Practicing Camus: the art of engagement.

In 1957, just a week after the announcement of his Nobel Prize for Literature, Albert Camus was interviewed by the Parisian magazine Demain about how an artist engages in public life. At the time of publication, Camus was already a well-known novelist, journalist, and intellectual superstar who was called on frequently to give comment on the brutal war of independence raging in his home country of Algeria. Aggrieved by the bloodbath taking place in the name of justice and freedom, he felt compelled to offer a dour, unpopular assessment: an artist is "groping his way in the dark, just like the man in the street--incapable of separating himself from the world's misfortune and passionately longing for solitude and silence; dreaming of justice, yet being himself a source of injustice; dragged--even though he thinks he is driving it--behind a chariot that is bigger than he." (1)

Camus had many reasons for perceiving darkness around him. He witnessed his country under siege and feared that his own mother would be among the innocent targets of terrorism against French colonials. But he also encountered another form of darkness among his peers in Parisian intellectual circles, particularly Jean Paul Sartre. Once close friends, Sartre and Camus parted ways five years previously in a flurry of criticism that struck at Camus's book, The Rebel. Camus's arguments against revolutionary zeal hit the Marxist-steeped Sartre as a personal affront. They never reconciled, and their public quarrel excited debate on the rules that guided how a person participates in social and political life.

The French left adopted the word engagement to describe this participation. Applying engagement to artists and intellectuals, it was often translated as "commitment" and signified one's responsibility to the public good as well as the moral consequences of art. Camus agreed to the need for responsibility but was troubled by the popular style of engagement that was narrowly partisan, concerned with ideology and concrete programs of reaching out towards the proletariat in their struggle against bourgeoisie oppression. He found their brand of commitment too prescriptive, preaching freedom but demanding stifling allegiance. Soon, he found himself alone, arguing for a different kind of engagement. According to Camus, balancing the rights and responsibilities of the polis is an all-too-human endeavor, too delicate for political parties alone, too consequential not to account for human limitation, and too important to be of concern only to artists. Noble causes should not have to sacrifice the nobility of the individual.

Nearly fifty years have passed since Camus confessed to the darkness that surrounds public engagement. His words touch on the painful truth that stepping into public life is a deeply private experience, one that exposes our tangled histories and conflicting loyalties. Translating personal passions and convictions into public discourse puts one in the critical crossfire, yet without the personal connections, social and political language loses its ground. Camus insists that, despite the darkness, we need to speak for justice. But, gratefully, we are not alone. Lending us hope in this work are the voices of suffering, joy, beauty, and friendship that keep us company in the dark.

The Experience of the Absurd

Camus was well acquainted with the effort to challenge the darkness. His father had been killed in World War I when he was only a year old, and his mother withdrew into a silence that profoundly affected him. Later he reflected on the silences he knew: his mother's love spoken only with her eyes, the dignity of working class life, and the spectre of death. (2) Diagnosed with tuberculosis at seventeen, he lived his life in sporadic health and took comfort in his boyhood memories of Algeria's harsh beauty of the sea and sun.

But the sun can burn and a man can drown easily in the sea. Nature is indifferent to human concerns and perfectly willing to deal death with surprise. History is not much better, and any confidence in progress was hard to swallow for Camus, who found himself caught in the fickle turns of history when he was stranded in Paris during the Nazi occupation. To be alive is to be caught in a liminal or "in-between" world--between life and death, guilt and innocence, creature and agent. Camus desired to be a person who, in Pascal's words, does not show his "greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once." (3)

He wrote of tragedy because he believed it to be the most honest way to move through it. His journalism kept his eyes open to the horrors of totalitarian government, first at Alger-Republicain, where he catalogued anti-Arab policy, and then at the French Resistance paper Combat during and after the occupation. His novels, including The Plague and The Fall, along with his plays and short stories, exposed characters to dire situations in order to explore human motivation in the face of adversity.

Vivid encounters with life's fragility prompted Camus to probe the basic worthiness of existence. Frustrated by the suffering in the world and God's apparent sanction of it, he concludes that there is "no eternity outside the turn of days." (4) Without divine significance, humans must attend to this life for meaning.

However, life fails to make sense all the time. Humans long for clarity and cohesion, but their experiences do not deliver solid threads of expectation and fulfillment. The break is the absurd, the "divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, [the] nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds them together." (5) Some solve the disparity by invoking divine will; others employ elaborate logic to justify the absurd. Neither of these satisfied Camus. Such quick fixes disguise the jolt of awareness that can be instructive. Instead of the conclusion--Ah, why bother? Life's absurd!--the absurd is an honest place to begin constructing meaning.

In the longing for life to make sense, Camus perceived a tendency in humans to seek absolute solutions, to go to extreme lengths to resolve disorder. And in this search for freedom from absurdity, he saw the death of freedom. He saw how German self-determination turned to destruction; he witnessed the Communists' call for liberation turn to forced labor camps; he observed terrorism in Algeria used to stop the terror of colonialism. It was abhorrent to him that as humans reached for freedom and justice, they persecuted, imprisoned, and oppressed those in their way.

His charge was direct: for the future to be a hospitable place, humans, one at a time, must make it so. In 1948, he was invited to address a Dominican monastery in Latour-Maubourg. He appealed to them to speak out against suffering, to risk their faith:</p> <pre> We are faced with evil. And, as for me, I feel rather as Augustine did before becoming a Christian when he said: "I tried to find the source of evil and I got nowhere" ... But it is also true that I, and a few others, know what must be done, if not to reduce evil, at least not to add to it. Perhaps we cannot prevent

this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this? (6) </pre> <p>Camus believed that, despite the limitations in perspective and the absurdity of life, humans can make decisions that lead to less suffering. This is not the eradication of evil, not the elimination of suffering, nor the expectation that inexplicable suffering will ever find its cause and its solution; it is instead the work of humans to reduce suffering when they can, to act with the acceptance that all cannot be healed, resolved, or explained on this earth.

In the more mundane work of "limiting hell rather than trying to attain heaven," Camus held onto the world around him, refusing to exchange it for a future proffered by politicians or clerics. (7) His own future was cut short a the age of forty-six when, on a wet road outside of Paris, the car carrying Camus slid off the road and into a tree. He was killed instantly. His briefcase contained the first draft of a new novel about a fatherless boy growing up in Algeria under the shadow of his mute mother. This last, unfinished work serves as a somber reminder that an artist is always first a person, figuring life out alongside everyone else.

Where Beauty Meets Justice

Camus's writing spans several genres, and while he is known for his fiction, his lyrical essays give the clearest insight into the strong philosophical and ethical themes present in his novels and plays. He is eminently concerned with the intersections of the political and the aesthetic, capping his essays with chapters such as "The Artist and His Time," "Rebellion and Art," and "Create Dangerously." Art, for Camus, is a way to expose the harshness of human existence but also to stake a claim in its transformation.

No art is created ex nihilo: creative work takes up its environment and forms it into some approximation of experience that both affirms and denies the original object or experience. Camus sees that "Art disputes reality but does not hide from it," simultaneously rejecting reality and exalting certain aspects of it. (8)</p> <pre> What, then, is art? Nothing simple, that is certain. And it is even harder to find out amid the shouts of so many people bent on simplifying everything. On the one hand, genius is expected to be

splendid and solitary; on the other hand, it is called upon to resemble all. Alas, reality is more complex. (9) </pre> <p>The result is an object lesson in tension, bearing witness at once to both the blessedness and the brokenness of the world.

As art speaks to the world, it also gives voice to a world that is not yet. Just as a landscape painting records the traces of an actual landscape, or a love poem traces an actual experience from which the players have long since left the scene, the artist's creation strives both to represent and to transcend the object represented so that it can continue in the world beyond its place, beyond its moment. However, it is only a moment. The creative work returns always to this "mortal and limited world," drawing one's attention back from the brink of possibility of an idealized past or future to ground one in reality. In this way, the best that we can imagine for the future--for ourselves, for the suffering--is made up of the stuff of this present life.

This simultaneous "yes" and "no" can be recreated not only through static objects but also through a life lived in rebellion. Just as the artist speaks against and yet imitates the original he represents, a rebel explicitly says "no" to that which oppresses him and implicitly says "yes" to that which preserves his right to choose. However, Camus does not want rebellion to be considered in narrow political terms or driven by the promise of a triumphant future. Instead, the rebellion is ongoing, a continuous, expanding cycle of affirmation and rejection that returns attention to the present where beautiful things begin. It is rebellion that is creative.

While Camus holds both political and aesthetic rebellion to the same standard, he sees the standard as set initially by the aesthetic:</p> <pre> 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 today are ultimately

fighting for beauty. (11) </pre> <p>Camus wants the political to be inspired by the artist who sees his goals of unity fulfilled in momentary ways instead of ultimate ways. (12) Because Camus can imagine these moments of unity accruing to affect history, he can imagine political change aware of human limits yet looking towards a different future.

But how does a political vision of hope turn into tyranny? In Camus's words, "totality is not unity." When political ideologies and the need for order override the present order of things, when tomorrow's freedom is paid for with today's liberties, politics fails its constituency and lapses into serving its own mechanisms instead of the people it intended to serve. Camus rages against this falsification of value when he writes:</p> <pre> By dint of argument, incessant struggle, polemics, excommunication, persecutions conducted and suffered, the universal city of free and fraternal man is slowly diverted and gives way to the only universe in which history and expediency 

can in fact be elevated to the position of supreme judges: the

universe of the trial. (13) </pre> <p>This is human agency mutated into an ideology of freedom, prone to corruption. Although Camus wrote at the cusp of the cold war, his cautionary message is just as relevant today, as individuals and governments, through religion and politics, continue to reduce complexity and brush aside uncertainty, concocting totalizing solutions to alleviate fear.

The Practice of Creative Rebellion

When inspired by the aesthetic, the impulse to political action becomes a creative act, animated by an appreciation for the particular and the momentary while still able to speak to a larger vision of justice. Politics needs art, not to create its propaganda but to protect art from becoming only propaganda. And in reverse, art need politics. Creative work needs structures that encourage individuality, innovation, and risk. This work requires freedom.

Art and life share the same aim: "to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world." (14) Two messages emerge from this view. First, with freedom comes responsibility--as each person lives and creates, she should do so with others' creative potential in mind. Second, any activity that encourages agency can be seen as an artistic endeavor. Creativity and artistic expression are not just for those who sell their work but rather for anyone courageous enough to call herself a poet or a painter, to represent a moment of clarity through something beautiful, to identify unity in a world that lacks coherence. (15)

While Camus does not advocate creative rebellion as an impetus for social change, he believes it relieves individuals of the need to know how it all fits together; which action to take to effect the greatest change, or where to stand in the midst of so much ambiguity. Creation is not just for an elite but for all who rebel against forces of destruction and death.

This work is not done in isolation. In rebellion, there is solidarity. Camus, through the rough working class streets of Algeria and through the crisis of World War II, witnessed that friendships deepen through common struggle. He saw that guarding each other's freedom builds community, engendering relationships founded on shared experience and committed to preserving life.

Camus explores this theme of solidarity in his novel The Plague, where the deadly force of the mysterious illness presents the characters with the option of facing death alone or facing death together. Set in Oran, a large French port in Algeria, it is the story of a city and its residents that come under siege by a sickness of unknown origin. As Doctor Rieux visits victim after victim, he watches how the quarantined residents contract or expand their lives according to their fears and longings in the face of death. Some work tirelessly, some refuse to work at all, all the while the plague ravishes randomly. What sustains Rieux is not only his vocational commitment to the sick but also his fellow citizens of Oran. He keeps up with his neighbors and coworkers. He receives the stories of old loves, childhood dreams, and reawakened ambition. He goes for a swim with a friend in the ocean. All the while, the plague keeps watch and takes its toll.

For Camus, rebellion is not a test of super human strength; it instead brings out the best of people--their compassion, loyalty, drive, and ingenuity. Rieux cannot fight the plague alone--he needs the help of others, but not only in work. He needs their company, their kindness and curiosity to refresh his spirit. Freedom cannot survive on independence but requires interdependence as well as the pleasures of connection and intimacy. Creative rebellion affirms a shared humanity; solidarity is the sharing of that humanity.

Humanity is diverse and that diversity is challenging. But rebellion is an obligation to the other to remain an other, a creative individual in her own right. The experience of dialogical communion, of our similarity-in-difference, expands the self to the point where our meaningful happiness is bound up with concern for that which enhances the lives of all. (16) The "I" is now mutually constructed, fully dependent on the success of the other, held in check through resisting totalizing forces.

It is a point of debate whether creative rebellion is always viable, whether or not all could accept such an invitation or its consequences. (17) Camus never makes a claim to a universal religious or political program for instituting this revolution because he fundamentally opposes such equalizing structures. But this does not belie his faith that individuals long to find ways to engage the world and to do so together.

When mired in a mix of confidence, uncertainty, knowledge, ignorance, compassion, and distance, creative rebellion suggests that actions do matter but not in ultimate terms. The limits of this-world--its change, disruption, and struggle--does not disconnect us from bringing about a better world. It instead makes the future closer at hand-through the creative work we do today. When that work is done alongside others--others who are like us and can make us laugh through their stories or who are different than us and provoke us to question our assumptions--we remain alert to our own needs alongside the needs of the world.

Camus for Our Time

Camus did not live to see the end of the conflict in Algeria; violence stretched beyond the war for independence into a civil war that claimed more than 100,000 lives and lasted until the end of the century. Scratching the surface of history reveals our own American dreams of justice yet complicity in injustice. The current conflict in Iraq is just a recent example, with deaths of civilians estimated over 100,000. (18) It is sometimes hard to know who is driving this chariot of freedom, or if we all-those promising freedom and those promised freedom--are being dragged.

War is not our only ill. Environmental policy, health care reform, global capitalism, budget cuts and increases--the list goes on of causes that can drain smart, well-meaning people of their will for a better world when they encounter the messiness of political decisions, the compromises to ideals, and the steep uphill quality of keeping earth's residents from extinction. Having an opinion feels like a long way from doing anything about it. Speaking out places one in the line of fire of opposing opinions. The battle of words and ideas turns dry and rigid and there seems little place for imagination, and yet the news headlines keep coming.

Camus's vision of engagement rested on friendship, moments of beauty, and trust in the creative process. Camus never painted a bright future for humanity. He consistently tangled his characters in scenes of death and argued that humans were caught in a world indifferent to their concerns. He foresaw no end to the rebellion against nihilism and totality.

But Camus did not let the isolated struggle of the individual define his approach to engagement. The interview that began with the artist and man on the street wandering in darkness did not end there. He continues, explaining that in this "exhausting adventure" of artistic and political engagement, there is more to anchor him than struggle alone. In his characteristic florid style, Camus offers a formula of sorts for the endeavor of engaged living:</p> <pre> The artist can only draw help from others, and, like anyone else, he will get help from pleasure, from forgetting, and also from friendship and admiration. And, like anyone else, he will get help from hope. In my case, I have always drawn my hope from idea of fecundity ... Like many men today, I am tired of criticism, of disparagement, of spitefulness--of nihilism, in short. It is essential to condemn what must be condemned, but swiftly and firmly. On the other hand, one should praise at length what still deserves to be praised. After all, that is why I am an artist, because even the work that negates still affirms something and does homage to the wretched and magnificent life that is ours. (19) </pre> <p>Writing near the end of his life, Camus proclaimed "Let us rejoice." His cheer was for having endured tyranny, oppression, and suffering in its many forms and "being faced with cruel truths," lived to see what threatens human freedom. His cheer was for artists and individuals alike who had seen the "destitutions, prisons and bloodshed" of their times and, having kept this vision in mind, were willing to create in patient defiance of their situations. (20) Camus says "yes" and "no" to our situation. He challenges us to the darkness, to stand within it, in the thick of it. And he calls us to bear witness to the justice and beauty of this world that guides us into that unknown future.

Notes

1. Albert Camus, "The Wager of Our Generation," in Resistance, Rebellion, and ... Death, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 238-9.

2. A sample of his passion and perspective on Algeria and its influence over him is covered in his essay, "The Minotaur, or Stopping in Oran." He speaks of silence, solitude, city life, the sea and the human longing neither create nor destroy but "to resemble nothing." in Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 109-133. See also the novel about his youth, published posthumously. The First Man, trans. David Hapgood (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).

3. Epigraph to "Letters to a German Friend," in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 1.

4. Albert Camus, "Summer in Algiers" in Lyrical and Critical Essays, 90.

5. Albert Camus, Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Random House, Inc., 1955), 37.

6. Camus, "The Unbeliever and Christians," in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 73.

7. Herbert Hochberg, "Albert Camus and the Ethic of Absurdity," Contemporary European Ethics, ed. Joseph J. Kocklemans. (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 340.

8. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage International, 1991), 258.

9. Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 264.

10. Camus, The Rebel, 258.

11. Camus, "Helen's Exile" in Myth of Sisyphus, 137.

12. John Randolph LeBlanc, "Art and Politics in Albert Camus: Beauty as Defiance and Art as a Spiritual Quest," Literature & Theology 3, no. 2, (June 1999): 140.

13. Camus, The Rebel, 270.

14. Camus, "The Wager of Our Generation," in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 240-241.

15. LeBlanc, "Art and Politics," 134-135.

16. For a discussion of Camus's solidarity through difference, see Fred H. Willhoite Jr., Beyond Nihilism: Albert Camus's Contribution to Political Thought (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 171 and Avi Sagi, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd, trans. Batya Stein, Value Inquiry Series 125 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 120-123.

17. Hochberg readily points to how this seems naive, turning the "plumber into an artist." Sartre leveled the argument that rebellion in Camusian terms would not work as a political system. Camus did not claim to solve all through his statements but did employ broad language as a convention that invited criticism from political philosophy. "Albert Camus and the Ethic of Absurdity," 339. See also Albert Camus: The Artist in the Arena (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1966).

18. The statistics are based on a September 2004 survey of 988 households. "Based on the number of Iraqi fatalities recorded by the survey teams, the researchers calculated that the death rate since the invasion had increased from 5 percent annually to 7.9 percent." Because no data was taken from Fallujah, the center of particularly intense fighting, researchers concluded that this was a conservative estimate. Rob Stein, "100,000 Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq," Washington Post, October 29, 2004, Friday, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7967-2004Oct28.html (accessed 27 June 2005). Counts based on media reports of civilian deaths are lower, with figures near 25,000. see www.iraqbodycount.org.

19. Camus, "The Wager of Our Generation," in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 239.

20. Camus, "Create Dangerously" in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 270.