Camus - Committed Writings

Alice Kaplan

Camus is unsurpassed among twentieth-century French writers for a body of work that animates the wonder and absurdity of existence. Letters to a German Friend, Reflections on the Guillotine, and the Nobel speeches sit alongside his classic novels and essays The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, and The Plague as the clearest expression of his moral intuitions. For Albert Camus, commitment was always a form of vigilancea refusal of complacency, of coercive abstractions and murderous ideologies. He searched for truth and freedom through the complete embodiment of empathy, his solidarity with others. Producing a play, putting out a newspaper: these group endeavors were central to his lifes work and provided a foundation for the kind of political and moral optimism that saw its fullest expression in The Plague, in the calm persistence of the public-health squads. He was also aware of the limits of commitment. During his lifetime, there was no shortage of political parties pursuing violent doctrines and governments driven by corrupt motives. Commitment, he knew, could be a blinding devotion as well as a force for good.

The essays and speeches gathered here represent three faces of Camuss commitment. Letters to a German Friend, born of his experience in the Resistance, is a passionate confrontation with Nazi ideology. Here Camus explores his willingness to take up arms against tyranny, reimagines love of country, and calls for a new Europe. His is one of the earliest arguments for a postwar European Union, a half century before European citizenship became a reality. Reflections on the Guillotine, written in 1957, one of the deadliest years of the Algerian War, became the signal text for the French abolition of the death penalty in 1981. The Swedish speeches explore a specific form of commitmentthe commitment to createthanks to which Camus remains one of the strongest models available today for artists in search of justice. These essays can be read together, as a manual of commitment, or separately, for their affinities with his other writings: Letters to a German Friend, a monologue with an imagined interlocutor, is a precursor to Camuss novel The Fall; Reflections on the Guillotine takes up the scandal of capital punishment central to The Stranger; the theme of dangerous creation in the Nobel speeches appears in The Human Crisis, the lecture Camus delivered in the United States in 1946, and in a lesser-known essay, The Artist in Prison. This 1952 essay explores the transformation of Oscar Wildea dandy, committed only to being superficial, until the devastating experience of an unjust incarceration redefined his vision.

When Camus was barely twenty-five years old, having recently graduated with a masters degree in philosophy, his former professor and mentor cynically told him that joining the Algerian Communist Party, or PCA, was a vexed matter but an indispensable part of growing uphe might as well do it because there was no way around it. During his two years in the party, from 1935 to 1937, he came into his own as an intellectual. He founded and directed a cultural center and a theater troupe, Le Thtre du Travail (The Theater of Work), while he prepared a first volume of personal essays, The Wrong Side and the Right Side. Though it would be thirty more years before Algeria won its independence from France, anti-colonialist activity was already stirring. Camus was assigned to recruit Muslims to the cause. However, by 1937, Hitler was on the move, and the party switched its orientation away from colonialism and toward the coming war. The party remained silent as anti-colonial activists were arrested and prosecuted by the colonial government. Camus grew disillusioned with the party, and the party, in turn, expelled him.