The Limits of Violence: Camus’s Tragic View of the Rebel

Abstract

When Camus became a culture hero of the young in the 1950's, his impact on their political imagination was bracing, but it was impractical, remote from the actualities of public and private life in this country. The Rebel (L'Homme Revolte, 1951) was the most interesting textbook of modern history and political and moral philosophy to pass through the hands of the student generation. It was the first book in the post-war years to begin the process of politicizing the more intelligent and activist minds among them, and on the whole the effect was salutary at that time. Still, Camus's lessons on the development of state terrorism and individual nihilism were only textbook situations for his American readers, to be earnestly discussed but hardly touching them as terrifying possibilities. Later, when his plays became available in English translation, the idea of the absurd and the different responses to it, the images of man caught in attitudes of despair in an irrational universe, were exhibited in concrete dramatic situations. But what were his youthful readers to make of these fables of violence, produced during the 1940's, The Misunderstanding (Le Malentendu) and Caligula, or the political allegory, State of Siege (L'Etat de siege)? The very popular novel The Stranger (L'Etranger) had found its young audience at once because of the vivid evocation of a life of sheer sensation devoid of any values beyond those which its hero, or anti-hero, could immediately feel. But the tortured lives depicted in the plays were simply too improbable, the stories too intellectual in their implications, to serve as objective correlative of what it felt like to live in mid-twentieth century America. The change has come very rapidly. The current student