdity of life. The logic of the situation was such that no sensitive mind could bear it. If life is inescapably absurd, then literature is certainly an indefensible preoccupation. Camus did not yield to a mood of despair. He made this revealing entry in his notebook: “we can despair of the meaning of life in general, but not of the particular forms it takes; we can despair of existence, for we have no power over it, but not of history, where the individual can do everything.”⁶

Death renders life absurd and forces many people to decide that life is not worth living. What justification, however, is there for suicide? There is, to be sure, a close connection between the feeling of the absurd and the decision to commit suicide. But what conceivable advantage can the suicide derive from his desperate act? For whatever decision his mind arrives at, the body prefers to go on living. Camus states: “The body's judgment is as good as the mind's, and the body shrinks from annihilation.”⁷ In his youth in Algiers, Camus had learned to love the earth, the light and heat of the sun, the flesh. If he fears death, it is because of the overwhelming strength of his will to live.

The perception of the absurd effects a revolution in the ordered continuity of time. Once hope lies shattered, the future ceases to entice man. There is only the fugitive, problematical present. The mind, having broken out of its biological bondage, beholds Nature bare, without the mediation of culture and art. Always man confronts the absolute certainty of death, and it is out of this confrontation that he becomes aware of the ubiquitous absurd.

The Absurd must be accepted even when one rebels against it. Man must not surrender his dignity and pride before these unknown and irrational powers. His only trustworthy frame of reference is the earth, the world of sensory experience; there is nothing beyond. What lies outside the range of awareness cannot become the legitimate object of faith. Man can understand and believe only in what is open to his senses. The world does not lend itself to his craving for unity. The more clearly he perceives the truth of the Absurd, the more thoroughly is he committed to an ethic of revolt.

The Stranger is the dramatic embodiment of the myth of the absurd. Its absurdist hero faces a reality that his reason cannot comprehend. Time is an illusion. Death marks the end of the human story. The protagonist is unable to derive any meaning from the universe. He has come to the realization that success, courage, sacrifice, devotion to duty are meaningless terms. All men are sentenced to die: therefore life is unutterably absurd. Passive, taciturn, indifferent toward all things, Meursault endures the tedium of existence. He is without the spur of ambition and he is incapable of love. The fate that awaits him, as it waits for all of us—this constitutes his chief obsession, though he does not take the trouble to philosophize about it. A creature of settled routine, he is upset by nothing except the heat of the sun. He lives alone. The death of his mother draws no tears from him. He is too honest with himself to pretend to feelings of grief that he does not have. As far as he is concerned, nothing really matters much, if at all. After all, he and his mother had nothing in common. Why should he grieve? Meursault is a loner; he keeps for the most part to himself. For him, the only realities that count are visceral sensations: the smoking of a cigarette, sleep, sex.

He sleeps with Marie and is willing to marry her (it is she who raises the issue), but he does not love her and frankly admits that he does not. It is his dogged devotion to the truth that others—the judge, the lawyer who defends him, the prosecuting attorney—find so disconcerting and this trait of character brings about his undoing at the trial. He is not impressed by the sound of moral rhetoric or religious appeals. It is his settled conviction that nothing is of any importance. He does not care one way or the other if he is put in charge of the Paris branch that the owner of the firm he is working for plans to establish. He would prefer to remain where he is. There is no such thing, he is convinced, as a change of life; “one life was as good as another, and my present one suited me quite well.”⁸

Meursault's encounter with the Arab on the beach illustrates the intrusion of the absurd element of contingency; the sun beats down on the sand with blinding heat, and Meursault feels befuddled. He could have turned back and nothing would have happened, but he steps forward, the Arab draws his knife, the blade of which glints in the sunlight. At this moment Meursault pulls the trigger of the gun he happens to be carrying (it is not his) and then, unaccountably, fires more shots into the inert body of the Arab. His behavior at the funeral of his mother has, of course, no bearing on his case in court, but it is the one thing that leads to his being sentenced to death. The efforts of the magistrate to convert him to religion produce no results. Meursault cannot follow the magistrate's evangelical discourse; he is tired of all this talk. When the question is put to him, he replies that he does not believe in God. The magistrate indignantly asks him if he wants his life to have no meaning, and Meursault reflects ironically: “Really I couldn't see how my wishes came into it …” (p. 86).

We see him in his cell, this absurdist anti-hero, and observe how he grows used to the routine of life in jail. He loses his craving for smoking. His chief problem is how to kill time, how to prevent the onset of boredom. At the trial he behaves with his usual directness, hiding nothing. He would have liked to explain that he had never been able to regret anything in his life. “I've always been far too much absorbed in the present moment, or the immediate future, to think back” (p. 127). He is resigned to death (he is to be beheaded for his crime) and the oblivion to which it will consign him. After death there is only an eternity of nothingness. The only life he craves is life here on earth. Only the living could be ranked among the privileged. Once he has vented his rage on the priest who wishes to minister to his spiritual needs he is emptied of hope. Gazing up at the sky, he “laid his heart open to the benign indifference of the universe” (p. 154). Thus, in dying bereft of illusion, he enacts the fate of mankind, all of whom are condemned to die.

Just as The Stranger underlines the futility of all striving, so The Myth of Sisyphus constitutes the manifesto of the absurd. It declares that religious faith is powerless to save the race of man. Salvation to be achieved through the instrumentality of reason or fullness of knowledge—that, too, is compounded of illusion. The human quest for ultimate meaning is foredoomed to defeat. The questions man raises are unanswerable. No explanation furnished by the limited intellect can penetrate the heart of the cosmic mystery. The feeling of the absurd originates and grows in the mind of man, but it emerges as the result of his interrogation of the universe. His steady awareness of the absurd does not lead him to embrace an ethic of renunciation. He cannot behold this vision of the void without changing his whole attitude toward life. It conditions everything he does and drives him at the same time to break out of this intolerable bondage. Unreconciled to this fate of the absurd, he adopts the only attitude compatible with his human pride, an attitude of “defiance.”⁹

It was with the tragedy rather then the comedy of the absurd that Camus was concerned. Whereas later dramatists of the absurd like Samuel Beckett, Adamov, and Ionesco freely utilized comic devices that would generate black humor—inane dialogue, pratfalls, vaudevillian stunts, burlesque, caricature, farce—Camus remained strictly within the orbit of tragedy. In Caligula and The Misunderstanding, he presents protagonists who look the Medusa squarely in the face; they will not turn aside from their calamitous fate. Caligula is no hater of mankind, but he is bent on depriving his people of their opiate illusions. He abhors their weak-kneed spirit of resignation, their acceptance of the outrageous conditions life imposes on them. In trying to teach them the meaning of nothingness, he uses a “nihilist logic in which the classic demonstration of the Absurd is rigorously triumphant.”¹⁰ He has discovered a truth, namely, that death exists, which renders all of human existence meaningless. He will teach the world that mankind is unimportant. “And the play on one level is a demonstration of Caligula's capricious madness in denying both the value of human life and the world.”¹¹Caligula carries the nihilist theme to an extreme.

Camus was not satisfied to reiterate that life is a thing of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Even if one feels deeply the pervasive and ultimate absurdity of existence, he still finds that some things are infinitely precious—the experience of love, the privilege of being alive, the power man possesses of protesting against the ignominy of death. Life is its own unarguable and supreme value. It is Camus's signal merit that he has raised these metaphysical questions anew and sought his answers within a rational rather than supernatural context.

Camus, of course, recognizes that if life is absurd, then the creative quest is also absurd. The artist working in a universe of the absurd realizes that he knows naught and is tempted to fall into silence. He decides nevertheless to speak out, to embody his tragic vision which, by affirming the unique value of life, repudiates the nihilism on which it is based. The artist goes beyond the plane of the personal and the constriction of the absurd. His imposition of order on the chaotic flux and superfetation of the universe constitutes a revolt: the upsurge of creativity.

Camus in his notebooks recorded “the fact that we are suffering from nihilism,”¹² but he never surrendered to the spirit of nihilism. For him, an attitude of negation did not presuppose an abdication of the moral sense. Negation represented the deliberate choice of the man who is without God. In his preliminary reflections on the ideas that were eventually incorporated in The Plague, Camus conceived of “a sort of arduous progress toward a sanctity of negation—a heroism without God—man alone, in short” (p. 20). In October 1945 he penned this thought on the aesthetics of revolt:

Impossibility for man to despair utterly. Conclusion: any literature of despair represents but an extreme case and not the most significant. The remarkable thing in man is not that he despairs, but that he overcomes or forgets despair. A literature of despair will never be universal.

(p. 112)

Camus did not remain a prisoner in the closed universe of the absurd; it was a stage he had to pass through and rise above. A humanist by conviction, he did not choose the role of negation: it was thrust upon him. In The Rebel as in The Plague, Camus promulgates a distinctively humanist philosophy of revolt. Man must create his own values and make them prevail. By affirming his faith in a humanist ethic, Camus managed to halt the advance of the absurd. Thody declares: “From being a description of man's fate in a world deprived of value and significance, Camus's work becomes after 1945 a study and exploration, no longer of the nihilism of the absurd, but of the problems of action and of the service of humanity.”¹³ Camus is convinced that radical nihilism can never be put into action. Camus writes that “I have sought only reasons to transcend our darkest nihilism.”¹⁴ Basic to his humanist outlook is the belief that man is the measure of all things. He warns against the danger of transforming history into an absolute.

There was no abrupt break between Camus, the contemplative nihilist, and Camus, the “committed” writer. Even when he was elaborating the myth of the absurd in The Stranger, he did not withdraw from participation in the social and political struggles of his time. He spoke out boldly in his journalistic work, which deals with the Algerian revolt, the Spanish Civil War, the question of Communism. From the beginning of his career he took his responsibility seriously, but “commitment” did not mean for him what it meant for Sartre. He left the Communist Party when he found that it followed a Machiavellian policy of expediency in formulating its ideological principles. He could not remain a supporter of nihilism. One critic, who has made a study of Camus's journalistic contributions, warmly defends Camus against the blanket charge of nihilism.

The labels “pessimistic” and “nihilistic” were incorrectly applied to these writings [namely The Myth of Sisyphus, Caligula, and The Stranger] and to their author when the works first appeared, and they have persisted in the criticism of nearly all of Camus's writing to the present day.¹⁵

After his comparatively short period of involvement with the nihilism of the absurd, Camus composed The Plague, which belongs to the literature of revolt. It rejects the abstract ethical commandments of the past. Dr. Bernard Rieux devotes himself selflessly to the treatment of the patients stricken by the plague in the town of Oran. He does all he can to alleviate the suffering of the victims. He does not know why the plague has broken out. He cannot accept the priest's explanation that it serves some mysterious purpose of God. But why, if he does not believe in God, does the doctor labor so self-sacrificingly to combat the ravages of the plague? Dr. Rieux replies “that if he believed in an all-powerful God he would cease curing the sick and leave that to Him. But no one in the world believed in a God of that sort. …”¹⁶ Instead of throwing himself on the mercy of Providence, he fights against creation. He cannot resign himself to seeing people die. His reasoning is cogent and challenging:

since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes toward Heaven where He sits in silence.

(pp. 117-18)

Tarrou, too, is opposed to any movement which for any reason justifies the act of putting people to death. He is content to let others have the honor of directing the course of history. He will not become a legalized murderer. But since the plague exists and is spreading, he will resist the power of the pestilence. Like Dr. Rieux, he does not believe in God, and yet he desires strongly to become a saint. Camus asks: “Can one be a saint without God?” (p. 230). It is Rieux, the narrator, who is allowed to have the last word. He exemplifies the secular saint in that he has always taken the side of the victims, without presuming to judge them; he has endeavored “to share with his fellow citizens the only certitudes they had in common—love, exile, and suffering” (p. 272). He is transcending not only nihilism but the narrow boundaries of the self. He is acting in the name of humanity. Through his rebellion, the individual overcomes his alienation; he is no longer alone. He rebels, however obscurely, in behalf of higher values, he wants to remake the world in the image of justice. In refusing to submit to the power that sentences him to death, he engineers a metaphysical revolution.

When the throne of God is overthrown, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition and, in this way, to justify the fall of God.¹⁷

In The Rebel Camus traces the inception and insidious growth of nihilism. He reveals its limitations and its dangers. “Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate” (pp. 52-53). Its final product is an inhuman logic. Once man assumes that he can become God he is at liberty, if he has the power, to act irresponsibly; there is nothing to stop him from engaging in crime. If the universe is absurd, then everything is permitted. Nothing is sacred or forbidden. The murderer is as justified in his behavior as the saint. Good and evil are but relative terms. If mass murders have taken place with impunity in our time, “this is because of the indifference to life which is the mark of nihilism” (p. 14). Camus is speaking in this connection of the moral nihilism which, applied recklessly to the realm of politics, is transformed into an unconscionable and deadly will to power. The Nazis were thoroughgoing nihilists who gave vent to their passion for an amoral life of action. Success was its own justification. The history of contemporary nihilism is thus “nothing but a prolonged endeavour to give order, by human forces alone and simply by force, to a history no longer endowed with order” (pp. 190-91).

Camus resolutely opposed the type of nihilism, regardless of the political banner it flaunted, that struggled to achieve absolute power, for this is the type of nihilism dedicated to Caesarism, which ushers in a reign of inhumanity. If he denies the existence of God, he also denies the validity of the argument that there is no appeal beyond history. It is this pragmatic reliance on the verdict of history that is essentially nihilistic in character. Dedicated to life, the rebel sets himself a limited goal. “All of us, among the ruins, are preparing a renaissance beyond the limits of nihilism” (p. 272).

Even during the painful years of the Occupation, Camus never lost his faith in justice, the life of the spirit, the power of the truth. Though the truth is at times difficult to ascertain, the lie can easily be detected. In Letters to a German Friend, published in 1943 and 1944, he defends the ideal of justice above the claims of patriotism. He tells his German friend: “Man is that force which ultimately cancels all tyrants and gods. He is the force of evidence. … If nothing has any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.”¹⁸ Camus here takes his stand against nihilism, upholding the principle of the unity of mankind and the viability of the European cultural tradition. He admits that, like his German friend, he had once believed that the world was devoid of ultimate meaning, and he still thinks so. But what conclusions is one warranted in drawing from this premise? Does it imply that nothing matters and that good and evil are without distinction? According to the logic of nihilism, the will to power becomes the sole touchstone of morality. Camus cherished a radically different body of values. It seems to him “that man must exalt justice in order to fight against injustice, create happiness in order to protest against the universe of unhappiness” (p. 28).

Camus is clearly no nihilist, even though he has not given up his belief that the universe is devoid of ultimate meaning.

I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one. This world has at least the truth of man, and our task is to provide its justification against fate itself. And it has no justification but man; hence he must be saved if we want to save the idea we have of life.

(p. 28)

Camus knew that though man is nothing vis-à-vis the universe, he is a nothing endowed with conscience and the indomitable courage, which is the mark of his greatness, to rise above the human condition. As for the charge that he was a nihilist, a charge preferred by both Christian and Marxist critics, Camus maintained that there was no incompatibility between a negative philosophy and a positive morality grounded in justice.

If the epoch has suffered from nihilism, we cannot remain ignorant of nihilism and still achieve the moral code we need. No, everything is not summed up in negation and absurdity. We know this. But we must first posit negation and absurdity because they are what our generation had encountered and what we must take into account.

(p. 59)

Notes

1. Thomas Hanna, Bodies in Revolt (New York and Chicago: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 193.

2. Roger Quilliot, The Sea and Prisons, trans. Emmet Parker (University, Ala.: The University of Alabama Press, 1970), p. 79.

3. Emmet Parker, Albert Camus (Madison and Milwaukee: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), p. 109.

4. John Cruickshank, Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 3.

5. Ibid., p. 3.

6. Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1943, trans. Philip Thody (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), pp. 151-52. Rayner Heppenstall places Camus in the tradition of romantic pessimism represented by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and others. He points out that Camus's heroes denounce bitterly the fact of death. “They have swallowed their disappointment about Father Christmas and are reconciled to the way babies are born, but the fact of death sticks in their throats.” The Fourfold Tradition (London: Barie and Rockliff, 1961), pp. 197-98.

7. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), p. 6.

8. Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage Books, 1954), p. 52.

9. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 41.

10. Quilliot, The Sea and Prisons, p. 51.

11. Robert Emmet Jones, The Alienated Heroes in Modern French Drama (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1962), p. 112.

12. Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1942-1951, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), p. 15.

13. Philip Thody, Albert Camus (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957), p. 27.

14. Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), p. 160.

15. Parker, Albert Camus, p. xiv.

16. Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: The Modern Library, 1948), p. 116.

17. Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), p. 31.

18. Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), p. 14.