Le Mythe De Sisyphe Research Articles

Albert Camus: A Very Short Introduction. By Oliver Gloag

If I had to choose a single book in English that introduces Albert Camus’s complex philosophical and literary enterprise, it would be John Foley’s Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), which gives a fair and scholarly account of the philosophical, political, and personal issues that troubled Camus, allowing readers to form their own opinion of dilemmas and criticisms that have repeatedly been raised by scholars. The appearance of Oliver Gloag’s recent introduction to Camus does not change this evaluation. I would even strongly recommend reading Foley, as well as another excellent study, David Carroll’s Albert Camus, the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), after, or perhaps instead of, reading Gloag. The book under review here has some interesting parts, and sets a clear goal of presenting Camus as a conflicted and ambiguous thinker. Gloag is convincing in his claim that these ambiguities are an essential and integral element of understanding Camus. The last chapter of the book, in which the author lists and criticizes various political misappropriations of Camus’s thought, is especially deserving of attention. However, the major problem I have with Gloag’s book is the inadequacy of the title to the analysis that is offered. This is not an introduction to Camus, if we agree that the essential purpose of an introduction would be to provide the reader with some basic knowledge on the enterprise of the researched intellectual. In fact, Gloag too often does not allow the reader to be introduced to Camus, as he hastily offers interpretation, rather than a selection of possible ways of seeing Camus. Although he concedes that there are different ways of seeing L’Étranger (1942), he devotes only a passing mention to Carroll and Robert Zaretzky, focusing primarily on the consensus with the long tradition of postcolonial critique of Camus’s novel, including the issues raised by Edward Said, Pierre Nora, Azzedine Haddour, and Conor Cruise O’Brien. And when Gloag discusses the famous essay on the absurd, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942), he concludes that ‘the absurd becomes an ideology of individual acceptance which leaves out social and historical conflicts’ (p. 55), merely restating what Francis Jeanson and Jean-Paul Sartre thought of the essay, when trying to prove the ineffectiveness of Camus’s position in politics, rather than offering other possible ways of seeing how the concept of absurdity could have been understood as the foundation for individual revolt leading to social and political change. Furthermore, Gloag’s research of sources seems inadequate. Any informed reader knows that the statement attributed to Camus, ‘I believe in Justice, but I will defend my mother before Justice’ (cited p. 100), is a distortion of what Camus had actually said in 1957. In summary of the book, Gloag is justly concerned that ‘Western politicians present a simplified version of Camus’ (p. 106). I wholeheartedly agree. But to counter simplifications, one has to offer a balanced, fair vision of the character. And to me this is seriously lacking in Gloag’s introduction, which too frequently condemns, rather than understands, Camus.

The Existentialist Legacy: Sisyphean Struggles in Albert Camus’ La Peste and Günter Grass’s Die Rättin

In the course of his career, Günter Grass repeatedly invoked the works of Albert Camus, above all the 1942 essay “Le Mythe de Sisyphe” (“Der Mythos von Sisyphos”). This article examines Camus’ influence on Grass, arguing that Grass validates his own political and literary efforts, beginning in Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (1972), as part of a productive Sisyphean struggle. Yet the legacy of Sisyphus in Kopfgeburten (1980) and Die Rättin (1986) shifts, increasingly being framed as a persistent humanistic effort to oppose consumerism, nuclear armament, and environmental destruction. Comparing Camus’ novel La Peste (1947) with Die Rättin, the article underscores the evolving views in Europe on politics and writing, biology and mortality, as well as technology and the environment. Whereas Camus is concerned with existential suffering in an absurd universe and imagines a heroic savior-protagonist, Grass addresses more specific political concerns, blaming humanity — including the ineffectual narrator of Die Rättin — for endangering life on the planet.

“A thing I carry about with me”

Abstract This article discusses Sisyphus as a recurrent (philosophical) image in Samuel Beckett’s work. Starting from his prewar reading notes, it moves on to the 1940s and the radio play All That Fall (1956), which is studied in light of Albert Camus’s essays Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942) and L’ Homme révolté (1951). By focussing on how the radio play deals with the absurd, revolt, suicide and murder, the article reads All That Fall as one of Beckett’s most critical but overlooked engagements with Camus, merging classical and modern versions of the character Sisyphus.

Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic by Alice Kaplan

Reviewed by: Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic by Alice Kaplan Adele King Kaplan, Alice. Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic. University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp 296. ISBN: 978-0-226-24167-8. $26.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-226-56536-1. $18.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-226-24170-8. $18.00 (eBook). This book is undoubtedly the most complete story of how L'étranger was written, perhaps one of the best stories of how any novel was written. Alice Kaplan has studied seemingly every moment of Albert Camus's life during the period between 1924 to 1942. Initially, Camus was living in a small working-class apartment in Algiers with his deaf mother, and by 1930, he was suffering from tuberculosis. His teacher, Louis Germain, was shocked at the way the family lived, but persuaded his grandmother to allow him to enroll in a lycée, a rare chance for a boy from his background. He lived for a time with his uncle where he had the opportunity to read books. By 1935, Camus had obtained the equivalent of a master's degree and, had he not been suffering from tuberculosis, might have entered the French academic system. He had various amorous attachments and in 1934, he married Simone Hié and was supported by her mother. Unhappy in their bourgeois life, he was unable to describe in depth his relationship to his own mother. He suggested that his mother was in Oran with relatives, making up a false history, because of "secret resentment. Pride especially" (18). He only gradually realizes that what he wants is to find "more power in showing than in telling, more emotion in silence than in speech" (19). In 1938, Pascal Pia hired him to work as a journalist with Alger-Républicain. Then he moved to Oran to live with the family of Francine Faure, the woman to whom he became engaged. These were the years when he was gradually working on L'étranger which he would be able to complete when he arrived in Paris at the time of the German occupation. In October 1939, although the French authorities were unhappy with this appointment because of his political opinions, Camus was made editor-in-chief of a newssheet, Soir-Républicain, using the small amount of paper available. The same month, he burned his papers, removing his earlier writing from his mind. He was by then working on what would be his two other Absurdist books, Le mythe de Sisyphe and Caligula. Camus travelled to France, arriving in Paris on March 16, 1940; Pascal Pia helped him find a job as a typesetter, not a journalist. He spent all possible time writing. After Paris-Soir began publishing in Lyon, Camus moved there, leaving drafts of his manuscript in a Parisian hotel that did not keep them. When his divorce from Hié was finalized, Francine arrived in France for their marriage, on December 3, 1940. Camus was dismissed from the newspaper at the end of 1940, and the couple returned to Oran where his life was difficult. Francine had to take [End Page 174] care of him when he faced a relapse of tuberculosis. There were anti-Jewish measures; all native Algerians were no longer French citizens. Camus could only do odd jobs, but he finished Le mythe de Sisyphe, as he noted on February 21, 1941. Kaplan quotes letters from many people whom Camus knew. Especially important is the correspondence with Jean Grenier, Camus's professor from Algiers, whom Kaplan thinks is "fussy" (26) and whom she judges unable to help the young man in his initial worries about his ability as a writer. Pascal Pia, the journalist, however, was always encouraging. He had earlier introduced Camus to André Malraux, whose enthusiastic letters were another influence on Camus's state of mind. When he had been working for Alger-Républicain, Camus had used details of the trials he observed (which were often of considerable interest) as background for what he now realized would be a novel. Kaplan describes herself as looking over Camus's shoulder...

Solidarity and the Absurd in Kamel Daoud's Meursault, contre-enquête

This article examines Kamel Daoud’s treatment of solidarity and the absurd in Meursault, contre-enquête and posits that the question of how to live in solidarity with others is central to the novel, although the word ‘solidarity’ never appears in it. After recalling Camus’s discussion of the absurd in Le Mythe de Sisyphe and of solidarity in L’Homme révolté, the article examines the manner in which Haroun, Daoud’s narrator and the brother of the Arab Meursault killed in L’Étranger, reveals his own failures of solidarity. He justly criticizes Meursault for privileging his confrontation with the absurd over the death of the Arab he did not even name, but Haroun too has killed. Haroun has, however, a greater understanding of solidarity than his fellows: he at least recognizes that murder is significant. He thus joins Meursault as an unworthy prophet who proclaims the absurd while surrounded by people who flee from it—and proclaiming the absurd can be a gesture of solidarity when one speaks for others, as Haroun speaks for his brother Moussa. Daoud’s novel reminds us that there are no final answers telling us how to live in solidarity with others and that we must do so all the same.

Brave genius: a scientist, a philosopher, and their daring adventures from the French resistance to the Nobel Prize

I really thank Sean Carroll, himself a scientist and educator, for his accessible and scholarly book, dealing with an intellectually unique interaction of two exceptional individuals during 30 years of the 20th century: the philosopher and writer Albert Camus and the biologist Jacques Monod. All readers, whatever their main interest in politics, history, or contemporary evolution of metaphysical concepts and bioscience research, may learn a lot and enjoy this fascinating and passionate account of a critical period when ideologies, biological discoveries, and their occasional confrontations evolved so much. My invitation to review this book for The FASEB Journal is warmly appreciated. Perhaps I was asked, because when I was very young—before I became a research physician and biochemist —I was a member of the French Resistance in the Francs Tireurs et Partisans Francais (FTPF), a fighting organization. Therefore, I had the privilege to be directly in contact with several matters that Camus and Monod approached and greatly influenced but not to say decisively. As Monod and Camus were born in 1910 and 1913, respectively, the book deals with most important political and economical aspects of the 20th century: the development of Communism and Fascism, the second World War, and the following years, featuring the violent and complex relationship between the French and German people. After World War II, audacious French moralists and philosophers, such as Albert Camus, were at the forefront of their field, as were great scientists, particularly those who, like Jacques Monod, revolutionized the basic foundations of biology. They publicly elaborated and discussed revolutionary concepts. Each published a book, creating an intellectual breakthrough: Le mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus) by Camus and Le hasard et la necessite (Chance and Necessity) by Monod; these books are introduced to us by Sean Carroll. Camus and Monod, both French and active resistants during the German occupation of France, met after the war; they became mutual admirers of each other and sincere friends. Monod had to work experimentally for many years before being able to speak openly on the significance of his biological discoveries with reference to questions and suggestions of Camus (such as “What is worth living for?”). Monod was the son of an American mother, and his father was a free-thinking painter. Jacques, a cellist and aspiring conductor, was encouraged to be a professional musician and did not make a definitive choice of career in biology until he completed his Ph.D., even though he had visited the laboratory of the pioneer geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan. He married a specialist of Asian art, Odette Bruhland, and they had twin sons, born in 1939. Monod had not yet been conscripted into the army (a consequence of childhood poliomyelitis), but he managed to support the regular armed forces. After the Armistice, he was demobilized in July 1940, and in Paris with his family, he finished his doctorate on bacterial growth. Opportunities for obtaining food were difficult, but more importantly, the collaborationist French government of Vichy developed an antiSemitic policy (Statut des Juifs, or Status of Jews), and so, Monod sent his family to a suburban area. He himself became rapidly very active in the nascent Resistance, writing and distributing clandestine publications. Progressively, he played an important role in underground networks and was promoted to the

A logical redeemer: Kirillov in Dostoievskii’s Demons

The engineer Kirillov, an important character in Dostoievskii’s Demons, has provoked considerable critical disagreement. In a well-known section of Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Albert Camus describes him as a figure who expresses the theme of ‘logical suicide’ with ‘the most admirable range and depth’. Other commentators have not always been so sanguine, some dismissing Kirillov as a madman in the grip of a mad theory. While dissenting from Camus’s analysis in certain respects, this article offers an interpretation consistent with his basic argument. Kirillov’s decision to commit suicide is based on a simple, if implacable, logic which convinces him that as long as he kills himself for the right reason, his death will be an act of redemption for all humanity. Kirillov is a wholly ‘metaphysical’ character – one of the earliest in modern fiction – whose ambition to become the ‘man-god’ is explored by Dostoievskii to its ultimate, desolate conclusion.

Sisyphus and Caesar: the opposition of Greece and Rome in Albert Camus' absurd cycle

Albert Camus’ reception of the ancient world is a subject deserving greater consideration than it has currently received. This article will discuss the importance of Greece and Rome in Camus’ Absurd cycle and its implications in the context of colonial Algeria. I begin with an analysis of Camus’ instinctive polarization of Greece and Rome (Greece as artistic and democratic; Rome as violent and imperialist), before arguing that this antithesis was vital in two of Camus’ most lasting creations: Sisyphus and Caligula. I will examine both the complex use of Greek myth in Le Mythe de Sisyphe and Camus’ contrasting representation of Roman society in the play Caligula. These receptions will then be situated within the political and literary contexts in which Camus wrote, particularly that of colonialism. Camus’ reception of the ancient world reveals much about his complex relationship with Algeria. Even as he rejected the Latinizing tropes of previous colonial writers, his own concept of Graeco-Mediterraneanism was equally predicated on Eurocentric discourses. Camus’ vision of the ancient world goes to the heart of understanding not only his Absurd literature but ultimately, I suggest, reveals a writer at a crossroads between Europe and Africa.

History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewFull AccessHistory of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western CultureAndrew Edmund Slaby, Ph.D., M.D.Andrew Edmund SlabySearch for more papers by this author, Ph.D., M.D.Published Online:1 Dec 1999https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.50.12.1643AboutSectionsView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Albert Camus stated in Le Mythe de Sisyphe in 1942 that there is but one truly serious philosophical problem—suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy, or, as Shakespeare said through Hamlet, "To be, or not to be: that is the question."So too George Minois traces the evolution of philosophical thought on self-inflicted death over three millennia. The power of the work is that the data supplied provide insights not only for philosophers but also for psychiatrists, economists, historians, epidemiologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars interested in the multiple factors that impact the decision to die by one's own hand and ways in which such deaths may be reported. Although genetic factors determining impulsivity and manifestation of psychiatric illness clearly play a critical role, other factors impact the force of these variables.Ironically, we learn that while many philosophers of the absurd reflected on suicide, most not only did not die by suicide but also rejected the idea of voluntary death. Camus and Voltaire rejected suicide. Jean Paul Sartre felt it was abandonment of all liberty, and Karl Jaspers "the absolute action that transgresses life." Others, less cynical, often did not—for example, Seneca and Pythagoras.The apparent suicide of Socrates, we learn, is debatable. Politically disenfranchised, he had no choice but to be killed or swallow hemlock because he refused to flee. The author also poignantly notes that with rare exceptions, such as Johannes Robeck, authors of treatises on suicide seldom died by it. They did not write apologies for voluntary death, but rather sought to demonstrate that when life becomes physically or mentally too burdensome, suicide may be a legitimate option.The author argues cogently that while those who have historically proclaimed the absurdity of the world most vocally are not the ones most likely to leave it voluntarily, those who have committed suicide appear to be those most attracted to worldly values. In some ways this phenomenon is a historical validation of a tenet of cognitive therapy, or, as Bertrand Russell once said, it is not the experience that happens to you, but what you do with the experience that happens to you.Statistics about suicide, we find, have been obfuscated not only by religious and political norms but also by the means available by social class to die. For instance, in the Middle Ages, suicide appears to have been rampant among commoners, but not among nobles, who had means of self-homicide. Craftsmen and women had to seek rivers or the rope to die, while the gentry could expose themselves to death through crusades, war, hunting, and tourneys, which allowed a sublimation of suicidal tendencies. Hence, suicides historically have been reported as greater among peasants.While ecclesiastical suicides were handled discretely, factors such as a relatively privileged status and strong group cohesion limited priestly suicides. Early Christians glorified self-sacrifice, and many who were unhappy with life's lot sought voluntary self-sacrifice through martyrdom that carried with it the promise of heaven.Minois reveals some amazing contradictions among leading Christian thinkers. St. Thomas More did not dare to overtly challenge the moral prohibitions of the Catholic Church, but in 1515, in fiction, he stated that when the natives of the ideal island realm of Utopia were stricken with painful and incurable illness, they could take their own lives.Finally, the development of capitalism appears to have made a sizable contribution to the rise of the suicide rate. The loss of the solidarity systems of the guilds and corporations coupled with the insecurity and instability that are an integral part of capitalism—which is founded on individualism, competition, and acceptance of risk—left individuals to face financial ruin alone.In the end, despite all, the author concludes, in discussing the move from philosophical suicide among the ancients to romantic suicides of the 19th century, that suicide occurred where it had always occurred— "in huts and shops, and always for the same reason, suffering." One finds support from this scholarly volume for what clinicians have always known to be true. People who die by suicide do not want to die. They simply want to end the pain. If there were another way to end the pain, they would choose it.Dr. Slaby is clinical professor of psychiatry at New York University and New York Medical College.by George Minois (1995); translated from the French by Lydia G. Cochrane; Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, 387 pages, $35.95 FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 50Issue 12 December 1999Pages 1643-1644 Metrics History Published online 1 December 1999 Published in print 1 December 1999

SISYPHUS HAPPY: Beckett beyond the Absurd

Relatively early in Beckett's career, his works came to be associated with and the likes of Kafka, Sartre, and Camus. In 1951, for example, the French reviewer Jean Pouillon called Molloy novel of the absurd, to use a word which has become convenient [...].2 And, of course, Martin Esslin in 1961 launched Beckett as his flagship figure in his book The Theatre of the Absurd. As late as 1971, David Hesla in The Shape of Chaos claimed that Beckett was stuck in the domain of the absurd. Said Hesla about Beckett's Watt and the work to follow: From this time forward, Beckett must and will conduct the art of narrative fiction on premises which will not permit him to escape from the ascesis imposed by the irrationality of (Hesla, 84). However, I propose that in the Beckett ceuvre there is life beyond the absurd, certainly in certain works of the 70's and 80's. To establish a measure for the meaning of the absurd, I recall here Albert Camus' seminal essays on absurdity in The Myth of Sisyphus (Le mythe de Sisyphe, 1942), as well as certain remarks on the absurd by Eugene Ionesco. For Camus the two major factors of absurd existence are estrangement and the spectre of death:

Camus's Curious Humanism or the Intellectual in Exile

Camus’s Curious Humanism or the Intellectual in Exile Lawrence D. Kritzman (bio) In the Company of Critics the social theorist Michael Walzer characterized Albert Camus as “a man of principle, a good man . . . in a bad time.” 1 From his critique of Marxism in L’homme révolté (1951) to his multiple anxieties concerning the destiny of Algeria, Camus opted for an ethic embedded in a humanism distinguished by an generalized sense of justice and a universal commitment to human value. 2 At the core of Camus’s critical approach was the politics of love and the classical ethos of measure that substituted reflective action and understanding for absolute values. Within that perspective Camus’s moral imperative is the result of a critical observation postulating the possibility of a world free from evil. Human choices, Camus believed, have a moral dimension that endowed them with ethical authority. In effect, the focus of moral concerns for Camus was not rooted in a legislative operation capable of generating both prescriptive and proscriptive behavior. Instead it was situated in the exercise of human judgment culminating in the formation of an “imagined community” whose sense of togetherness was based on a belief in harmony and justice with intuition functioning as the oracle of truth. 3 Accordingly, [End Page 550] as early as Le mythe de Sisyphe (1942) Camus suggests that judgment has consequences and individual political agency has implications that impact on the world. “Toutes les morales sont fondées sur l’idée qu’un acte a des conséquences qui le légitiment ou l’oblitèrent. Un esprit pénétré d’absurde juge seulement que ces suites doivent être considérées avec sérénité. Il est prêt à payer” (MS, 150). Starting with the presupposition that the scandal of human existence is the absurdity of death, Camus’s L’homme révolté condemns Marxist revolution and with it a critical epistemology based on an absolutism derived from the notion of totalization. On its publication in 1951 Camus’s essay made a deep impression on the ideological issues of the day and in a way ignited a debate concerning the value of what we today call the “metanarratives of liberation” and the possible dangers of moral absolutes. “Quand on veut unifier le monde entier au nom d’une théorie, il n’est pas d’autres voies que de rendre ce monde aussi décharné, aveugle et sourd que la théorie elle-même” (HR, 402–3). Motivating Camus’s critical vision is a desire to unequivocally dis-approve of terrorism while adhering to the Greek ethos of measure and finitude. “La révolution du XXe siècle a séparé arbitrairement, pour des fins démésurées de conquête, deux notions inséparables. La liberté absolue rallie la justice, la justice absolue nie la liberté. Pour être fécondes, les deux notions doivent trouver, l’une dans l’autre, leur limites” (HR, 694). As Camus sees it, the end of freedom and justice is paradoxically found in a commitment to the Marxist conception of history and as such justice and freedom have no future in that name. Yet if justice is an issue for Camus it is to be taken neither in the sense of right nor of law, but in the context of self-identification with human value. In criticizing the outcome of modern social revolutions Camus emphasized humankind’s possibility of engendering evil when rebellion assumes the power of God-like absolutism and degenerates into the contemporary reenactments of a Robespierre-like Reign of Terror. Beyond the missionary zeal that he associated with the legislators of historical materialism, Camus put forth an ethical stance whose underlying premise was that humans construct the world as it is and that goodness can only be realized if we reject the socio-political architects of absolute ideals. Camus’s cognizance of limits renders the legislative power of the post-enlightenment intellectual’s radical critique irrelevant to a certain extent. As a thinker somewhat before his time Camus attempts to demystify the philosophical technology of social thought in the name [End Page 551] of a more balanced...

The unity of existential philosophy and literature as revealed by Shestov's approach to Dostoevsky

Reading through the entry on existentialism in the Soviet Filosofskaja encik lopedija, one notes a conspicuous absence of Soviet thinkers.1 Nor should this be too surprising. Beginning with Kierkegaard, existential thought followed a line of development sparked by a negative reaction to Hegel, while Soviet thought, beginning with Marx, has largely been the product of a positive Hegelian influence. Subsequently, those philosophical questions which have been raised by Soviet thinkers in regard to literature have revolved around literature's ideological relationship to history, culture, society, revolution, and so on. From Lenin on, the Soviet philosophical interest in literature has always been from the point of view of the general, the universal, the multi tude, and not the single individual.2 The Filosofskaja enciklopedija does, however, name three Russian existen tial thinkers Dostoevsky, Shestov and Berdjaev whose presence in the history of Russian philosophy provides Soviet thought with a sharper outline. For it is here, particularly in Shestov, that we see a Russian reaction against Hegelian thinking; it is here that the single individual becomes the primary focal point for both the philosophical and literary modes of investigation. In his introduction to Shestov's Speculation and Revelation (Umozrenie i otkrovenie) Berdjaev tells us that Shestov was a man for whom philosophy was a matter of life and death, for whom human tragedy, terror, and suffering form the starting point of philosophy.3 Camus describes Shestov in Le mythe de Sisyphe by saying,

Camus' Attitude to Dostoevsky's Kirilov and the Impact of the Engineer's Ideas on Camus' Early Work.

The “ébradement” which Camus claims to have experienced when reading the work of Dostoevsky has frequently attracted the atten‐tion of scholars. The present article endeavours to assess the precise impact of Dostoevsky's hero Kirilovon the development and crystallisation of Camus' early thought. Kirilov, the philosopher‐engineer of Les Posseédés seems to have been the Dostoevskian character who most interested the Camus of the thirties and early forties and it can be argued that he provided Camus with not only a valuable point of reference in Le Mythe de Sisyphe but with a number of ideas and attitudes which may have played an important role in the elaboration of his thought from L' Envers et L' Endroit to the essay on the Absurd. There are quite striking parallels between Camus' attitudes to death, courage, lucidity, authenticity and suicide, and those embodied in Dostoevsky's hero. Moreover, the moments of ecstatic happiness which lead Kirilov to utter the words “Tout est bien” (and which for Dostoevsky represent moments of religious mysticism emanating from Kirilov's epilepsy), seem to possess a most interesting affinity withthe experiences of union, harmony and timelessness which Camus describes in Noces and which inform his thinking at the time of L' Etranger and Le Mythe de Sisyphe.

Imprisonment in Camus’ “Modern Tragedies”: Les Justes, Requiem pour une nonne, Le Malentendu

tragedie est un ou bute, ou se heurte. Au theâtre, il faut qu'elle naisse et meure dans l'espace restreint de scene.l Camus made this observation in 1939, but the expression monde clos appears throughout the Carnets, in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, in the essay Kafka and in L'Homme Revolte. Furthermore, monde clos is only one example of a whole category of images which permeate Camus' work. Abstract metaphors such as l'univers ferme, la voie sans issue, and la prison de l'histoire play an important part in Le Mythe de Sisyphe and in L'Homme Revolte. The figures which Camus uses in his essays are in a sense complemented by the numerous settings of closed worlds in his novels and plays: the prison cells in L'Etranger, Les Justes and Requiem pour une nonne, the inn of Le Malentendu, rooms in Femme Adultere, L'Hote, and Jonas, and the cities of Oran and Amsterdam in La Veste and La Chute. Il y a cent cinquante ans, declares the protagonist of the latter novel, on s'attendrissait sur les lacs et les forets. Aujourd'hui, nous avons le lyrisme cellulaire. The dualism of Camus' temperament balances this confinement imagery with expressions of joy in nature sea, sun and earth. One could roughly translate Camus' confinement imagery as diverse manifestations of the absurd and his nature imagery as representations of freedom or happiness. Yet the best images of both types are not only more complex (like all successful images); they are often paradoxical. Liberty is at times inseparable from confinement; seas and prisons some-

Pierre Reverdy, Poet of Nausea

The image of collapse or implosion which dominates Reverdy's poetry and haunts the climactic section of La Nausée is glossed in the concluding pages of Sartre's novel and in various parts of Camus's Le Mythe de Sisyphe. All three men focus on the experience of the absurd, on the malaise that accompanies the fleeting awareness of the contingency of all things, a feeling that is often triggered by the perception of abrupt decline or dissolution. This existentialist malaise or nausea, which terrifies Sartre's hero Roquentin, is in fact the very stuff of Reverdy's poetry and as such it demoralizes his readers. At the same time, however, Reverdy's poetry is deeply satisfying. Its ultimate appeal can perhaps best be understood in the light of Roquentin's final decision to face up to his nausea and to purify it in a lasting form such as a work of literature. It is precisely this solution to the problem of the absurd that Reveredy had intuited at the beginning of his career in 1915. Indeed, his life's work as a poet amounts to a sustained effort to confront the absurd and neutralize it in poetic form.

The Stranger's Secrets

To do justice to Camus requires an indifference to literary fashions in the light of which Camus is likely to appear quaintly archaic, as well as to the appeal of a life and a work pervaded by an apparently unassailable integrity. Tough-mindedness would seem to demand that we ignore those claims to sympathy which made Camus something of a moral hero to many of his readers: the struggle against poverty and illness, Camus' tortured conscience, his suspicion of political theories and positions which might promote or justify human suffering, the simplicity and intensity of his attachment to life, and the accident which brutally vindicated his impressive and useless protest against the unacceptable fact of death. Camus' work has profited from the quietly glamorous nobility of his life. More than that: his urgently sincere tone has obscured the presence in his work of some of the habits of thought and of feeling against which he argued most eloquently. He is a comparatively uninteresting writer, and the quality of his achievement is, for me, all the more vitiated by an indulgence in abstraction, a secretly prideful reticence of feeling, and an easy cynicism, all of which he constantly, and rightly, attacked for their dehumanizing effects on life. I find the moraliste of Le Mythe de Sisyphe and L'Homme revolte a dull and vague thinker; as a playwright, Camus strikes me not only as less inventive or radical than Beckett, Arrabal, and even Ionesco, but also, within the conventions of a more traditional theater of linguistic and psychological coherence, less successful than the Sartre of Huis clos and Les Sequestres d'Altona. Camus' fiction-especially L'Etranger and a couple of stories in L'Exil et le royaume-is another matter, however, and L'Etranger deserves to be discussed as an impressive if flawed exercise in a kind of writing promoted by the New Novelists of the 1950s to the dignity, and occasionally narrow rigor, of doctrine. The doctrine is not Camus', but the refreshed novelistic techniques we find in L'Etranger could nonetheless be thought of as an example and an inspiration for what has now become an excessively theoretical determination to re-structure the relation between language and psychology in fiction.

Poglądy etyczne Alberta Camusa

The aim of the paper here presented is to reconstruct the ethical views of Camus and to provide an account of their evolution. Wherever Camus’s axiological convictions closely correspond to his philosophical cogitations, and where the latter appear to present evidence of Camus’s efforts to find theoretical ground for the former the article also supplies information concerning the philosophical ideas of the author of ‚Le Mythe de Sisyphe’.

Journey to Consciousness: The Symbolic Pattern of Camus's L'Etranger

Although a good deal has been written about L'Etranger in the light of Camus's philosophic insights in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, the verbal similarities between these two works have been used only sporadically in interpreting the novel. Carl Viggiani, whose essay on L'Etranger appears to have dealt most fully with the symbolic undercurrent of the novel and Meursault's relation to Sisyphus has concentrated almost solely on detached archetypal motifs while largely neglecting any sort of progressive or “novelistic” development of the protagonist as he moves from his mother's funeral to his final jail cell. I propose to demonstrate such a consistent development by viewing Meursault's adventure as a parable of mental awakening or coming to consciousness which corresponds in detailed thematic and imagistic ways to the adventure of the mind in Le Mythe de Sisyphe.