The Myth Of Sisyphus
An Absurd Reasoning
Absurdity and Suicide
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that
is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to
answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—
whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind
has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are
games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims,
that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example,
you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede
the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call
for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.
If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent
than that, I reply that one judges by the actions it entails. I have
never seen anyone die for the ontologi-cal argument. Galileo, who
held a scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the
greatest ease as soon as it endangered his life. In a certain sense, he
did right.[1] That truth was not worth the stake. Whether the earth
or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of profound
indifference. To tell the truth, it is a futile question. On the other
hand, I see many people die because they judge that life is not
worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas
or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a
reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore
conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.
How to answer it? On all essential problems (I mean thereby those
that run the risk of leading to death or those that intensify the
passion of living) there are probably but two methods of thought:
the method of La Palisse and the method of Don Quixote. Solely
the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve
simultaneously emotion and lucidity. In a subject at once so
humble and so heavy with emotion, the learned and classical
dialectic must yield, one can see, to a more modest attitude of mind
deriving at one and the same time from common sense and
understanding.
Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social
phenomenon. On the contrary, we are concerned here, at the outset,
with the relationship between individual thought and suicide. An
act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great
work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. One evening he
pulls the trigger or jumps. Of an apartment-building manager who
had killed himself I was told that he had lost his daughter five
years before, that be bad changed greatly since, and that that
experience had “undermined” him. A more exact word cannot be
imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.
Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm
is in man’s heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow
and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face
of existence to flight from light.
There are many causes for a suicide, and generally the most
obvious ones were not the most powerful. Rarely is suicide
committed (yet the hypothesis is not excluded) through reflection.
What sets off the crisis is almost always unverifiable. Newspapers
often speak of “personal sorrows” or of “incurable illness.” These
explanations are plausible. But one would have to know whether a
friend of the desperate man had not that very day addressed him
indifferently. He is the guilty one. For that is enough to precipitate
all the rancors and all the boredom still in suspension.[2]
But if it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when
the mind opted for death, it is easier to deduce from the act itself
the consequences it implies. In a sense, and as in melodrama,
killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is
too much for you or that you do not understand it. Let’s not go too
far in such analogies, however, but rather return to everyday
words. It is merely confessing that that “is not worth the trouble.”
Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures
commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is
habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even
instinc—
tively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any
profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily
agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.
What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind
of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even
with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a
universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an
alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived
of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This
divorce between man and this life, the actor and his setting, is
properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men having thought
of their own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation,
that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the
longing for death.
The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between
the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a
solution to the absurd. The principle can be established that for a
man who does not cheat, what he believes to be true must
determine his action. Belief in the absurdity of existence must then
dictate his conduct. It is legitimate to wonder, clearly and without
false pathos, whether a conclusion of this importance requires
forsaking as rapidly as possible an incomprehensible condition. I
am speaking, of course, of men inclined to be in harmony with
themselves.
Stated clearly, this problem may seem both simple and
insoluble. But it is wrongly assumed that simple questions involve
answers that are no less simple and that evidence implies evidence.
A priori and reversing the terms of the problem, just as one does or
does not kill oneself, it seems that there are but two philosophical
solutions, either yes or no. This would be too easy. But allowance
must be made for those who, without concluding, continue
questioning. Here I am only slightly indulging in irony: this is the
majority. I notice also that those who answer “no” act as if they
thought “yes.” As a matter of fact, if I accept the Nietzschean
criterion, they think “yes” in one way or another. On the other
hand, it often happens that those who commit suicide were assured
of the meaning of life. These contradictions are constant. It may
even be said that they have never been so keen as on this point
where, on the contrary, logic seems so desirable. It is a
commonplace to compare philosophical theories and the behavior
of those who profess them. But it must be said that of the thinkers
who refused a meaning to life none except Kirilov who belongs to
literature, Peregrinos who is born of legend,[3] and Jules Lequier
who belongs to hypothesis, admitted his logic to the point of
refusing that life. Schopenhauer is often cited, as a fit subject for
laughter, because he praised suicide while seated at a well-set
table. This is no subject for joking. That way of not taking the
tragic seriously is not so grievous, but it helps to judge a man.
In the face of such contradictions and obscurities must we
conclude that there is no relationship between the opinion one has
about life and the act one commits to leave it? Let us not
exaggerate in this direction. In a man’s attachment to life there is
something stronger than all the ills in the world. The body’s
judgment is as good as the mind’s and the body shrinks from
annihilation. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the
habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death,
the body maintains its irreparable lead. In short, the essence of that
contradiction lies in what I shall call the act of eluding because it is
both less and more than diversion in the Pascalian sense. Eluding is
the invariable game. The typical act of eluding, the fatal evasion
that constitutes the third theme of this essay, is hope. Hope of
another life one must “deserve” or trickery of those who live not
for life itself but for some great idea that will transcend it, refine it,
give it a meaning, and betray it.
Thus everything contributes to spreading confusion.
Hitherto, and it has not been wasted effort, people have played
on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning
to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In
truth, there is no necessary common measure between these two
judgments. One merely has to refuse to he misled by the
confusions, divorces, and inconsistencies previously pointed out.
One must brush everything aside and go straight to the real
problem. One kills oneself because life is not worth living, that is
certainly a truth yet an unfruitful one because it is a truism. But
does that insult to existence, that flat denial in which it is plunged
come from the fact that it has no meaning? Does its absurdity
require one to escape it through hope or suicide—this is what must
be clarified, hunted down, and elucidated while brushing aside all
the rest. Does the Absurd dictate death? This problem must be
given priority over others, outside all methods of thought and all
exercises of the disinterested mind. Shades of meaning,
contradictions, the psychology that an “objective” mind can always
introduce into all problems have no place in this pursuit and this
passion. It calls simply for an unjust—in other words, logical—
thought. That is not easy. It is always easy to be logical. It is
almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end. Men who die by
their own hand consequently follow to its conclusion their
emotional inclination. Reflection on suicide gives me an
opportunity to raise the only problem to interest me: is there a logic
to the point of death? I cannot know unless I pursue, without
reckless passion, in the sole light of evidence, the reasoning of
which I am here suggesting the source. This is what I call an
absurd reasoning. Many have begun it. I do not yet know whether
or not they kept to it.
When Karl Jaspers, revealing the impossibility of constituting
the world as a unity, exclaims: “This limitation leads me to myself,
where I can no longer withdraw behind an objective point of view
that I am merely representing, where neither I myself nor the
existence of others can any longer become an object for me,” he is
evoking after many others those waterless deserts where thought
reaches its confines. After many others, yes indeed, but how eager
they were to get out of them! At that last crossroad where thought
hesitates, many men have arrived and even some of the humblest.
They then abdicated what was most precious to them, their life.
Others, princes of the mind, abdicated likewise, but they initiated
the suicide of their thought in its purest revolt. The real effort is to
stay there, rather, in so far as that is possible, and to examine
closely the odd vegetation of those distant regions. Tenacity and
acumen are privileged spectators of this inhuman show in which
absurdity, hope, and death carry on their dialogue. The mind can
then analyze the figures of that elementary yet subtle dance before
illustrating them and reliving them itself.
Absurd Walls
Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they
are conscious of saying. The regularity of an impulse or a repulsion
in a soul is encountered again in habits of doing or thinking, is
reproduced in consequences of which the soul itself knows
nothing. Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid
or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in
which they recognize their climate. There is a universe of jealousy,
of ambition, of selfishness, or of generosity. A universe in other
words, a metaphysic and an attitude of mind. What is true of
already specialized feelings will be even more so of emotions
basically as indeterminate, simultaneously as vague and as
“definite,” as remote and as “present” as those furnished us by
beauty or aroused by absurdity.
At any streetcorner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man
in the face. As it is, in its distressing nudity, in its light without
effulgence, it is elusive. But that very difficulty deserves reflection.
It is probably true that a man remains forever unknown to us and
that there is in him something irreducible that escapes us. But
practically I know men and recognize them by their behavior, by
the totality of their deeds, by the consequences caused in life by
their presence. Likewise, all those irrational feelings which offer
no purchase to analysis. I can define them practically, appreciate
them practically, by gathering together the sum of their
consequences in the domain of the intelligence, by seizing and
noting all their aspects, by outlining their universe. It is certain that
apparently, though I have seen the same actor a hundred times, I
shall not for that reason know him any better personally. Yet if I
add up the heroes he has personified and if I say that I know him a
little better at the hundredth character counted off, this will be felt
to contain an element of truth. For this apparent paradox is also an
apologue. There is a moral to it. It teaches that a man defines
himself by his make-believe as well as by his sincere impulses.
There is thus a lower key of feelings, inaccessible in the heart but
partially disclosed by the acts they imply and the attitudes of mind
they assume. It is clear that in this way I am defining a method.
But it is also evident that that method is one of analysis and not of
knowledge. For methods imply metaphysics; unconsciously they
disclose conclusions that they often claim not to know yet.
Similarly, the last pages of a book are already contained in the first
pages. Such a link is inevitable. The method defined here
acknowledges the feeling that all true knowledge is impossible.
Solely appearances can be enumerated and the climate make itself
felt.
Perhaps we shall be able to overtake that elusive feeling of
absurdity in the different but closely related worlds of intelligence,
of the art of living, or of art itself. The climate of absurdity is in the
beginning. The end is the absurd universe and that attitude of mind
which lights the world with its true colors to bring out the
privileged and implacable visage which that attitude has discerned
in it.
* * *
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous
beginning. Great works are often born on a street-corner or in a
restaurant’s revolving door. So it is with absurdity. The absurd
world more than others derives its nobility from that abject birth.
In certain situations, replying “nothing” when asked what one is
thinking about may be pretense in a man. Those who are loved are
well aware of this. But if that reply is sincere, if it symbolizes that
odd state of soul in which the void be-comes eloquent, in which
the chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly
seeks the link that will connect it again, then it is as it were the first
sign of absurdity.
It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four
hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of
work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday
Friday and Saturday accord—
ing to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of
the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in
that weariness tinged with amazement. “Begins”—this is
important. Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical
life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of
consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what
follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is
the definitive awakening. At the end of the awakening comes, in
time, the consequence: suicide or recovery. In itself weariness has
something sickening about it. Here, I must conclude that it is good.
For everything be-gins with consciousness and nothing is worth
anything except through it. There is nothing original about these
remarks. But they are obvious; that is enough for a while, during a
sketchy reconnaissance in the origins of the absurd. Mere
“anxiety,” as Heidegger says, is at the source of everything.
Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time
carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it.
We live on the future: “tomorrow,” “later on,” “when you have
made your way,” “you will understand when you are old enough.”
Such irrelevan-cies are wonderful, for, after all, it’s a matter of
dying. Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is
thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates
himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that
he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having
to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that
seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was
longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it.
That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.[4]
A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the
world is “dense,” sensing to what a degree a stone is foreign and
irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can
negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and
these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this
very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed
them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive
hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia, for a
second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have
understood in it solely the images and designs that we had at-
tributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to
make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes
itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes again
what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us. Just as there are days
when under the familial face of a woman, we see as a stranger her
we had loved months or years ago, perhaps we shall come even to
desire what suddenly leaves us so alone. But the time has not yet
come. Just one thing: that denseness and that strangeness of the
world is the absurd.
Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity,
the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless
pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is
talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear
him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder
why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man’s own
inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we
are, this “nausea,” as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd.
Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a
mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our
own photographs is also the absurd.
I come at last to death and to the attitude we have toward it. On
this point everything has been said and it is only proper to avoid
pathos. Yet one will never be sufficiently surprised that everyone
lives as if no one “knew.” This is because in reality there is no
experience of death. Properly speaking, nothing has been
experienced but what has been lived and made conscious. Here, it
is barely possible to speak of the experience of others’ deaths. It is
a substitute, an illusion, and it never quite convinces us. That
melancholy convention cannot be persuasive. The horror comes in
reality from the mathematical aspect of the event. If time frightens
us, this is because it works out the problem and the solution comes
afterward. All the pretty speeches about the soul will have their
contrary convincingly proved, at least for a time. From this inert
body on which a slap makes no mark the soul has disappeared.
This elementary and definitive aspect of the adventure constitutes
the absurd feeling. Under the fatal lighting of that destiny, its
uselessness becomes evident. No code of ethics and no effort are
justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that
command our condition.
Let me repeat: all this has been said over and over. I am
limiting myself here to making a rapid classification and to
pointing out these obvious themes. They run through all literatures
and all philosophies. Everyday conversation feeds on them. There
is no question of reinventing them. But it is essential to be sure of
these facts in order to be able to question oneself subsequently on
the primordial question. I am interested let me repeat again—not
go much in absurd discoveries as in their consequences. If one is
assured of these facts, what is one to conclude, how far is one to go
to elude nothing? Is one to die voluntarily or to hope in spite of
everything? Beforehand, it is necessary to take the same rapid
inventory on the plane of the intelligence.
***
The mind’s first step is to distinguish what is true from what is
false. However, as soon as thought reflects on itself, what it first
discovers is a contradiction. Useless to strive to be convincing in
this case. Over the centuries no one has furnished a clearer and
more elegant demonstration of the business than Aristotle: “The
often ridiculed consequence of these opinions is that they destroy
themselves. For by asserting that all is true we assert the truth of
the contrary assertion and consequently the falsity of our own
thesis (for the contrary assertion does not admit that it can be true).
And if one says that all is false, that assertion is itself false. If we
declare that solely the assertion opposed to ours is false or else that
solely ours is not false, we are nevertheless forced to admit an
infinite number of true or false judgments. For the one who
expresses a true assertion proclaims simultaneously that it is true,
and so on ad infinitum.”
This vicious circle is but the first of a series in which the mind
that studies itself gets lost in a giddy whirling. The very simplicity
of these paradoxes makes them irreducible. Whatever may be the
plays on words and the acrobatics of logic, to understand is, above
all, to unify. The mind’s deepest desire, even in its most elaborate
operations, parallels man’s unconscious feeling in the face of his
universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.
Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human,
stamping it with his seal. The cat’s universe is not the universe of
the anthill. The truism “All thought is anthropomorphic” has no
other meaning. Likewise, the mind that aims to understand reality
can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought.
If man realized that the universe like him can love and suffer, he
would be reconciled. If thought discovered in the shimmering
mirrors of phenomena eternal relations capable of summing them
up and summing themselves up in a single principle, then would be
seen an intellectual joy of which the myth of the blessed would be
but a ridiculous imitation. That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for
the absolute illustrates the essential impulse of the human drama.
But the fact of that nostalgia’s existence does not imply that it is to
be immediately satisfied. For if, bridging the gulf that separates
desire from conquest, we assert with Parmenides the reality of the
One (whatever it may be), we fall into the ridiculous contradiction
of a mind that asserts total unity and proves by its very assertion its
own difference and the diversity it claimed to resolve. This other
vicious circle is enough to stifle our hopes.
These are again truisms. I shall again repeat that they are not
interesting in themselves but in the consequences that can be
deduced from them. I know another truism: it tells me that man is
mortal. One can nevertheless count the minds that have deduced
the extreme conclusions from it. It is essential to consider as a
constant point of reference in this essay the regular hiatus between
what we fancy we know and what we really know, practical assent
and simulated ignorance which allows us to live with ideas which,
if we truly put them to the test, ought to upset our whole life. Faced
with this inextricable contradiction of the mind, we shall fully
grasp the divorce separating us from our own creations. So long as
the mind keeps silent in the motionless world of its hopes,
everything is reflected and arranged in the unity of its nostalgia.
But with its first move this world cracks and tumbles: an infinite
number of shimmering fragments is offered to the understanding.
We must despair of ever reconstructing the familiar, calm surface
which would give us peace of heart. After so many centuries of
inquiries, so many abdications among thinkers, we are well aware
that this is true for all our knowledge. With the exception of
professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If
the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it
would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its
impotences.
Of whom and of what indeed can I say: “I know that!” This
heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I
can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my
knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self
of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is
nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by
one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have
been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these
silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added
up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable
to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the
content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled.
Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic,
there are truths but no truth. Socrates’”Know thyself” has as much
value as the “Be virtuous” of our confessionals. They reveal a
nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile
exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only in precisely so
far as they are approximate.
And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and
I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain
evenings when the heart relaxes—how shall I negate this world
whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth
will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You
describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its
laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You
take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage
you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be
reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the
electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you
tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons
gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an
image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall
never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have
already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me
everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in
metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need
had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand
of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have
returned to my beginning. I realize that if through science I can
seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that,
apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with my
finger, I should not know any more. And you give me the choice
between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and
hypotheses that claim to teach me but that are not sure. A stranger
to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that
negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I
can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the
appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To
will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as
to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by
thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations.
Hence the intelligence, too, tells me in its way that this world is
absurd. Its contrary, blind reason, may well claim that all is clear; I
was waiting for proof and longing for it to be right. But despite so
many pretentious centuries and over the heads of so many eloquent
and persuasive men, I know that is false. On this plane, at least,
there is no happiness if I cannot know. That universal reason,
practical or ethical, that determinism, those categories that explain
everything are enough to make a decent man laugh. They have
nothing to do with the mind. They negate its profound truth, which
is to be enchained. In this unintelligible and limited universe,
man’s fate henceforth assumes its meaning. A horde of irrationals
has sprung up and surrounds him until his ultimate end. In his
recovered and now studied lucidity, the feeling of the absurd
becomes clear and definite. I said that the world is absurd, but I
was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that
can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this
irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the
human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world.
For the moment it is all that links them together. It binds them one
to the other as only hatred can weld two creatures together. This is
all I can discern clearly in this measureless universe where my
adventure takes place. Let us pause here. If I hold to be true that
absurdity that determines my relationship with life, if I become
thoroughly imbued with that sentiment that seizes me in face of the
world’s scenes, with that lucidity imposed on me by the pursuit of
a science, I must sacrifice everything to these certainties and I must
see them squarely to be able to maintain them. Above all, I must
adapt my behavior to them and pursue them in all their
consequences. I am speaking here of decency. But I want to know
beforehand if thought can live in those deserts.
* * *
I already know that thought has at least entered those deserts.
There it found its bread. There it realized that it had previously
been feeding on phantoms. It justified some of the most urgent
themes of human reflection.
From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a
passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live
with one’s passions, whether or not one can accept their law,
which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt—that is the
whole question. It is not, however, the one we shall ask just yet. It
stands at the center of this experience. There will be time to come
back to it. Let us recognize rather those themes and those impulses
born of the desert. It will suffice to enumerate them. They, too, are
known to all today. There have always been men to defend the
rights of the irrational. The tradition of what may be called
humiliated thought has never ceased to exist. The criticism of
rationalism has been made so often that it seems unnecessary to
begin again. Yet our epoch is marked by the rebirth of those
paradoxical systems that strive to trip up the reason as if truly it
had always forged ahead. But that is not so much a proof of the
efficacy of the reason as of the intensity of its hopes. On the plane
of history, such a constancy of two attitudes illustrates the essential
passion of man torn between his urge toward unity and the clear
vision he may have of the walls enclosing him.
But never perhaps at any time has the attack on reason been
more violent than in ours. Since Zarathustra’s great outburst: “By
chance it is the oldest nobility in the world. I conferred it upon all
things when I proclaimed that above them no eternal will was
exercised,” since Kierkegaard’s fatal illness, “that malady that
leads to death with nothing else following it,” the significant and
tormenting themes of absurd thought have followed one another.
Or at least, and this proviso is of capital importance, the themes of
irrational and religious thought. From Jaspers to Heidegger, from
Kierkegaard to Che-stov, from the phenomenologists to Scheler,
on the logical plane and on the moral plane, a whole family of
minds related by their nostalgia but opposed by their methods or
their aims, have persisted in blocking the royal road of reason and
in recovering the direct paths of truth. Here I assume these
thoughts to be known and lived. Whatever may be or have been
their ambitions, all started out from that indescribable universe
where contradiction, antinomy, anguish, or impotence reigns. And
what they have in common is precisely the themes so far disclosed.
For them, too, it must be said that what matters above all is the
conclusions they have managed to draw from those discoveries.
That matters so much that they must be examined separately. But
for the moment we are concerned solely with their discoveries and
their initial experiments. We are concerned solely with noting their
agreement. If it would be presumptuous to try to deal with their
philosophies, it is possible and sufficient in any case to bring out
the climate that is common to them.
Heidegger considers the human condition coldly and
announces that that existence is humiliated. The only reality is
“anxiety” in the whole chain of beings. To the man lost in the
world and its diversions this anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if
that fear becomes conscious of itself, it becomes anguish, the
perpetual climate of the lucid man “in whom existence is
concentrated.” This professor of philosophy writes without
trembling and in the most abstract language in the world that “the
finite and limited character of human existence is more primordial
than man himself.” His interest in Kant extends only to
recognizing the restricted character of his “pure Reason.” This is to
coincide at the end of his analyses that “the world can no longer
offer anything to the man filled with anguish.” This anxiety seems
to him so much more important than all the categories in the world
that he thinks and talks only of it. He enumerates its aspects:
boredom when the ordinary man strives to quash it in him and
benumb it; terror when the mind contemplates death. He too does
not separate consciousness from the absurd. The consciousness of
death is the call of anxiety and “existence then delivers itself its
own summons through the intermediary of consciousness.” It is the
very voice of anguish and it adjures existence “to return from its
loss in the anonymous They.” For him, too, one must not sleep, but
must keep alert until the consummation. He stands in this absurd
world and points out its ephemeral character. He seeks his way
amid these ruins.
Jaspers despairs of any ontology because he claims that we
have lost “naivete.” He knows that we can achieve nothing that
will transcend the fatal game of appearances. He knows that the
end of the mind is failure. He tarries over the spiritual adventures
revealed by history and pitilessly discloses the flaw in each system,
the illusion that saved everything, the preaching that hid nothing.
In this ravaged world in which the impossibility of knowledge is
established, in which everlasting nothingness seems the only
reality and irremediable despair seems the only attitude, he tries to
recover the Ariadne’s thread that leads to divine secrets.
Chestov, for his part, throughout a wonderfully monotonous
work, constantly straining toward the same truths, tirelessly
demonstrates that the tightest system, the most universal
rationalism always stumbles eventually on the irrational of human
thought. None of the ironic facts or ridiculous contradictions that
depreciate the reason escapes him. One thing only interests him,
and that is the exception, whether in the domain of the heart or of
the mind. Through the Dostoevskian experiences of the
condemned man, the exacerbated adventures of the Nietzschean
mind, Hamlet’s imprecations, or the bitter aristocracy of an Ibsen,
he tracks down, il-luminates, and magnifies the human revolt
against the irremediable. He refuses the reason its reasons and
begins to advance with some decision only in the middle of that
colorless desert where all certainties have become stones.
Of all perhaps the most engaging, Kierkegaard, for a part of his
existence at least, does more than discover the absurd, he lives it.
The man who writes: “The surest of stubborn silences is not to
hold one’s tongue but to talk” makes sure in the beginning that no
truth is absolute or can render satisfactory an existence that is
impossible in itself. Don Juan of the understanding, he multiplies
pseudonyms and contradictions, writes his Discourses of
Edification at the same time as that manual of cynical spiritualism,
The Diary of the Seducer. He refuses consolations, ethics, reliable
principles. As for that thorn he feels in his heart, he is careful not
to quiet its pain. On the contrary, he awakens it and, in the
desperate joy of a man crucified and happy to be so, he builds up
piece by piece—lucidity, refusal, make believe—a category of the
man possessed. That face both tender and sneering, those
pirouettes followed by a cry from the heart are the absurd spirit
itself grappling with a reality beyond its comprehension. And the
spiritual adventure that leads Kierkegaard to his beloved scandals
begins likewise in the chaos of an experience divested of its setting
and relegated to its original incoherence.
On quite a different plane, that of method, Husserl and the
phenomenologists, by their very extravagances, reinstate the world
in its diversity and deny the transcendent power of the reason. The
spiritual universe becomes incalculably enriched through them.
The rose petal, the milestone, or the human hand are as important
as love, desire, or the laws of gravity. Thinking ceases to be
unifying or making a semblance familiar in the guise of a major
principle. Thinking is learning all over again to see, to be attentive,
to focus consciousness; it is turning every idea and every image, in
the manner of Proust, into a privileged moment. What justifies
thought is its extreme consciousness. Though more positive than
Kierkegaard’s or Chestov’s, Husserl’s manner of proceeding, in
the beginning, nevertheless negates the classic method of the
reason, disappoints hope, opens to intuition and to the heart a
whole proliferation of phenomena, the wealth of which has about it
something inhuman. These paths lead to all sciences or to none.
This amounts to saying that in this case the means are more
important than the end. All that is involved is “an attitude for
understanding” and not a consolation. Let me repeat: in the
beginning, at very least.
How can one fail to feel the basic relationship of these minds!
How can one fail to see that they take their stand around a
privileged and bitter moment in which hope has no further place? I
want everything to be explained to me or nothing. And the reason
is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart. The mind aroused
by this insistence seeks and finds nothing but contradictions and
nonsense. What I fail to understand is nonsense. The world is
peopled with such irrationals. The world itself, whose single
meaning I do not understand, is but a vast irrational. If one could
only say just once: “This is clear,” all would be saved. But these
men vie with one another in proclaiming that nothing is clear, all is
chaos, that all man has is his lucidity and his definite knowledge of
the walls surrounding him.
All these experiences agree and confirm one another. The
mind, when it reaches its limits, must make a judgment and choose
its conclusions. This is where suicide and the reply stand. But I
wish to reverse the order of the inquiry and start out from the
intelligent adventure and come back to daily acts. The experiences
called to mind here were born in the desert that we must not leave
behind. At least it is essential to know how far they went. At this
point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He
feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The
absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and
the unreasonable silence of the world. This must not be forgotten.
This must be clung to because the whole consequence of a life can
depend on it. The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd
that is born of their encounter—these are the three characters in the
drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an
existence is capable.
Philosophical Suicide
The feeling of the absurd is not, for all that, the notion of the
absurd. It lays the foundations for it, and that is all. It is not limited
to that notion, except in the brief moment when it passes judgment
on the universe. Subsequently it has a chance of going further. It is
alive; in other words, it must die or else reverberate. So it is with
the themes we have gathered together. But there again what
interests me is not works or minds, criticism of which would call
for another form and another place, but the discovery of what their
conclusions have in common. Never, perhaps, have minds been so
different. And yet we recognize as identical the spiritual
landscapes in which they get under way. Likewise, despite such
dissimilar zones of knowledge, the cry that terminates their
itinerary rings out in the same way. It is evident that the thinkers
we have just recalled have a common climate.
To say that that climate is deadly scarcely amounts to playing
on words. Living under that stifling sky forces one to get away or
to stay. The important thing is to find out how people get away in
the first case and why people stay in the second case. This is how I
define the problem of suicide and the possible interest in the
conclusions of existential philosophy.
But first I want to detour from the direct path. Up to now we
have managed to circumscribe the absurd from the outside. One
can, however, wonder how much is clear in that notion and by
direct analysis try to discover its meaning on the one hand and, on
the other, the consequences it involves.
If I accuse an innocent man of a monstrous crime, if I tell a
virtuous man that he has coveted his own sister, he will reply that
this is absurd. His indignation has its comical aspect. But it also
has its fundamental reason. The virtuous man illustrates by that
reply the definitive antinomy existing between the deed I am
attributing to him and his lifelong principles. “It’s absurd” means
“It’s impossible” but also “It’s contradictory.” If I see a man armed
only with a sword attack a group of machine guns, I shall consider
his act to be absurd. But it is so solely by virtue of the
disproportion between his intention and the reality he will
encounter, of the contradiction I notice between his true strength
and the aim he has in view. Likewise we shall deem a verdict
absurd when we contrast it with the verdict the facts apparently
dictated. And, similarly, a demonstration by the absurd is achieved
by comparing the consequences of such a reasoning with the
logical reality one wants to set up. In all these cases, from the
simplest to the most complex, the magnitude of the absurdity will
be in direct ratio to the distance between the two terms of my
comparison. There are absurd marriages, challenges, rancors,
silences, wars, and even peace treaties. For each of them the
absurdity springs from a comparison. I am thus justified in saying
that the feeling of absurdity does not spring from the mere scrutiny
of a fact or an impression, but that it bursts from the comparison
between a bare fact and a certain reality, between an action and the
world that transcends it. The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies
in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their
confrontation.
In this particular case and on the plane of intelligence, I can
therefore say that the Absurd is not in man (if such a metaphor
could have a meaning) nor in the world, but in their presence
together. For the moment it is the only bond uniting them. If wish
to limit myself to facts, I know what man wants, I know what the
world offers him, and now I can say that I also know what links
them. I have no need to dig deeper. A single certainty is enough for
the seeker. He simply has to derive all the consequences from it.
The immediate consequence is also a rule of method. The odd
trinity brought to light in this way is certainly not a startling
discovery. But it resembles the data of experience in that it is both
infinitely simple and infinitely complicated. Its first distinguishing
feature in this regard is that it cannot be divided. To destroy one of
its terms is to destroy the whole. There can be no absurd outside
the human mind. Thus, like everything else, the absurd ends with
death. But there can be no absurd outside this world either. And it
is by this elementary criterion that I judge the notion of the absurd
to be essential and consider that it can stand as the first of my
truths. The rule of method alluded to above appears here. If I judge
that a thing is true, I must preserve it. If I attempt to solve a
problem, at least I must not by that very solution conjure away one
of the terms of the problem. For me the sole datum is the absurd.
The first and, after all, the only condition of my inquiry is to
preserve the very thing that crushes me, consequently to respect
what I consider essential in it. I have just defined it as a
confrontation and an unceasing struggle.
And carrying this absurd logic to its conclusion, I must admit
that that struggle implies a total absence of hope (which has
nothing to do with despair), a continual rejection (which must not
be confused with renunciation), and a conscious dissatisfaction
(which must not be compared to immature unrest). Everything that
destroys, conjures away, or exorcises these requirements (and, to
begin with, consent which overthrows divorce) ruins the absurd
and devaluates the attitude that may then be proposed. The absurd
has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to.
***
There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely,
that a man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted
them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something.
A man who has be-come conscious of the absurd is forever bound
to it. A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased
to belong to the future. That is natural. But it is just as natural that
he should strive to escape the universe of which he is the creator.
All the foregoing has significance only on account of this paradox.
Certain men, starting from a critique of rationalism, have admitted
the absurd climate. Nothing is more instructive in this regard than
to scrutinize the way in which they have elaborated their
consequences.
Now, to limit myself to existential philosophies, I see that all of
them without exception suggest escape. Through an odd reasoning,
starting out from the absurd over the ruins of reason, in a closed
universe limited to the human, they deify what crushes them and
find reason to hope in what impoverishes them. That forced hope is
religious in all of them. It deserves attention.
I shall merely analyze here as examples a few themes dear to
Chestov and Kierkegaard. But Jaspers will provide us, in
caricatural form, a typical example of this attitude. As a result the
rest will be clearer. He is left powerless to realize the transcendent,
incapab le of plumbing the depth of experience, and conscious of
that universe upset by failure. Will he advance or at least draw the
conclusions from that failure? He contributes nothing new. He has
found nothing in experience but the confession of his own
impotence and no occasion to infer any satisfactory principle. Yet
without justification, as he says to himself, he suddenly asserts all
at once the transcendent, the essence of experience, and the
superhuman significance of life when he writes: “Does not the
failure reveal, beyond any possible explanation and interpretation,
not the absence but the existence of transcendence?” That
existence which, suddenly and through a blind act of human
confidence, explains everything, he defines as “the unthinkable
unity of the general and the particular.” Thus the absurd becomes
god (in the broadest meaning of this word) and that inability to
understand becomes the existence that illuminates everything.
Nothing logically prepares this reasoning. I can call it a leap. And
para-doxically can be understood Jaspers’s insistence, his infinite
patience devoted to making the experience of the transcendent
impossible to realize. For the more fleeting that approximation is,
the more empty that definition proves to be, and the more real that
transcendent is to him; for the passion he devotes to asserting it is
in direct proportion to the gap between his powers of explanation
and the irrationality of the world and of experience. It thus appears
that the more bitterly Jaspers destroys the reason’s preconceptions,
the more radically he will explain the world. That apostle of
humiliated thought will find at the very end of humiliation the
means of regenerating being to its very depth.
Mystical thought has familiarized us with such devices. They
are just as legitimate as any attitude of mind. But for the moment I
am acting as if I took a certain problem seriously. Without judging
beforehand the general value of this attitude or its educative power,
I mean simply to consider whether it answers the conditions I set
myself, whether it is worthy of the conflict that concerns me. Thus
I return to Chestov. A commentator relates a remark of his that
deserves interest:
“The only true solution,” he said, “is precisely where human
judgment sees no solution. Otherwise, what need would we have of
God? We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible. As for
the possible, men suffice.” If there is a Chestovian philosophy, I
can say that it is altogether summed up in this way. For when, at
the conclusion of his passionate analyses, Chestov discovers the
fundamental absurdity of all existence, he does not say: “This is
the absurd,” but rather: “This is God: we must rely on him even if
he does not correspond to any of our rational categories.” So that
confusion may not be possible, the Russian philosopher even hints
that this God is perhaps full of hatred and hateful,
incomprehensible and contradictory; but the more hideous is his
face, the more he asserts his power. His greatness is his
incoherence. His proof is his inhumanity. One must spring into him
and by this leap free oneself from rational illusions. Thus, for
Chestov acceptance of the absurd is contemporaneous with the
absurd itself. Being aware of it amounts to accepting it, and the
whole logical effort of his thought is to bring it out so that at the
same time the tremendous hope it involves may burst forth. Let me
repeat that this attitude is legitimate. But I am persisting here in
considering a single problem and all its consequences. I do not
have to examine the emotion of a thought or of an act of faith. I
have a whole lifetime to do that. I know that the rationalist finds
Chestov’s attitude annoying. But I also feel that Chestov is right
rather than the rationalist, and I merely want to know if he remains
faithful to the commandments of the absurd.
Now, if it is admitted that the absurd is the contrary of hope, it
is seen that existential thought for Chestov presupposes the absurd
but proves it only to dispel it. Such subtlety of thought is a
conjuror’s emotional trick. When Chestov elsewhere sets his
absurd in opposition to current morality and reason, he calls it truth
and redemption. Hence, there is basically in that definition of the
absurd an approbation that Chestov grants it. If it is admitted that
all the power of that notion lies in the way it runs counter to our
elementary hopes, if it is felt that to remain, the absurd requires not
to be consented to, then it can be clearly seen that it has lost its true
aspect, its human and relative character in order to enter an eternity
that is both incomprehensible and satisfying. If there is an absurd,
it is in man’s universe. The moment the notion transforms itself
into eternity’s springboard, it ceases to be linked to human lucidity.
The absurd is no longer that evidence that man ascertains without
consenting to it. The struggle is eluded. Man integrates the absurd
and in that communion causes to disappear its essential character,
which is opposition, laceration, and divorce. This leap is an escape.
Chestov, who is so fond of quoting Hamlet’s remark: “The time is
out of joint,” writes it down with a sort of savage hope that seems
to belong to him in particular. For it is not in this sense that Hamlet
says it or Shakespeare writes it. The intoxication of the irrational
and the vocation of rapture turn a lucid mind away from the
absurd. To Chestov reason is useless but there is something beyond
reason. To an absurd mind reason is useless and there is nothing
beyond reason.
This leap can at least enlighten us a little more as to the true
nature of the absurd. We know that it is worthless except in an
equilibrium, that it is, above all, in the comparison and not in the
terms of that comparison. But it so happens that Chestov puts all
the emphasis on one of the terms and destroys the equilibrium. Our
appetite for understanding, our nostalgia for the absolute are
explicable only in so far, precisely, as we can understand and
explain many things. It is useless to negate the reason absolutely. It
has its order in which it is efficacious. It is properly that of human
experience. Whence we wanted to make everything clear. If we
cannot do so, if the absurd is born on that occasion, it is born
precisely at the very meeting-point of that efficacious but limited
reason with the ever resurgent irrational. Now, when Chestov rises
up against a Hegelian proposition such as “the motion of the solar
system takes place in conformity with immutable laws and those
laws are its reason,” when he devotes all his passion to upsetting
Spinoza’s rationalism, he concludes, in effect, in favor of the
vanity of all reason. Whence, by a natural and illegitimate reversal,
to the pre-eminence of the irrational.[5] But the transition is not
evident. For here may intervene the notion of limit and the notion
of level. The laws of nature may be operative up to a certain limit,
beyond which they turn against themselves to give birth to the
absurd. Or else, they may justify themselves on the level of
description without for that reason being true on the level of
explanation.
Everything is sacrificed here to the irrational, and, the demand
for clarity being conjured away, the absurd disappears with one of
the terms of its comparison. The absurd man, on the other hand,
does not undertake such a leveling process. He recognizes the
struggle, does not absolutely scorn reason, and admits the
irrational. Thus he again embraces in a single glance all the data of
experience and he is little inclined to leap before knowing. He
knows simply that in that alert awareness there is no further place
for hope.
What is perceptible in Leo Chestov will be perhaps even more
so in Kierkegaard. To be sure, it is hard to outline clear
propositions in so elusive a writer. But, despite apparently opposed
writings, beyond the pseudonyms, the tricks, and the smiles, can be
felt throughout that work, as it were, the presentiment (at the same
time as the apprehension) of a truth which eventually bursts forth
in the last works: Kierkegaard likewise takes the leap. His
childhood having been so frightened by Christianity, he ultimately
returns to its harshest aspect. For him, too, antinomy and paradox
become criteria of the religious. Thus, the very thing that led to
despair of the meaning and depth of this life now gives it its truth
and its clarity. Christianity is the scandal, and what Kierkegaard
calls for quite plainly is the third sacrifice required by Ignatius
Loyola, the one in which God most rejoices: “The sacrifice of the
intellect.” [6]
This effect of the “leap” is odd, but must not surprise us any
longer. He makes of the absurd the criterion of the other world,
whereas it is simply a residue of the experience of this world. “In
his failure,” says Kierkegaard, “the believer finds his triumph.”
It is not for me to wonder to what stirring preaching this
attitude is linked. I merely have to wonder if the spectacle of the
absurd and its own character justifies it. On this point, I know that
it is not so. Upon considering again the content of the absurd, one
understands better the method that inspired Kierkegaard. Between
the irrational of the world and the insurgent nostalgia of the absurd,
he does not maintain the equilibrium. He does not respect the
relationship that constitutes, properly speaking, the feeling of
absurdity. Sure of being unable to escape the irrational, he wants at
least to save himself from that desperate nostalgia that seems to
him sterile and devoid of implication. But if he may be right on
this point in his judgment, he could not be in his negation. If he
substitutes for his cry of revolt a frantic adherence, at once he is
led to blind himself to the absurd which hitherto enlightened him
and to deify the only certainty he henceforth possesses, the
irrational. The important thing, as Abbe Galiani said to Mme
d’Epinay, is not to be cured, but to live with one’s ailments.
Kierkegaard wants to be cured. To be cured is his frenzied wish,
and it runs throughout his whole journal. The entire effort of his
intelligence is to escape the antinomy of the human condition. An
all the more desperate effort since he intermittently perceives its
vanity when he speaks of himself, as if neither fear of God nor
piety were capable of bringing him to peace. Thus it is that,
through a strained subterfuge, he gives the irrational the
appearance and God the attributes of the absurd: unjust,
incoherent, and incomprehensible. Intelligence alone in him strives
to stifle the underlying demands of the human heart. Since nothing
is proved, everything can be proved.
Indeed, Kierkegaard himself shows us the path taken. I do not
want to suggest anything here, but how can one fail to read in his
works the signs of an almost intentional mutilation of the soul to
balance the mutilation accepted in regard to the absurd? It is the
leitmotiv of the Journal. “What I lacked was the animal which also
belongs to human destiny .... But give me a body then.” And
further on: “Oh! especially in my early youth what should I not
have given to be a man, even for six months ... what I lack,
basically, is a body and the physical conditions of existence.”
Elsewhere, the same man nevertheless adopts the great cry of hope
that has come down through so many centuries and quickened so
many hearts, except that of the absurd man. “But for the Christian
death is certainly not the end of everything and it implies infinitely
more hope than life implies for us, even when that life is
overflowing with health and vigor.” Reconciliation through
scandal is still reconciliation. It allows one perhaps, as can be seen,
to derive hope of its contrary, which is death. But even if fellow-
feeling inclines one toward that attitude, still it must be said that
excess justifies nothing. That transcends, as the saying goes, the
human scale; therefore it must be superhuman. But this “therefore”
is superfluous. There is no logical certainty here. There is no
experimental probability either. All I can say is that, in fact, that
transcends my scale. If I do not draw a negation from it, at least I
do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to
know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone. I
am told again that here the intelligence must sacrifice its pride and
the reason bow down. But if I recognize the limits of the reason, I
do not therefore negate it, recognizing its relative powers. I merely
want to remain in this middle path where the intelligence can
remain clear. If that is its pride, I see no sufficient reason for
giving it up. Nothing more profound, for example, than
Kierkegaard’s view according to which despair is not a fact but a
state: the very state of sin. For sin is what alienates from God. The
absurd, which is the metaphysical state of the conscious man, does
not lead to God.[7] Perhaps this notion will become clearer if I risk
this shocking statement: the absurd is sin without God.
It is a matter of living in that state of the absurd I know on
what it is founded, this mind and this world straining against each
other without being able to embrace each other. I ask for the rule—
of life of that state, and what I am offered neglects its basis,
negates one of the terms of the painful opposition, demands of me
a resignation. I ask what is involved in the condition I recognize as
mine; I know it implies obscurity and ignorance; and I am assured
that this ignorance explains everything and that this darkness is my
light. But there is no reply here to my intent, and this stirring
lyricism cannot hide the paradox from me. One must therefore turn
away. Kierkegaard may shout in warning: “If man had no eternal
consciousness, if, at the bottom of everything, there were merely a
wild, seething force producing everything, both large and trifling,
in the storm of dark passions, if the bottomless void that nothing
can fill underlay all things, what would life be but despair?” This
cry is not likely to stop the absurd man. Seeking what is true is not
seeking what is desirable. If in order to elude the anxious question:
“What would life be?” one must, like the donkey, feed on the roses
of illusion, then the absurd mind, rather than resigning itself to
falsehood, prefers, to adopt fearlessly Kierkegaard’s reply:
“despair.” Everything considered, a determined soul will always
manage.
***
I am taking the liberty at this point of calling the existential
attitude philosophical suicide. But this does not imply a judgment.
It is a convenient way of indicating the movement by which a
thought negates itself and tends to transcend itself in its very
negation. For the existentials negation is their God. To be precise,
that god is maintained only through the negation of human
reason.[8] But, like suicides, gods change with men. There are
many ways of leaping, the essential being to leap. Those
redeeming negations, those ultimate contradictions which negate
the obstacle that has not yet been leaped over, may spring just as
well (this is the paradox at which this reasoning aims) from a
certain religious inspiration as from the rational order. They always
lay claim to the eternal, and it is solely in this that they take the
leap.
It must be repeated that the reasoning developed in this essay
leaves out altogether the most widespread spiritual attitude of our
enlightened age: the one, based on the principle that all is reason,
which aims to explain the world. It is natural to give a clear view
of the world after accepting the idea that it must be clear. That is
even legitimate, but does not concern the reasoning we are
following out here. In fact, our aim is to shed light upon the step
taken by the mind when, starting from a philosophy of the world’s
lack of meaning, it ends up by finding a meaning and depth in it.
The most touching of those steps is religious in essence; it
becomes obvious in the theme of the irrational. But the most
paradoxical and most significant is certainly the one that attributes
rational reasons to a world it originally imagined as devoid of any
guiding principle. It is impossible in any case to reach the
consequences that concern us without having given an idea of this
new attainment of the spirit of nostalgia.
I shall examine merely the theme of “the Intention” made
fashionable by Husserl and the phenomenologists. I have already
alluded to it. Originally Husserl’s method negates the classic
procedure of the reason. Let me repeat. Thinking is not unifying or
making the appearance familiar under the guise of a great
principle. Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing
one’s consciousness, making of every image a privileged place. In
other words, phenomenology declines to explain the world, it
wants to be merely a description of actual experience. It confirms
absurd thought in its initial assertion that there is no truth, but
merely truths. From the evening breeze to this hand on my
shoulder, everything has its truth. Consciousness illuminates it by
paying attention to it. Consciousness does not form the object of its
understanding, it merely focuses, it is the act of attention, and, to
borrow a Bergsonian image, it resembles the projector that
suddenly focuses on an image. The difference is that there is no
scenario, but a successive and incoherent illustration. In that magic
lantern all the pictures are privileged. Consciousness suspends in
experience the objects of its attention. Through its miracle it
isolates them. Henceforth they are beyond all judgments. This is
the “intention” that characterizes consciousness. But the word does
not imply any idea of finality; it is taken in its sense of “direction”:
its only value is topographical.
At first sight, it certainly seems that in this way nothing
contradicts the absurd spirit. That apparent modesty of thought that
limits itself to describing what it declines to explain, that
intentional discipline whence results paradoxically a profound
enrichment of experience and the rebirth of the world in its
prolixity are absurd procedures. At least at first sight. For methods
of thought, in this case as elsewhere, always assume two aspects,
one psychological and the other metaphysical.[9] Thereby they
harbor two truths. If the theme of the intentional claims to illustrate
merely a psychological attitude, by which reality is drained instead
of being explained, nothing in fact separates it from the absurd
spirit. It aims to enumerate what it cannot transcend. It affirms
solely that without any unifying principle thought can still take
delight in describing and understanding every aspect of experience.
The truth involved then for each of those aspects is psychological
in nature. It simply testifies to the “interest” that reality can offer.
It is a way of awaking a sleeping world and of making it vivid to
the mind. But if one attempts to extend and give a rational basis to
that notion of truth, if one claims to discover in this way the
“essence” of each object of knowledge, one restores its depth to
experience. For an absurd mind that is incomprehensible. Now, it
is this wavering between modesty and assurance that is noticeable
in the intentional attitude, and this shimmering of
phenomenological thought will illustrate the absurd reasoning
better than anything else.
For Husserl speaks likewise of “extra-temporal essences”
brought to light by the intention, and he sounds like Plato. All
things are not explained by one thing but by all things. I see no
difference. To be sure, those ideas or those essences that
consciousness “effectuates” at the end of every description are not
yet to be considered perfect models. But it is asserted that they are
directly present in each datum of perception. There is no longer a
single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of
essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The
world comes to a stop, but also lights up. Platonic realism becomes
intuitive, but it is still realism. Kierkegaard was swallowed up in
his God; Parmenides plunged thought into the One. But here
thought hurls itself into an abstract polytheism. But this is not all:
hallucinations and fictions likewise belong to “extra-temporal
essences.” In the new world of ideas, the species of centaurs
collaborates with the more modest species of metropolitan man.
For the absurd man, there was a truth as well as a bitterness in
that purely psychological opinion that all aspects of the world are
privileged. To say that everything is privileged is tantamount to
saying that everything is equivalent. But the metaphysical aspect of
that truth is so far-reaching that through an elementary reaction he
feels closer perhaps to Plato. He is taught, in fact, that every image
presupposes an equally privileged essence. In this ideal world
without hierarchy, the formal army is composed solely of generals.
To be sure, transcendency had been eliminated. But a sudden shift
in thought brings back into the world a sort of fragmentary
immanence which restores to the universe its depth.
Am I to fear having carried too far a theme handled with
greater circumspection by its creators? I read merely these
assertions of Husserl, apparently paradoxical yet rigorously logical
if what precedes is accepted: “That which is true is true absolutely,
in itself; truth is one, identical with itself, however different the
creatures who perceive it, men, monsters, angels or gods.” Reason
triumphs and trumpets forth with that voice, I cannot deny. What
can its assertions mean in the absurd world? The perception of an
angel or a god has no meaning for me. That geometrical spot
where divine reason ratifies mine will always be incomprehensible
to me. There, too, I discern a leap, and though performed in the
abstract, it nonetheless means for me forgetting just what I do not
want to forget. When farther on Husserl exclaims: “If all masses
subject to attraction were to disappear, the law of attraction would
not be destroyed but would simply remain without any possible
application,” I know that I am faced with a metaphysic of
consolation. And if I want to discover the point where thought
leaves the path of evidence, I have only to reread the parallel
reasoning that Husserl voices regarding the mind: “If we could
contemplate clearly the exact laws of psychic processes, they
would be seen to be likewise eternal and invariable, like the basic
laws of theoretical natural science. Hence they would be valid even
if there were no psychic process.” Even if the mind were not, its
laws would be! I see then that of a psychological truth Husserl
aims to make a rational rule: after having denied the integrating
power of human reason, he leaps by this expedient to eternal
Reason.
Husserl’s theme of the “concrete universe” cannot then surprise
me. If I am told that all essences are not formal but that some are
material, that the first are the object of logic and the second of
science, this is merely a question of definition. The abstract, I am
told, indicates but a part, without consistency in itself, of a
concrete universal. But the wavering already noted allows me to
throw light on the confusion of these terms. For that may mean that
the concrete object of my attention, this sky, the reflection of that
water on this coat, alone preserve the prestige of the real that my
interest isolates in the world. And I shall not deny it. But that may
mean also that this coat itself is universal, has its particular and
sufficient essence, belongs to the world of forms. I then realize that
merely the order of the procession has been changed. This world
has ceased to have its reflection in a higher universe, but the
heaven of forms is figured in the host of images of this earth. This
changes nothing for me. Rather than encountering here a taste for
the concrete, the meaning of the human condition, I find an
intellectualism sufficiently unbridled to generalize the concrete
itself.
* * *
It is futile to be amazed by the apparent paradox that leads
thought to its own negation by the opposite paths of humiliated
reason and triumphal reason. From the abstract god of Husserl to
the dazzling god of Kierkegaard the distance is not so great.
Reason and the irrational lead to the same preaching. In truth the
way matters but little; the will to arrive suffices. The abstract
philosopher and the religious philosopher start out from the same
disorder and support each other in the same anxiety. But the
essential is to explain. Nostalgia is stronger here than knowledge.
It is significant that the thought of the epoch is at once one of the
most deeply imbued with a philosophy of the non-significance of
the world and one of the most divided in its conclusions. It is
constantly oscillating between extreme rationalization of reality
which tends to break up that thought into standard reasons and its
extreme irrationalization which tends to deify it. But this divorce is
only apparent. It is a matter of reconciliation, and, in both cases,
the leap suffices. It is always wrongly thought that the notion of
reason is a oneway notion. To tell the truth, however rigorous it
may be in its ambition, this concept is nonetheless just as unstable
as others. Reason bears a quite human aspect, but it also is able to
turn toward the divine. Since Plotinus, who was the first to
reconcile it with the eternal climate, it has learned to turn away
from the most cherished of its principles, which is contradiction, in
order to integrate into it the strangest, the quite magic one of
participation.[10] It is an instrument of thought and not thought
itself. Above all, a man’s thought is his nostalgia.
Just as reason was able to soothe the melancholy of Plotinus, it
provides modern anguish the means of calming itself in the
familiar setting of the eternal. The absurd mind has less luck. For it
the world is neither so rational nor so irrational. It is unreasonable
and only that. With Husserl the reason eventually has no limits at
all. The absurd, on the contrary, establishes its lim-its since it is
powerless to calm its anguish. Kierkegaard independently asserts
that a single limit is enough to negate that anguish. But the absurd
does not go so far. For it that limit is directed solely at the reason’s
ambitions. The theme of the irrational, as it is conceived by the
existentials, is reason becoming confused and escaping by negating
itself. The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.
Only at the end of this difficult path does the absurd man
recognize his true motives. Upon comparing his inner exigence and
what is then offered him, he suddenly feels he is going to turn
away. In the universe of Husserl the world becomes clear and that
longing for familiarity that man’s heart harbors becomes useless.
In Kierkegaard’s apocalypse that desire for clarity must be given
up if it wants to be satisfied. Sin is not so much knowing (if it
were, everybody would be innocent) as wanting to know. Indeed, it
is the only sin of which the absurd man can feel that it constitutes
both his guilt and his innocence. He is offered a solution in which
all the past contradictions have become merely polemical games.
But this is not the way he experienced them. Their truth must be
preserved, which consists in not being satisfied. He does not want
preaching.
My reasoning wants to be faithful to the evidence that aroused
it. That evidence is the absurd. It is that divorce between the mind
that desires and the world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity,
this fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds them
together. Kierkegaard suppresses my nostalgia and Husserl gathers
together that universe. That is not what I was expecting. It was a
matter of living and thinking with those dislocations, of knowing
whether one had to accept or refuse. There can be no question of
masking the evidence, of suppressing the absurd by denying one of
the terms of its equation. It is essential to know whether one can
live with it or whether, on the other hand, logic commands one to
die of it. I am not interested in philosophical suicide, but rather in
plain suicide. I merely wish to purge it of its emotional content and
know its logic and its integrity. Any other position implies for the
absurd mind deceit and the mind’s retreat before what the mind
itself has brought to light. Husserl claims to obey the desire to
escape “the inveterate habit of living and thinking in certain well-
known and convenient conditions of existence,” but the final leap
restores in him the eternal and its comfort. The leap does not
represent an extreme danger as Kierkegaard would like it to do.
The danger, on the contrary, lies in the subtle instant that precedes
the leap. Being able to remain on that dizzying crest—that is
integrity and the rest is subterfuge. I know also that never has
helplessness inspired such striking harmonies as those of
Kierkegaard. But if helplessness has its place in the indifferent
landscapes of history, it has none in a reasoning whose exigence is
now known.
Absurd Freedom
Now the main thing is done, I hold certain facts from which I
cannot separate. What I know, what is certain, what I cannot deny,
what I cannot reject—this is what counts. I can negate everything
of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire
for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I
can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or
enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this
divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don’t know
whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know
that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me
just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition
mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch,
what resists me—that is what I understand. And these two
certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the
impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable
principle—I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other
truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack
and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?
If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life
would have a meaning, or rather this problem would not arise, for I
should belong to this world. I should be this world to which I am
now opposed by my whole consciousness and my whole insistence
upon familiarity. This ridiculous reason is what sets me in
opposition to all creation. I cannot cross it out with a stroke of the
pen. What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve. What
seems to me so obvious, even against me, I must support. And
what constitutes the basis of that conflict, of that break between the
world and my mind, but the awareness of it? If therefore I want to
preserve it, I can through a constant awareness, ever revived, ever
alert. This is what, for the moment, I must remember. At this
moment the absurd, so obvious and yet so hard to win, returns to a
man’s life and finds its home there. At this moment, too, the mind
can leave the arid, dried-up path of lucid effort. That path now
emerges in daily life. It encounters the world of the anonymous
impersonal pronoun “one,” but henceforth man enters in with his
revolt and his lucidity. He has forgotten how to hope. This hell of
the present is his Kingdom at last. All problems recover their sharp
edge. Abstract evidence retreats before the poetry of forms and
colors. Spiritual conflicts become embodied and return to the
abject and magnificent shelter of man’s heart. None of them is
settled. But all are transfigured. Is one going to die, escape by the
leap, rebuild a mansion of ideas and forms to one’s own scale? Is
one, on the contrary, going to take up the heart-rending and
marvelous wager of the absurd? Let’s make a final effort in this
regard and draw all our conclusions. The body, affection, creation,
action, human nobility will then resume their places in this mad
world. At last man will again find there the wine of the absurd and
the bread of indifference on which he feeds his greatness.
Let us insist again on the method: it is a matter of persisting. At
a certain point on his path the absurd man is tempted. History is
not lacking in either religions or prophets, even without gods. He is
asked to leap. All he can reply is that he doesn’t fully understand,
that it is not obvious. Indeed, he does not want to do anything but
what he fully understands. He is assured that this is the sin of
pride, but he does not understand the notion of sin; that perhaps
hell is in store, but he has not enough imagination to visualize that
strange future; that he is losing immortal life, but that seems to him
an idle consideration. An attempt is made to get him to admit his
guilt. He feels innocent. To tell the truth, that is all he feels—his
irreparable innocence. This is what allows him everything. Hence,
what he demands of himself is to live solely with what he knows,
to accommodate himself to what is, and to bring in nothing that is
not certain. He is told that nothing is. But this at least is a certainty.
And it is with this that he is concerned: he wants to find out if it is
possible to live without appeal.
Now I can broach the notion of suicide. It has already been felt
what solution might be given. At this point the problem is
reversed. It was previously a question of finding out whether or not
life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on
the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.
Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. Now,
no one will live this fate, knowing it to be absurd, unless he does
everything to keep before him that absurd brought to light by
consciousness. Negating one of the terms of the opposition on
which he lives amounts to escaping it. To abolish conscious revolt
is to elude the problem. The theme of permanent revolution is thus
carried into individual experience. Living is keeping the absurd
alive. Keeping it alive is, above all, contemplating it. Unlike
Eurydice, the absurd dies only when we turn away from it. One of
the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a
constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity. It is an
insistence upon an impossible transparency. It challenges the world
anew every second. Just as danger provided man the unique
opportunity of seizing awareness, so metaphysical revolt extends
awareness to the whole of experience. It is that constant presence
of man in his own eyes. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope.
That revolt is the certainly of a crushing fate, without the
resignation that ought to accompany it.
This is where it is seen to what a degree absurd experience is
remote from suicide. It may be thought that suicide follows
revolt—but wrongly. For it does not represent the logical outcome
of revolt. It is just the contrary by the consent it presupposes.
Suicide, like the leap, is acceptance at its extreme. Everything is
over and man returns to his essential history. His future, his unique
and dreadful future—he sees and rushes toward it. In its way,
suicide settles the absurd. It engulfs the absurd in the same death.
But I know that in order to keep alive, the absurd cannot be settled.
It escapes suicide to the extent that it is simultaneously awareness
and rejection of death. It is, at the extreme limit of the condemned
man’s last thought, that shoelace that despite everything he sees a
few yards away, on the very brink of his dizzying fall. The
contrary of suicide, in fact, is the man condemned to death.
That revolt gives life its value. Spread out over the whole
length of a life, it restores its majesty to that life. To a man devoid
of blinders, there is no finer sight than that of the intelligence at
grips with a reality that transcends it. The sight of human pride is
unequaled. No disparagement is of any use. That discipline that the
mind imposes on itself, that will conjured up out of nothing, that
face-to-face struggle have something exceptional about them. To
impoverish that reality whose inhumanity constitutes man’s
majesty is tantamount to impoverishing him himself. I understand
then why the doctrines that explain everything to me also debilitate
me at the same time. They relieve me of the weight of my own life,
and yet I must carry it alone. At this juncture, I cannot conceive
that a skeptical metaphysics can be joined to an ethics of
renunciation.
Consciousness and revolt, these rejections are the contrary of
renunciation. Everything that is indomitable and passionate in a
human heart quickens them, on the contrary, with its own life. It is
essential to die unrecon-ciled and not of one’s own free will.
Suicide is a repudi—ation. The absurd man can only drain
everything to the bitter end, and deplete himself. The absurd is his
extreme tension, which he maintains constantly by solitary effort,
for he knows that in that consciousness and in that day-to-day
revolt he gives proof of his only truth, which is defiance. This is a
first consequence.
***
If I remain in that prearranged position which consists in
drawing all the conclusions (and nothing else) involved in a newly
discovered notion, I am faced with a second paradox. In order to
remain faithful to that method, I have nothing to do with the
problem of metaphysical liberty. Knowing whether or not man is
free doesn’t interest me. I can experience only my own freedom.
As to it, I can have no general notions, but merely a few clear
insights. The problem of “freedom as such” has no meaning, for it
is linked in quite a different way with the problem of God.
Knowing whether or not man is free involves knowing whether he
can have a master. The absurdity peculiar to this problem comes
from the fact that the very notion that makes the problem of
freedom possible also takes away all its meaning. For in the
presence of God there is less a problem of freedom than a problem
of evil. You know the alternative: either we are not free and God
the all-powerful is responsible for evil. Or we are free and
responsible but God is not all powerful. All the scholastic
subtleties have neither added anything to nor subtracted anything
from the acuteness of this paradox.
This is why I cannot act lost in the glorification or the mere
definition of a notion which eludes me and loses its meaning as
soon as it goes beyond the frame of reference of my individual
experience. I cannot understand what kind of freedom would be
given me by a higher being. I have lost the sense of hierarchy. The
only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the
individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is
freedom of thought and action. Now if the absurd cancels all my
chances of eternal freedom, it restores and magnifies, on the other
hand, my freedom of action. That privation of hope and future
means an increase in man’s availability.
Before encountering the absurd, the everyday man lives with
aims, a concern for the future or for justification (with regard to
whom or what is not the question). He weighs his chances, he
counts on “someday,” his retirement or the labor of his sons. He
still thinks that something in his life can be directed. In truth, he
acts as if he were free, even if all the facts make a point of
contradicting that liberty. But after the absurd, everything is upset.
That idea that “I am,” my way of acting as if everything has a
meaning (even if, on occasion, I said that nothing has)—all that is
given the lie in vertiginous fashion by the absurdity of a possible
death. Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having
preferences—all this presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one
occasionally ascertains that one doesn’t feel it. But at that moment
I am well aware that that higher liberty, that freedom to be, which
alone can serve as basis for a truth, does not exist. Death is there as
the only reality. After death the chips are down. I am not even free,
either, to perpetuate myself, but a slave, and, above all, a slave
without hope of an eternal revolution, without recourse to
contempt. And who without revolution and without contempt can
remain a slave? What freedom can exist in the fullest sense without
assurance of eternity?
But at the same time the absurd man realizes that hitherto he
was bound to that postulate of freedom on the illusion of which he
was living. In a certain sense, that hampered him. To the extent to
which he imagined a purpose to his life, he adapted himself to the
demands of a purpose to be achieved and became the slave of his
liberty. Thus I could not act otherwise than as the father (or the
engineer or the leader of a nation, or the post-office sub-clerk) that
I am preparing to be. I think I can choose to be that rather than
something else. I think so unconsciously, to be sure. But at the
same time I strengthen my postulate with the beliefs of those
around me, with the presumptions of my human environment
(others are so sure of being free, and that cheerful mood is so
contagious!). However far one may remain from any presumption,
moral or social, one is partly influenced by them and even, for the
best among them (there are good and bad presumptions), one
adapts one’s life to them. Thus the absurd man realizes that he was
not really free. To speak clearly, to the extent to which I hope, to
which I worry about a truth that might be individual to me, about a
way of being or creating, to the extent to which I arrange my life
and prove thereby that I accept its having a meaning, I create for
myself barriers between which I confine my life. I do like so many
bureaucrats of the mind and heart who only fill me with disgust
and whose only vice, I now see clearly, is to take man’s freedom
seriously.
The absurd enlightens me on this point: there is no future.
Henceforth this is the reason for my inner freedom. I shall use two
comparisons here. Mystics, to begin with, find freedom in giving
themselves. By losing themselves in their god, by accepting his
rules, they become secretly free. In spontaneously accepted slavery
they recover a deeper independence. But what does that freedom
mean? It may be said, above all, that they feel free with regard to
themselves, and not so much free as liberated. Likewise,
completely turned toward death (taken here as the most obvious
absurdity), the absurd man feels released from everything outside
that passionate attention crystallizing in him. He enjoys a freedom
with regard to common rules. It can be seen at this point that the
initial themes of existential philosophy keep their entire value. The
return to consciousness, the escape from everyday sleep represent
the first steps of absurd freedom. But it is existential preaching that
is alluded to, and with it that spiritual leap which basically escapes
consciousness. In the same way (this is my second comparison) the
slaves of antiquity did not belong to themselves. But they knew
that freedom which consists in not feeling responsible.[11] Death,
too, has patrician hands which, while crushing, also liberate.
Losing oneself in that bottomless certainty, feeling henceforth
sufficiently remote from one’s own life to increase it and take a
broad view of it—this involves the principle of a liberation. Such
new independence has a definite time limit, like any freedom of
action. It does not write a check on eternity. But it takes the place
of the illusions of freedom, which all stopped with death. The
divine availability of the condemned man before whom the prison
doors open in a certain early dawn, that unbelievable
disinterestedness with regard to everything except for the pure
flame of life—it is clear that death and the absurd are here the
principles of the only reasonable freedom: that which a human
heart can experience and live. This is a second consequence. The
absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent
and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is
given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness. He can
then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength,
his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without
consolation.
***
But what does life mean in such a universe? Nothing else for
the moment but indifference to the future and a desire to use up
everything that is given. Belief in the meaning of life always
implies a scale of values, a choice, our preferences. Belief in the
absurd, according to our definitions, teaches the contrary. But this
is worth examining.
Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that
interests me. I do not want to get out of my depth. This aspect of
life being given me, can I adapt myself to it? Now, faced with this
particular concern, belief in the absurd is tantamount to
substituting the quantity of experiences for the quality. If I
convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the
absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that
perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness
in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning
except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what
counts is not the best living but the most living. It is not up to me
to wonder if this is vulgar or revolting, elegant or deplorable. Once
and for all, value judgments are discarded here in favor of factual
judgments. I have merely to draw the conclusions from what I can
see and to risk nothing that is hypothetical. Supposing that living in
this way were not honorable, then true propriety would command
me to be dishonorable.
The most living; in the broadest sense, that rule means nothing.
It calls for definition. It seems to begin with the fact that the notion
of quantity has not been sufficiently explored. For it can account
for a large share of human experience. A man’s rule of conduct
and his scale of values have no meaning except through the
quantity and variety of experiences he has been in a position to
accumulate. Now, the conditions of modern life impose on the
majority of men the same quantity of experiences and
consequently the same profound experience. To be sure, there must
also be taken into consideration the individual’s spontaneous
contribution, the “given” element in him. But I cannot judge of
that, and let me repeat that my rule here is to get along with the
immediate evidence. I see, then, that the individual character of a
common code of ethics lies not so much in the ideal importance of
its basic principles as in the norm of an experience that it is
possible to measure. To stretch a point somewhat, the Greeks had
the code of their leisure just as we have the code of our eight-hour
day. But already many men among the most tragic cause us to
foresee that a longer experience changes this table of values. They
make us imagine that adventurer of the everyday who through
mere quantity of experiences would break all records (I am
purposely using this sports expression) and would thus win his
own code of ethics.[12] Yet let’s avoid romanticism and just ask
ourselves what such an attitude may mean to a man with his mind
made up to take up his bet and to observe strictly what he takes to
be the rules of the game.
Breaking all the records is first and foremost being faced with
the world as often as possible. How can that be done without
contradictions and without playing on words? For on the one hand
the absurd teaches that all experiences are unimportant, and on the
other it urges toward the greatest quantity of experiences. How,
then, can one fail to do as so many of those men I was speaking of
earlier—choose the form of life that brings us the most possible of
that human matter, thereby introducing a scale of values that on the
other hand one claims to reject?
But again it is the absurd and its contradictory life that teaches
us. For the mistake is thinking that that quantity of experiences
depends on the circumstances of our life when it depends solely on
us. Here we have to be over-simple. To two men living the same
number of years, the world always provides the same sum of
experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them. Being aware of
one’s life, one’s revolt, one’s freedom, and to the maximum, is
living, and to the maximum. Where lucidity dominates, the scale of
values becomes useless. Let’s be even more simple. Let us say that
the sole obstacle, the sole deficiency to be made good, is
constituted by premature death. Thus it is that no depth, no
emotion, no passion, and no sacrifice could render equal in the
eyes of the absurd man (even if he wished it so) a conscious life of
forty years and a lucidity spread over sixty years.[13] Madness and
death are his irreparables. Man does not choose. The absurd and
the extra life it involves therefore do not defend on man’s will, but
on its contrary, which is death.[14] Weighing words carefully, it is
altogether a question of luck. One just has to be able to consent to
this. There will never be any substitute for twenty years of life and
experience.
By what is an odd inconsistency in such an alert race, the
Greeks claimed that those who died young were beloved of the
gods. And that is true only if you are willing to believe that
entering the ridiculous world of the gods is forever losing the
purest of joys, which is feeling, and feeling on this earth. The
present and the succession of presents before a constantly
conscious soul is the ideal of the absurd man. But the word “ideal”
rings false in this connection. It is not even his vocation, but
merely the third consequence of his reasoning. Having started from
an anguished awareness of the inhuman, the meditation on the
absurd returns at the end of its itinerary to the very heart of the
passionate flames of human revolt.[15]
* * *
Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my
revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of
consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation
to death—and I refuse suicide. I know, to be sure, the dull
resonance that vibrates throughout these days. Yet I have but a
word to say: that it is necessary. When Nietzsche writes: “It clearly
seems that the chief thing in heaven and on earth is to obey at
length and in a single direction: in the long run there results
something for which it is worth the trouble of living on this earth
as, for example, virtue, art, music, the dance, reason, the mind—
something that transfigures, something delicate, mad, or divine,”
he elucidates the rule of a really distinguished code of ethics. But
he also points the way of the absurd man. Obeying the flame is
both the easiest and the hardest thing to do. However, it is good for
man to judge himself occasionally. He is alone in being able to do
so.
“Prayer,” says Alain, “is when night descends over thought.”
“But the mind must meet the night,” reply the mystics and the
existentials. Yes, indeed, but not that night that is born under
closed eyelids and through the mere will of man—dark,
impenetrable night that the mind calls up in order to plunge into it.
If it must encounter a night, let it be rather that of despair, which
remains lucid—polar night, vigil of the mind, whence will arise
perhaps that white and virginal brightness which outlines every
object in the light of the intelligence. At that degree, equivalence
encounters passionate understanding. Then it is no longer even a
question of judging the existential leap. It resumes its place amid
the age-old fresco of human attitudes. For the spectator, if he is
conscious, that leap is still absurd. In so far as it thinks it solves the
paradox, it reinstates it intact. On this score, it is stirring. On this
score, everything resumes its place and the absurd world is reborn
in all its splendor and diversity.
But it is bad to stop, hard to be satisfied with a single way of
seeing, to go without contradiction, perhaps the most subtle of all
spiritual forces. The preceding merely defines a way of thinking.
But the point is to live.
The Absurd Man
If Stavrogin believes, he does not think he believes. If he does
not believe, he does not think he does not believe.
—The Possessed
My field,” said Goethe, “is time.” That is indeed the absurd
speech. What, in fact, is the absurd man? He who, without
negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is
foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The
first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what
he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his
temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and of
his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the
span of his lifetime. That is his field, that is his action, which he
shields from any judgment but his own. A greater life cannot mean
for him another life. That would be unfair. I am not even speaking
here of that paltry eternity that is called posterity. Mme Roland
relied on herself. That rashness was taught a lesson. Posterity is
glad to quote her remark, but forgets to judge it. Mme Roland is
indifferent to posterity.
There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen
people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that
integrity has no need of rules. There is but one moral code that the
absurd man can accept, the one that is not separated from God: the
one that is dictated. But it so happens that he lives outside that
God. As for the others (I mean also immoralism), the absurd man
sees nothing in them but justifications and he has nothing to
justify. I start out here from the principle of his innocence.
That innocence is to be feared. “Everything is permitted,”
exclaims Ivan Karamazov. That, too, smacks of the absurd. But on
condition that it not be taken in the vulgar sense. I don’t know
whether or not it has been sufficiently pointed out that it is not an
outburst of relief or of joy, but rather a bitter acknowledgment of a
fact. The certainty of a God giving a meaning to life far surpasses
in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The
choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice, and that
is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it
binds. It does not authorize all actions. “Everything is permitted”
does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely
confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions. It
does not recommend crime, for this would be childish, but it
restores to remorse its futility. Likewise, if all experiences are
indifferent, that of duty is as legitimate as any other. One can be
virtuous through a whim.
All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has
consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the
absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered
calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be
responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion. At
very most, such a mind will consent to use past experience as a
basis for its future actions. Time will prolong time, and life will
serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with
possibilities, everything in himself, except his lucidity, seems
unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that
unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to
him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd
mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its
reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.
The few following images are of this type. They prolong the
absurd reasoning by giving it a specific attitude and their warmth.
Do I need to develop the idea that an example is not necessarily
an example to be followed (even less so, if possible, in the absurd
world) and that these illustrations are not therefore models?
Besides the fact that a certain vocation is required for this, one
becomes ridiculous, with all due allowance, when drawing from
Rousseau the conclusion that one must walk on all fours and from
Nietzsche that one must maltreat one’s mother. “It is essential to be
absurd,” writes a modern author, “it is not essential to be a dupe.”
The attitudes of which I shall treat can assume their whole
meaning only through consideration of their contraries. A sub-
clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness
is common to them. All experiences are indifferent in this regard.
There are some that do either a service or a disservice to man.
They do him a service if he is conscious. Otherwise, that has no
importance: a man’s failures imply judgment, not of
circumstances, but of himself.
I am choosing solely men who aim only to expend themselves
or whom I see to be expending themselves. That has no further
implications. For the moment I want to speak only of a world in
which thoughts, like lives, are devoid of future. Everything that
makes man work and get excited utilizes hope. The sole thought
that is not mendacious is therefore a sterile thought. In the absurd
world the value of a notion or of a life is measured by its sterility.
Don Juanism
If it were sufficient to love, things would be too easy. The more
one loves, the stronger the absurd grows. It is not through lack of
love that Don Juan goes from woman to woman. It is ridiculous to
represent him as a mystic in quest of total love. But it is indeed
because he loves them with the same passion and each time with
his whole self that he must repeat his gift and his profound quest.
Whence each woman hopes to give him what no one has ever
given him. Each time they are utterly wrong and merely manage to
make him feel the need of that repetition. “At last,” exclaims one
of them, “I have given you love.” Can we be surprised that Don
Juan laughs at this? “At last? No,” he says, “but once more.” Why
should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?
Is Don Juan melancholy? This is not likely. I shall barely have
recourse to the legend. That laugh, the conquering insolence, that
playfulness and love of the theater are all clear and joyous. Every
healthy creature tends to multiply himself. So it is with Don Juan.
But, furthermore, melancholy people have two reasons for being
so: they don’t know or they hope. Don Juan knows and does not
hope. He reminds one of those artists who know their limits, never
go beyond them, and in that precarious interval in which they take
their spiritual stand enjoy all the wonderful ease of masters. And
that is indeed genius: the intelligence that knows its frontiers. Up
to the frontier of physical death Don Juan is ignorant of
melancholy. The moment he knows, his laugh bursts forth and
makes one forgive everything. He was melancholy at the time
when he hoped. Today, on the mouth of that woman he recognizes
the bitter and comforting taste of the only knowledge. Bitter?
Barely: that necessary imperfection that makes happiness
perceptible!
It is quite false to try to see in Don Juan a man brought up on
Ecclesiastes. For nothing is vanity to him except the hope of
another life. He proves this because he gambles that other life
against heaven itself. Longing for desire killed by satisfaction, that
commonplace of the impotent man, does not belong to him. That is
all right for Faust, who believed in God enough to sell himself to
the devil. For Don Juan the thing is simpler. Molina’s Burlador
ever replies to the threats of hell: “What a long respite you give
me!” What comes after death is futile, and what a long succession
of days for whoever knows how to be alive! Faust craved worldly
goods; the poor man had only to stretch out his hand. It already
amounted to selling his soul when he was unable to gladden it. As
for satiety, Don Juan insists upon it, on the contrary. If he leaves a
woman it is not absolutely because he has ceased to desire her. A
beautiful woman is always desirable. But he desires another, and
no, this is not the same thing.
This life gratifies his every wish, and nothing is worse than
losing it. This madman is a great wise man. But men who live on
hope do not thrive in this universe where kindness yields to
generosity, affection to virile silence, and communion to solitary
courage. And all hasten to say: “He was a weakling, an idealist or a
saint.” One has to disparage the greatness that insults.
* * *
People are sufficiently annoyed (or that smile of complicity
that debases what it admires) by Don Juan’s speeches and by that
same remark that he uses on all women. But to anyone who seeks
quantity in his joys, the only thing that matters is efficacy. What is
the use of complicating the passwords that have stood the test? No
one, neither the woman nor the man, listens to them, but rather to
the voice that pronounces them. They are the rule, the convention,
and the courtesy. After they are spoken the most important still
remains to be done. Don Juan is already getting ready for it. Why
should he give himself a problem in morality? He is not like
Milosz’s Manara, who damns himself through a desire to be a
saint. Hell for him is a thing to be provoked. He has but one reply
to divine wrath, and that is human honor: “I have honor,” he says
to the Commander, “and I am keeping my promise because I am a
knight.” But it would be just as great an error to make an
immoralist of him. In this regard, he is “like everyone else”: he has
the moral code of his likes and dislikes. Don Juan can be properly
understood only by constant reference to what he commonly
symbolizes: the ordinary seducer and the sexual athlete. He is an
ordinary seducer.[16] Except for the difference that he is conscious,
and that is why he is absurd. A seducer who has become lucid will
not change for all that. Seducing is his condition in life. Only in
novels does one change condition or become better. Yet it can be
said that at the same time nothing is changed and everything is
transformed. What Don Juan realizes in action is an ethic of
quantity, whereas the saint, on the contrary, tends toward quality.
Not to believe in the profound meaning of things belongs to the
absurd man. As for those cordial or wonder-struck faces, he eyes
them, stores them up, and does not pause over them. Time keeps
up with him. The absurd man is he who is not apart from time. Don
Juan does not think of “collecting” women. He exhausts their
number and with them his chances of life. “Collecting” amounts to
being capable of living off one’s past. But he rejects regret, that
other form of hope. He is incapable of looking at portraits.
* * *
Is he selfish for all that? In his way, probably. But here, too, it
is essential to understand one another.
There are those who are made for living and those who are
made for loving. At least Don Juan would be inclined to say so.
But he would do so in a very few words such as he is capable of
choosing. For the love we are speaking of here is clothed in
illusions of the eternal. As all the specialists in passion teach us,
there is no eternal love but what is thwarted. There is scarcely any
passion without struggle. Such a love culminates only in the
ultimate contradiction of death. One must be Werther or nothing.
There, too, there are several ways of committing suicide, one of
which is the total gift and forget-fulness of self. Don Juan, as well
as anyone else, knows that this can be stirring. But he is one of the
very few who know that this is not the important thing. He knows
just as well that those who turn away from all personal life through
a great love enrich themselves perhaps but certainly impoverish
those their love has chosen. A mother or a passionate wife
necessarily has a closed heart, for it is turned away from the world.
A single emotion, a single creature, a single face, but all is
devoured. Quite a different love disturbs Don Juan, and this one is
liberating. It brings with it all the faces in the world, and its tremor
comes from the fact that it knows itself to be mortal. Don Juan has
chosen to be nothing.
For him it is a matter of seeing clearly. We call love what binds
us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of
seeing for which books and legends are responsible. But of love I
know only that mixture of desire, affection, and intelligence that
binds me to this or that creature. That compound is not the same
for another person. I do not have the right to cover all these
experiences with the same name. This exempts one from
conducting them with the same gestures. The absurd man
multiplies here again what he cannot unify. Thus he discovers a
new way of being which liberates him at least as much as it
liberates those who approach him. There is no noble love but that
which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional. All
those deaths and all those rebirths gathered together as in a sheaf
make up for Don Juan the flowering of his life. It is his way of
giving and of vivifying. I let it be decided whether or not one can
speak of selfishness.
* * *
I think at this point of all those who absolutely insist that Don
Juan be punished. Not only in another life, but even in this one. I
think of all those tales, legends, and laughs about the aged Don
Juan. But Don Juan is already ready. To a conscious man old age
and what it portends are not a surprise. Indeed, he is conscious
only in so far as he does not conceal its horror from himself. There
was in Athens a temple dedicated to old age. Children were taken
there. As for Don Juan, the more people laugh at him, the more his
figure stands out. Thereby he rejects the one the romantics lent
him. No one wants to laugh at that tormented, pitiful Don Juan. He
is pitied; heaven itself will redeem him? But that’s not it. In the
universe of which Don Juan has a glimpse, ridicule too is included.
He would consider it normal to be chastised. That is the rule of the
game. And, indeed, it is typical of his nobility to have accepted all
the rules of the game. Yet he knows he is right and that there can
be no question of punishment. A fate is not a punishment.
That is his crime, and how easy it is to understand why the men
of God call down punishment on his head. He achieves a
knowledge without illusions which negates everything they
profess. Loving and possessing, conquering and consuming—that
is his way of knowing. (There is significance in that favorite
Scriptural word that calls the carnal act “knowing.”) He is their
worst enemy to the extent that he is ignorant of them. A chronicler
relates that the true Burlador died assassinated by Fransciscans
who wanted “to put an end to the excesses and blasphemies of Don
Juan, whose birth assured him impunity.” Then they proclaimed
that heaven had struck him down. No one has proved that strange
end. Nor has anyone proved the contrary. But without wondering if
it is probable, I can say that it is logical. I want merely to single out
at this point the word “birth” and to play on words: it was the fact
of living that assured his innocence. It was from death alone that
he derived a guilt now become legendary.
What else does that stone Commander signify, that cold statue
set in motion to punish the blood and courage that dared to think?
All the powers of eternal Reason, of order, of universal morality,
all the foreign grandeur of a God open to wrath are summed up in
him. That gigantic and soulless stone merely symbolizes the forces
that Don Juan negated forever. But the Commander’s mission
stops there. The thunder and lightning can return to the imitation
heaven whence they were called forth. The real tragedy takes place
quite apart from them. No, it was not under a stone hand that Don
Juan met his death. I am inclined to believe in the legendary
bravado, in that mad laughter of the healthy man provoking a non-
existent God. But, above all, I believe that on that evening when
Don Juan was waiting at Anna’s the Commander didn’t come, and
that after midnight the blasphemer must have felt the dreadful
bitterness of those who have been right. I accept even more readily
the account of his life that has him eventually burying himself in a
monastery. Not that the edifying aspect of the story can he
considered probable. What refuge can he go ask of God? But this
symbolizes rather the logical outcome of a life completely imbued
with the absurd, the grim ending of an existence turned toward
short lived joys. At this point sensual pleasure winds up in
asceticism. It is essential to realize that they may be, as it were, the
two aspects of the same destitution. What more ghastly image can
be called up than that of a man betrayed by his body who, simply
because he did not die in time, lives out the comedy while awaiting
the end, face to face with that God he does not adore, serving him
as he served life, kneeling before a void and arms outstretched
toward a heaven without eloquence that he knows to he also
without depth?
I see Don Juan in a cell of one of those Spanish monasteries
lost on a hilltop. And if he contemplates anything at all, it is not the
ghosts of past loves, but perhaps, through a narrow slit in the sun-
baked wall, some silent Spanish plain, a noble, soulless land in
which he recognizes himself. Yes, it is on this melancholy and
radiant image that the curtain must be rung down. The ultimate
end, awaited but never desired, the ultimate end is negligible.
Drama
“The play’s the thing,” says Hamlet, “wherein I’ll catch the
conscience of the king.”
“Catch” is indeed the word. For conscience moves swiftly or
withdraws within itself. It has to be caught on the wing, at that
barely perceptible moment when it glances fleetingly at itself. The
everyday man does not enjoy tarrying. Everything, on the contrary,
hurries him onward. But at the same time nothing interests him
more than himself, especially his potentialities. Whence his interest
in the theater, in the show, where so many fates are offered him,
where he can accept the poetry without feeling the sorrow. There at
least can be recognized the thoughtless man, and he continues to
hasten toward some hope or other. The absurd man begins where
that one leaves off, where, ceasing to admire the play, the mind
wants to enter in. Entering into all these lives, experiencing them
in their diversity, amounts to acting them out. I am not saying that
actors in general obey that impulse, that they are absurd men, but
that their fate is an absurd fate which might charm and attract a
lucid heart. It is necessary to establish this in order to grasp
without misunderstanding what will follow.
The actor’s realm is that of the fleeting. Of all kinds of fame, it
is known, his is the most ephemeral. At least, this is said in
conversation. But all kinds of fame are ephemeral. From the point
of view of Sirius, Goethe’s works in ten thousand years will be
dust and his name forgotten. Perhaps a handful of archaeologists
will look for “evidence” as to our era. That idea has always
contained a lesson. Seriously meditated upon, it reduces our
perturbations to the profound nobility that is found in indifference.
Above all, it directs our concerns toward what is most certain—
that is, toward the immediate. Of all kinds of fame the least
deceptive is the one that is lived.
Hence the actor has chosen multiple fame, the fame that is
hallowed and tested. From the fact that everything is to die
someday he draws the best conclusion. An actor succeeds or does
not succeed. A writer has some hope even if he is not appreciated.
He assumes that his works will bear witness to what he was. At
best the actor will leave us a photograph, and nothing of what he
was himself, his gestures and his silences, his gasping or his
panting with love, will come down to us. For him, not to be known
is not to act, and not acting is dying a hundred times with all the
creatures he would have brought to life or resuscitated.
***
Why should we be surprised to find a fleeting fame built upon
the most ephemeral of creations? The actor has three hours to be
Iago or Alceste, Phedre or Gloucester. In that short space of time
he makes them come to life and die on fifty square yards of boards.
Never has the absurd been so well illustrated or at such length.
What more revelatory epitome can be imagined than those
marvelous lives, those exceptional and total desti—
nies unfolding for a few hours within a stage set? Off the stage,
Sigismundo ceases to count. Two hours later he is seen dining out.
Then it is, perhaps, that life is a dream. But after Sigismundo
comes another. The hero suffering from uncertainty takes the place
of the man roaring for his revenge. By thus sweeping over
centuries and minds, by miming man as he can be and as he is, the
actor has much in common with that other absurd individual, the
traveler. Like him, he drains something and is constantly on the
move. He is a traveler in time and, for the best, the hunted traveler,
pursued by souls. If ever the ethics of quantity could find
sustenance, it is indeed on that strange stage. To what degree the
actor benefits from the characters is hard to say. But that is not the
important thing. It is merely a matter of knowing how far he
identifies himself with those irreplaceable lives. It often happens
that he carries them with him, that they somewhat overflow the
time and place in which they were born. They accompany the
actor, who cannot very readily separate himself from what he has
been. Occasionally when reaching for his glass he resumes
Hamlet’s gesture of raising his cup. No, the distance separating
him from the creatures into whom he infuses life is not so great. He
abundantly illustrates every month or every day that so suggestive
truth that there is no frontier between what a man wants to be and
what he is. Always concerned with better representing, he
demonstrates to what a degree appearing creates being. For that is
his art—to simulate absolutely, to project himself as deeply as
possible into lives that are not his own. At the end of his effort his
vocation becomes clear: to apply himself wholeheartedly to being
nothing or to being several. The narrower the limits allotted him
for creating his character, the more necessary his talent. He will die
in three hours under the mask he has assumed today. Within three
hours he must experience and express a whole exceptional life.
That is called losing oneself to find oneself. In those three hours he
travels the whole course of the dead-end path that the man in the
audience takes a lifetime to cover.
* * *
A mime of the ephemeral, the actor trains and perfects himself
only in appearances. The theatrical convention is that the heart
expresses itself and communicates itself only through gestures and
in the body—or through the voice, which is as much of the soul as
of the body. The rule of that art insists that everything be
magnified and translated into flesh. If it were essential on the stage
to love as people really love, to employ that irreplaceable voice of
the heart, to look as people contemplate in life, our speech would
be in code. But here silences must make themselves heard. Love
speaks up louder, and immobility itself becomes spectacular. The
body is king, Not everyone can be “theatrical,” and this unjustly
maligned word covers a whole aesthetic and a whole ethic. Half a
man’s life is spent in implying, in turning away, and in keeping
silent. Here the actor is the intruder. He breaks the spell chaining
that soul, and at last the passions can rush onto their stage. They
speak in every gesture; they live only through shouts and cries.
Thus the actor creates his characters for display. He outlines or
sculptures them and slips into their imaginary form, transfusing his
blood into their phantoms. I am of course speaking of great drama,
the kind that gives the actor an opportunity to fulfill his wholly
physical fate. Take Shakespeare, for instance. In that impulsive
drama the physical passions lead the dance. They explain
everything. Without them all would collapse. Never would King
Lear keep the appointment set by madness without the brutal
gesture that exiles Cordelia and condemns Edgar. It is just that the
unfolding of that tragedy should thenceforth be dominated by
madness. Souls are given over to the demons and their saraband.
No fewer than four madmen: one by trade, another by intention,
and the last two through suffering—four disordered bodies, four
unutterable aspects of a single condition.
The very scale of the human body is inadequate. The mask and
the buskin, the make-up that reduces and accentuates the face in its
essential elements, the costume that exaggerates and simplifies—
that universe sacrifices everything to appearance and is made
solely for the eye. Through an absurd miracle, it is the body that
also brings knowledge. I should never really understand Iago
unless I played his part. It is not enough to hear him, for I grasp
him only at the moment when I see him. Of the absurd character
the actor consequently has the monotony, that single, oppressive
silhouette, simultaneously strange and familiar, that he carries
about from hero to hero. There, too, the great dramatic work
contributes to this unity of tone.[17] This is where the actor
contradicts himself: the same and yet so various, so many souls
summed up in a single body. Yet it is the absurd contradiction
itself, that individual who wants to achieve everything and live
everything, that useless attempt, that ineffectual persistence. What
always contradicts itself nevertheless joins in him. He is at that
point where body and mind converge, where the mind, tired of its
defeats, turns toward its most faithful ally. “And blest are those,”
says Hamlet, “whose blood and judgment are so well commingled
that they are not a pipe for fortune’s finger to sound what stop she
please.”
How could the Church have failed to condemn such a practice
on the part of the actor? She repudiated in that art the heretical
multiplication of souls, the emotional debauch, the scandalous
presumption of a mind that objects to living but one life and hurls
itself into all forms of excess. She proscribed in them that
preference for the present and that triumph of Proteus which are
the negation of everything she teaches. Eternity is not a game. A
mind foolish enough to prefer a comedy to eternity has lost its
salvation. Between “everywhere” and “forever” there is no
compromise. Whence that much maligned profession can give rise
to a tremendous spiritual conflict. “What matters,” said Nietzsche,
“is not eternal life but eternal vivacity.” All drama is, in fact, in
this choice. Celimene against Elianthe, the whole subject in the
absurd consequence of a nature carried to its extreme, and the
verse itself, the “bad verse,” barely accented like the monotony of
the character’s nature.
Adrienne Lecouvreur on her deathbed was willing to confess
and receive communion, but refused to abjure her profession. She
thereby lost the benefit of the confession. Did this not amount, in
effect, to choosing her absorbing passion in preference to God?
And that woman in the death throes refusing in tears to repudiate
what she called her art gave evidence of a greatness that she never
achieved behind the footlights. This was her finest role and the
hardest one to play. Choosing between heaven and a ridiculous
fidelity, preferring oneself to eternity or losing oneself in God is
the age-old tragedy in which each must play his part.
The actors of the era knew they were excommunicated.
Entering the profession amounted to choosing Hell. And the
Church discerned in them her worst enemies. A few men of letters
protest: “What! Refuse the last rites to Moliere!” But that was just,
and especially in one who died onstage and finished under the
actor’s make-up a life entirely devoted to dispersion. In his case
genius is invoked, which excuses everything. But genius excuses
nothing, just because it refuses to do so.
The actor knew at that time what punishment was in store for
him. But what significance could such vague threats have
compared to the final punishment that life itself was reserving for
him? This was the one that he felt in advance and accepted wholly.
To the actor as to the absurd man, a premature death is irreparable.
Nothing can make up for the sum of faces and centuries he would
otherwise have traversed. But in any case, one has to die. For the
actor is doubtless everywhere, but time sweeps him along, too, and
makes its impression with him.
It requires but a little imagination to feel what an actor’s fate
means. It is in time that he makes up and enumerates his
characters. It is in time likewise that he learns to dominate them.
The greater number of different lives he has lived, the more aloof
he can be from them. The time comes when he must die to the
stage and for the world. What he has lived faces him. He sees
clearly. He feels the harrowing and irreplaceable quality of that
adventure. He knows and can now die. There are homes for aged
actors.
Conquest
“No,” says the conqueror, “don’t assume that because I love
action I have had to forget how to think. On the contrary I can
throughly define what I believe. For I believe it firmly and I see it
surely and clearly. Beware of those who say: ‘I know this too well
to be able to express it.’ For if they cannot do so, this is because
they don’t know it or because out of laziness they stopped at the
outer crust.
“I have not many opinions. At the end of a life man notices that
he has spent years becoming sure of a single truth. But a single
truth, if it is obvious, is enough to guide an existence. As for me, I
decidedly have something to say about the individual. One must
speak of him bluntly and, if need be, with the appropriate
contempt.
“A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself
than through those he says. There are many that I shall keep to
myself. But I firmly believe that all those who have judged the
individual have done so with much less experience than we on
which to base their judgment. The intelligence, the stirring
intelligence perhaps foresaw what it was essential to note. But the
era, its ruins, and its blood overwhelm us with facts. It was
possible for ancient nations, and even for more recent ones down
to our machine age, to weigh one against the other the virtues of
society and of the individual, to try to find out which was to serve
the other. To begin with, that was possible by virtue of that
stubborn aberration in man’s heart according to which human
beings were created to serve or be served. In the second place, it
was possible because neither society nor the individual had yet
revealed all their ability.
“I have seen bright minds express astonishment at the
masterpieces of Dutch painters born at the height of the bloody
wars in Flanders, be amazed by the prayers of Silesian mystics
brought up during the frightful Thirty Years’ War. Eternal values
survive secular turmoils before their astonished eyes. But there has
been progress since. The painters of today are deprived of such
serenity. Even if they have basically the heart the creator needs—I
mean the closed heart—it is of no use; for everyone, including the
saint himself, is mobilized. This is perhaps what I have felt most
deeply. At every form that miscarries in the trenches, at every
outline, metaphor, or prayer crushed under steel, the eternal loses a
round. Conscious that I cannot stand aloof from my time, I have
decided to be an integral part of it. This is why I esteem the
individual only because he strikes me as ridiculous and humiliated.
Knowing that there are no victorious causes, I have a liking for lost
causes: they require an uncontaminated soul, equal to its defeat as
to its temporary victories. For anyone who feels bound up with this
world’s fate, the clash of civilizations has something agonizing
about it. I have made that anguish mine at the same time that I
wanted to join in. Between history and the eternal I have chosen
history because I like certainties. Of it, at least, I am certain, and
how can I deny this force crushing me?
“There always comes a time when one must choose between
contemplation and action. This is called becoming a man. Such
wrenches are dreadful. But for a proud heart there can be no
compromise. There is God or time, that cross or this sword. This
world has a higher meaning that transcends its worries, or nothing
is true but those worries. One must live with time and die with it,
or else elude it for a greater life. I know that one can compromise
and live in the world while believing in the eternal. That is called
accepting. But I loathe this term and want all or nothing. If I
choose action, don’t think that contemplation is like an unknown
country to me. But it cannot give me everything, and, deprived of
the eternal, I want to ally myself with time. I do not want to put
down to my account either nostalgia or bitterness, and I merely
want to see clearly. I tell you, tomorrow you will be mobilized. For
you and for me that is a liberation. The individual can do nothing
and yet he can do everything. In that wonderful unattached state
you understand why I exalt and crush him at one and the same
time. It is the world that pulverizes him and I who liberate him. I
provide him with all his rights.
“Conquerors know that action is in itself useless. There is but
one useful action, that of remaking man and the earth. I shall never
remake men. But one must do ’as if.’ For the path of struggle leads
me to the flesh. Even humiliated, the flesh is my only certainty. I
can live only on it. The creature is my native land. This is why I
have chosen this absurd and ineffectual effort. This is why I am on
the side of the struggle. The epoch lends itself to this, as I have
said. Hitherto the greatness of a conqueror was geographical. It
was measured by the extent of the conquered territories. There is a
reason why the word has changed in meaning and has ceased to
signify the victorious general. The greatness has changed camp. It
lies in protest and the blind-alley sacrifice. There, too, it is not
through a preference for defeat. Victory would be desirable. But
there is but one victory, and it is eternal. That is the one I shall
never have. That is where I stumble and cling. A revolution is
always accomplished against the gods, beginning with the
revolution of Prometheus, the first of modern conquerors. It is
man’s demands made against his fate; the demands of the poor are
but a pretext. Yet I can seize that spirit only in its historical act,
and that is where I make contact with it. Don’t assume, however,
that I take pleasure in it: opposite the essential contradiction, I
maintain my human contradiction. I establish my lucidity in the
midst of what negates it. I exalt man be-fore what crushes him, and
my freedom, my revolt, and my passion come together then in that
tension, that lucidity, and that vast repetition.
“Yes, man is his own end. And he is his only end. If he aims to
be something, it is in this life. Now I know it only too well.
Conquerors sometimes talk of vanquishing and overcoming. But it
is always ‘overcoming oneself’ that they mean. You are well aware
of what that means. Every man has felt himself to be the equal of a
god at certain moments. At least, this is the way it is expressed.
But this comes from the fact that in a flash he felt the amazing
grandeur of the human mind. The conquerors are merely those
among men who are conscious enough of their strength to be sure
of living constantly on those heights and fully aware of that
grandeur. It is a question of arithmetic, of more or less. The
conquerors are capable of the more. But they are capable of no
more than man himself when he wants. This is why they never
leave the human crucible, plunging into the seething soul of
revolutions.
“There they find the creature mutilated, but they also encounter
there the only values they like and admire, man and his silence.
This is both their destitution and their wealth. There is but one
luxury for them—that of human relations. How can one fail to
realize that in this vulnerable universe everything that is human
and solely human assumes a more vivid meaning? Taut faces,
threatened fraternity, such strong and chaste friendship among
men—these are the true riches because they are transitory. In their
midst the mind is most aware of its powers and limitations. That is
to say, its efficacity. Some have spoken of genius. But genius is
easy to say; I prefer the intelligence. It must be said that it can be
magnificent then. It lights up this desert and dominates it. It knows
its obligations and illustrates them. It will die at the same time as
this body. But knowing this constitutes its freedom.
“We are not ignorant of the fact that all churches are against us.
A heart so keyed up eludes the eternal, and all churches, divine or
political, lay claim to the eternal. Happiness and courage,
retribution or justice are secondary ends for them. It is a doctrine
they bring, and one must subscribe to it. But I have no concern
with ideas or with the eternal. The truths that come within my
scope can be touched with the hand. I cannot separate from them.
This is why you cannot base anything on me: nothing of the
conqueror lasts, not even his doctrines.
“At the end of all that, despite everything, is death. We know
also that it ends everything. This is why those cemeteries all over
Europe, which obsess some among us, are hideous. People beautify
only what they love, and death repels us and tires our patience. It,
too, is to be conquered. The last Carrara, a prisoner in Padua
emptied by the plague and besieged by the Venetians, ran
screaming through the halls of his deserted palace: he was calling
on the devil and asking him for death. This was a way of
overcoming it. And it is likewise a mark of courage characteristic
of the Occident to have made so ugly the places where death thinks
itself honored. In the rebel s universe, death exalts injustice. It is
the supreme abuse.
“Others, without compromising either, have chosen the eternal
and denounced the illusion of this world. Their cemeteries smile
amid numerous flowers and birds. That suits the conqueror and
gives him a clear image of what he has rejected. He has chosen, on
the contrary, the black iron fence or the potter’s field. The best
among the men of God occasionally are seized with fright mingled
with consideration and pity for minds that can live with such an
image of their death. Yet those minds derive their strength and
justification from this. Our fate stands before us and we provoke
him. Less out of pride than out of awareness of our ineffectual
condition. We, too, sometimes feel pity for ourselves. It is the only
compassion that seems acceptable to us: a feeling that perhaps you
hardly understand and that seems to you scarcely virile. Yet the
most daring among us are the ones who feel it. But we call the
lucid ones virile and we do not want a strength that is apart from
lucidity.”
* * *
Let me repeat that these images do not propose moral codes
and involve no judgments: they are sketches. They merely
represent a style of life. The lover, the actor, or the adventurer
plays the absurd. But equally well, if he wishes, the chaste man,
the civil servant, or the president of the Republic. It is enough to
know and to mask nothing. In Italian museums are sometimes
found little painted screens that the priest used to hold in front of
the face of condemned men to hide the scaffold from them. The
leap in all its forms, rushing into the divine or the eternal,
surrendering to the illusions of the everyday or of the idea—all
these screens hide the absurd. But there are civil servants without
screens, and they are the ones of whom I mean to speak. I have
chosen the most extreme ones. At this level the absurd gives them
a royal power. It is true that those princes are without a kingdom.
But they have this advantage over others: they know that all
royalties are illusory. They know that is their whole nobility, and it
is useless to speak in relation to them of hidden misfortune or the
ashes of disillusion. Being deprived of hope is not despairing. The
flames of earth are surely worth celestial perfumes. Neither I nor
anyone can judge them here. They are not striving to be better;
they are attempting to be consistent. If the term “wise man” can be
applied to the man who lives on what he has without speculating
on what he has not, then they are wise men. One of them, a
conqueror but in the realm of mind, a Don Juan but of knowledge,
an actor but of the intelligence, knows this better than anyone:
“You nowise deserve a privilege on earth and in heaven for having
brought to perfection your dear little meek sheep; you nonetheless
continue to be at best a ridiculous dear little sheep with horns and
nothing more—even supposing that you do not burst with vanity
and do not create a scandal by posing as a judge.”
In any case, it was essential to restore to the absurd reasoning
more cordial examples. The imagination can add many others,
inseparable from time and exile, who likewise know how to live in
harmony with a universe without future and without weakness.
This absurd, godless world is, then, peopled with men who think
clearly and have ceased to hope. And I have not yet spoken of the
most absurd character, who is the creator.
Absurd Creation
Philosophy and Fiction
All those lives maintained in the rarefied air of the absurd
could not persevere without some profound and constant thought
to infuse its strength into them. Right here, it can be only a strange
feeling of fidelity. Conscious men have been seen to fulfill their
task amid the most stupid of wars without considering themselves
in contradiction. This is because it was essential to elude nothing.
There is thus a metaphysical honor in enduring the world’s
absurdity. Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, absurd revolt
are tributes that man pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he
is defeated in advance.
It is merely a matter of being faithful to the rule of the battle.
That thought may suffice to sustain a mind; it has supported and
still supports whole civilizations. War cannot be negated. One
must live it or die of it. So it is with the absurd: it is a question of
breathing with it, of recognizing its lessons and recovering their
flesh. In this regard the absurd joy par excellence is creation. “Art
and nothing but art,” said Nietzsche; “we have art in order not to
die of the truth.”
In the experience that I am attempting to describe and to stress
on several modes, it is certain that a new torment arises wherever
another dies. The childish chasing after forgetfulness, the appeal of
satisfaction are now devoid of echo. But the constant tension that
keeps man face to face with the world, the ordered delirium that
urges him to be receptive to everything leave him another fever. In
this universe the work of art is then the sole chance of keeping his
consciousness and of fixing its adventures. Creating is living
doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous
collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies
nothing else. At the same time, it has no more significance than the
continual and imperceptible creation in which the actor, the
conqueror, and all absurd men indulge every day of their lives. All
try their hands at miming, at repeating, and at recreating the reality
that is theirs. We always end up by having the appearance of our
truths. All existence for a man turned away from the eternal is but
a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. Creation is the great
mime.
Such men know to begin with, and then their whole effort is to
examine, to enlarge, and to enrich the ephemeral island on which
they have just landed. But first they must know. For the absurd
discovery coincides with a pause in which future passions are
prepared and justified. Even men without a gospel have their
Mount of Olives. And one must not fall asleep on theirs either. For
the absurd man it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of
experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid
indifference.
Describing—that is the last ambition of an absurd thought.
Science likewise, having reached the end of its paradoxes, ceases
to propound and stops to contemplate and sketch the ever virgin
landscape of phenomena. The heart learns thus that the emotion
delighting us when we see the world’s aspects comes to us not
from its depth but from their diversity. Explanation is useless, but
the sensation remains and, with it, the constant attractions of a
universe inexhaustible in quantity. The place of the work of art can
be understood at this point.
It marks both the death of an experience and its multiplication.
It is a sort of monotonous and passionate repetition of the themes
already orchestrated by the world: the body, inexhaustible image
on the pediment of temples, forms or colors, number or grief. It is
therefore not indifferent, as a conclusion, to encounter once again
the principal themes of this essay in the wonderful and childish
world of the creator. It would be wrong to see a symbol in it and to
think that the work of art can be considered at last as a refuge for
the absurd. It is itself an absurd phenomenon, and we are
concerned merely with its description. It does not offer an escape
for the intellectual ailment. Rather, it is one of the symptoms of
that ailment which reflects it throughout a man’s whole thought.
But for the first time it makes the mind get outside of itself and
places it in opposition to others, not for it to get lost but to show it
clearly the blind path that all have entered upon. In the time of the
absurd reasoning, creation follows indifference and discovery. It
marks the point from which absurd passions spring and where the
reasoning stops. Its place in this essay is justified in this way.
It will suffice to bring to light a few themes common to the
creator and the thinker in order to find in the work of art all the
contradictions of thought involved in the absurd. Indeed, it is not
so much identical conclusions that prove minds to be related as the
contradictions that are common to them. So it is with thought and
creation. I hardly need to say that the same anguish urges man to
these two attitudes. This is where they coincide in the beginning.
But among all the thoughts that start from the absurd, I have seen
that very few remain within it. And through their deviations or
infidelities I have best been able to measure what belonged to the
absurd. Similarly I must wonder: is an absurd work of art possible?
* * *
It would be impossible to insist too much on the arbitrary
nature of the former opposition between art and philosophy. If you
insist on taking it in too limited a sense, it is certainly false. If you
mean merely that these two disciplines each have their peculiar
climate, that is probably true but remains vague. The only
acceptable argument used to lie in the contradiction brought up
between the philosopher enclosed within his system and the artist
placed before his work. But this was pertinent for a certain form of
art and of philosophy which we consider secondary here. The idea
of an art detached from its creator is not only outmoded; it is false.
In opposition to the artist, it is pointed out that no philosopher ever
created several systems. But that is true in so far, indeed, as no
artist ever expressed more than one thing under different aspects.
The instantaneous perfection of art, the necessity for its renewal—
this is true only through a preconceived notion. For the work of art
likewise is a construction and everyone knows how monotonous
the great creators can be. For the same reason as the thinker, the
artist commits himself and becomes himself in his work. That
osmosis raises the most important of aesthetic problems.
Moreover, to anyone who is convinced of the mind’s singleness of
purpose, nothing is more futile than these distinctions based on
methods and objects. There are no frontiers between the disciplines
that man sets himself for understanding and loving. They interlock,
and the same anxiety merges them.
It is necessary to state this to begin with. For an absurd work of
art to be possible, thought in its most lucid form must be involved
in it. But at the same time thought must not be apparent except as
the regulating intelligence. This paradox can be explained
according to the absurd. The work of art is born of the
intelligence’s refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph
of the carnal. It is lucid thought that provokes it, but in that very
act that thought repudiates itself. It will not yield to the temptation
of adding to what is described a deeper meaning that it knows to be
illegitimate. The work of art embodies a drama of the intelligence,
but it proves this only indirectly. The absurd work requires an artist
conscious of these limitations and an art in which the concrete
signifies nothing more than itself. It cannot be the end, the
meaning, and the consolation of a life. Creating or not creating
changes nothing. The absurd creator does not prize his work. He
could repudiate it. He does sometimes repudiate it. An Abyssinia
suffices for this, as in the case of Rimbaud.
At the same time a rule of aesthetics can be seen in this. The
true work of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the
one that says “less.” There is a certain relationship between the
global experience of the artist and the work that reflects that
experience, between Wilhelm Meister and Goethe’s maturity. That
relationship is bad when the work aims to give the whole
experience in the lace-paper of an explanatory literature. That
relationship is good when the work is but a piece cut out of
experience, a facet of the diamond in which the inner luster is
epitomized without being limited. In the first case there is
overloading and pretension to the eternal. In the second, a fecund
work because of a whole implied experience, the wealth of which
is suspected. The problem for the absurd artist is to acquire this
savoir-vivre which transcends savoir-faire. And in the end, the
great artist under this climate is, above all, a great living being, it
being understood that living in this case is just as much
experiencing as reflecting. The work then embodies an intellectual
drama. The absurd work illustrates thought’s renouncing of its
prestige and its resignation to being no more than the intelligence
that works up appearances and covers with images what has no
reason. If the world were clear, art would not exist.
I am not speaking here of the arts of form or color in which
description alone prevails in its splendid modesty.[18] Expression
begins where thought ends. Those adolescents with empty
eyesockets who people temples and museums—their philosophy
has been expressed in gestures. For an absurd man it is more
educative than all libraries. Under another aspect the same is true
for music. If any art is devoid of lessons, it is certainly music. It is
too closely related to mathematics not to have borrowed their
gratuitousness. That game the mind plays with itself according to
set and measured laws takes place in the sonorous compass that
belongs to us and beyond which the vibrations nevertheless meet in
an inhuman universe. There is no purer sensation. These examples
are too easy. The absurd man recognizes as his own these
harmonies and these forms.
But I should like to speak here of a work in which the
temptation to explain remains greatest, in which illusion offers
itself automatically, in which conclusion is almost inevitable. I
mean fictional creation. I propose to inquire whether or not the
absurd can hold its own there.
* * *
To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one’s own
world, which comes to the same thing). It is starting out from the
basic disagreement that separates man from his experience in order
to find a common ground according to one’s nostalgia, a universe
hedged with reasons or lighted up with analogies but which, in any
case, gives an opportunity to rescind the unbearable divorce. The
philosopher, even if he is Kant, is a creator. He has his characters,
his symbols, and his secret action. He has his plot endings. On the
contrary, the lead taken by the novel over poetry and the essay
merely represents, despite appearances, a greater intellectualiza-
tion of the art. Let there be no mistake about it; I am speaking of
the greatest. The fecundity and the importance of a literary form
are often measured by the trash it contains. The number of bad
novels must not make us forget the value of the best. These,
indeed, carry with them their universe. The novel has its logic, its
reasonings, its intuition, and its postulates. It also has its
requirements of clarity.[19]
The classical opposition of which I was speaking above is even
less justified in this particular case. It held in the time when it was
easy to separate philosophy from its authors. Today when thought
has ceased to lay claim to the universal, when its best history
would be that of its repentances, we know that the system, when it
is worth while, cannot be separated from its author. The Ethics
itself, in one of its aspects, is but a long and reasoned personal
confession. Abstract thought at last returns to its prop of flesh.
And, likewise, the fictional activities of the body and of the
passions are regulated a little more according to the requirements
of a vision of the world. The writer has given up telling “stories”
and creates his universe. The great novelists are philosophical
novelists—that is, the contrary of thesis-writers. For instance,
Balzac, Sade, Melville, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Proust, Malraux,
Kafka, to cite but a few.
But in fact the preference they have shown for writing in
images rather than in reasoned arguments is revelatory of a certain
thought that is common to them all, convinced of the uselessness
of any principle of explanation and sure of the educative message
of perceptible appearance. They consider the work of art both as an
end and a beginning. It is the outcome of an often unexpressed
philosophy, its illustration and its consummation. But it is
complete only through the implications of that philosophy. It
justifies at last that variant of an old theme that a little thought
estranges from life whereas much thought reconciles to life.
Incapable of refining the real, thought pauses to mimic it. The
novel in question is the instrument of that simultaneously relative
and inexhaustible knowledge, so like that of love. Of love, fictional
creation has the initial wonder and the fecund rumination.
***
These at least are the charms I see in it at the outset. But I saw
them likewise in those princes of humiliated thought whose
suicides I was later able to witness.
What interests me, indeed, is knowing and describing the force
that leads them back toward the common path of illusion. The
same method will consequently help me here. The fact of having
already utilized it will allow me to shorten my argument and to
sum it up without delay in a particular example. I want to know
whether, accepting a life without appeal, one can also agree to
work and create without appeal and what is the way leading to
these liberties. I want to liberate my universe of its phantoms and
to people it solely with flesh-and-blood truths whose presence I
cannot deny. I can perform absurd work, choose the creative
attitude rather than another. But an absurd attitude, if it is to remain
so, must remain aware of its gratuitousness. So it is with the work
of art. If the commandments of the absurd are not respected, if the
work does not illustrate divorce and revolt, if it sacrifices to
illusions and arouses hope, it ceases to be gratuitous. I can no
longer detach myself from it. My life may find a meaning in it, but
that is trifling. It ceases to be that exercise in detachment and
passion which crowns the splendor and futility of a man’s life.
In the creation in which the temptation to explain is the
strongest, can one overcome that temptation? In the fictional world
in which awareness of the real world is keenest, can I remain
faithful to the absurd without sacrificing to the desire to judge? So
many questions to be taken into consideration in a last effort. It
must be already clear what they signify. They are the last scruples
of an awareness that fears to forsake its initial and difficult lesson
in favor of a final illusion. What holds for creation, looked upon as
one of the possible attitudes for the man conscious of the absurd,
holds for all the styles of life open to him. The conqueror or the
actor, the creator or Don Juan may forget that their exercise in
living could not do without awareness of its mad character. One
becomes accustomed so quickly. A man wants to earn money in
order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are
devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the
means are taken for the end. Likewise, the whole effort of this
conqueror will be diverted to ambition, which was but a way
toward a greater life. Don Juan in turn will likewise yield to his
fate, be satisfied with that existence whose nobility is of value only
through revolt. For one it is awareness and for the other, revolt; in
both cases the absurd has disappeared. There is so much stubborn
hope in the human heart. The most destitute men often end up by
accepting illusion. That approval prompted by the need for peace
inwardly parallels the existential consent. There are thus gods of
light and idols of mud. But it is essential to find the middle path
leading to the faces of man.
So far, the failures of the absurd exigence have best informed
us as to what it is. In the same way, if we are to be informed, it will
suffice to notice that fictional creation can present the same
ambiguity as certain philosophies. Hence I can choose as
illustration a work comprising everything that denotes awareness
of the absurd, having a clear starting-point and a lucid climate. Its
consequences will enlighten us. If the absurd is not respected in it,
we shall know by what expedient illusion enters in. A particular
example, a theme, a creator’s fidelity will suffice, then. This
involves the same analysis that has already been made at greater
length.
I shall examine a favorite theme of Dostoevsky. I might just as
well have studied other works.[20] But in this work the problem is
treated directly, in the sense of nobility and emotion, as for the
existential philosophies already discussed. This parallelism serves
my purpose.
Kirilov
All of Dostoevsky’s heroes question themselves as to the
meaning of life. In this they are modern: they do not fear ridicule.
What distinguishes modern sensibility from classical sensibility is
that the latter thrives on moral problems and the former on
metaphysical problems. In Dostoevsky’s novels the question is
propounded with such intensity that it can only invite extreme
solutions. Existence is illusory or it is eternal. If Dostoevsky were
satisfied with this inquiry, he would be a philosopher. But he
illustrates the consequences that such intellectual pastimes may
have in a man’s life, and in this regard he is an artist. Among those
consequences, his attention is arrested particularly by the last one,
which he himself calls logical suicide in his Diary of a Writer. In
the installments for December 1876, indeed, he imagines the
reasoning of “logical suicide.” Convinced that human existence is
an utter absurdity for anyone without faith in immortality, the
desperate man comes to the following conclusions:
“Since in reply to my questions about happiness, I am told,
through the intermediary of my consciousness, that I cannot be
happy except in harmony with the great all, which I cannot
conceive and shall never be in a position to conceive, it is evident
...”
“Since, finally, in this connection, I assume both the role of the
plaintiff and that of the defendant, of the accused and of the judge,
and since I consider this comedy perpetrated by nature altogether
stupid, and since I even deem it humiliating for me to deign to play
it ...”
“In my indisputable capacity of plaintiff and defendant, of
judge and accused, I condemn that nature which, with such
impudent nerve, brought me into being in order to suffer—I
condemn it to be annihilated with me.”
There remains a little humor in that position. This suicide kills
himself because, on the metaphysical plane, he is vexed. In a
certain sense he is taking his revenge. This is his way of proving
that he “will not be had.” It is known, however, that the same
theme is embodied, but with the most wonderful generality, in
Kirilov of The Possessed, likewise an advocate of logical suicide.
Kirilov the engineer declares somewhere that he wants to take his
own life because it “is his idea.” Obviously the word must be taken
in its proper sense. It is for an idea, a thought, that he is getting
ready for death. This is the superior suicide. Progressively, in a
series of scenes in which Kirilov’s mask is gradually illuminated,
the fatal thought driving him is revealed to us. The engineer, in
fact, goes back to the arguments of the Diary. He feels that God is
necessary and that he must exist. But he knows that he does not
and cannot exist. “Why do you not realize,” he exclaims, “that this
is sufficient reason for killing oneself?” That attitude involves
likewise for him some of the absurd consequences. Through
indifference he accepts letting his suicide be used to the advantage
of a cause he despises. “I decided last night that I didn’t care.” And
finally he prepares his deed with a mixed feeling of revolt and
freedom. “I shall kill myself in order to assert my insubordination,
my new and dreadful liberty.” It is no longer a question of revenge,
but of revolt. Kirilov is consequently an absurd character—yet
with this essential reservation: he kills himself. But he himself
explains this contradiction, and in such a way that at the same time
he reveals the absurd secret in all its purity. In truth, he adds to his
fatal logic an extraordinary ambition which gives the character its
full perspective: he wants to kill himself to become god.
The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist,
Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself.
Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is
absurd, but it is what is needed. The interesting thing, however, is
to give a meaning to that divinity brought to earth. That amounts to
clarifying the premise: “If God does not exist, I am god,” which
still remains rather obscure. It is important to note at the outset that
the man who flaunts that mad claim is indeed of this world. He
performs his gymnastics every morning to preserve his health. He
is stirred by the joy of Chatov recovering his wife. On a sheet of
paper to be found after his death he wants to draw a face sticking
out his tongue at “them.” He is childish and irascible, passionate,
methodical, and sensitive. Of the superman he has nothing but the
logic and the obsession, whereas of man he has the whole
catalogue. Yet it is he who speaks calmly of his divinity. He is not
mad, or else Dostoevsky is. Consequently it is not a
megalomaniac’s illusion that excites him. And taking the words in
their specific sense would, in this instance, be ridiculous.
Kirilov himself helps us to understand. In reply to a question
from Stavrogin, he makes clear that he is not talking of a god-man.
It might be thought that this springs from concern to distinguish
himself from Christ. But in reality it is a matter of annexing Christ.
Kirilov in fact fancies for a moment that Jesus at his death did not
find himself in Paradise. He found out then that his torture had
been useless. “The laws of nature,” says the engineer, “made
Christ live in the midst of falsehood and die for a falsehood.”
Solely in this sense Jesus indeed personifies the whole human
drama. He is the complete man, being the one who realized the
most absurd condition. He is not the God-man but the man-god.
And, like him, each of us can be crucified and victimized—and is
to a certain degree.
The divinity in question is therefore altogether terrestrial. “For
three years,” says Kirilov, “I sought the attribute of my divinity
and I have found it. The attribute of my divinity is independence.”
Now can be seen the meaning of Kirilov’s premise: “If God does
not exist, I am god.” To become god is merely to be free on this
earth, not to serve an immortal being. Above all, of course, it is
drawing all the inferences from that painful independence. If God
exists, all depends on him and we can do nothing against his will.
If he does not exist, everything depends on us. For Kirilov, as for
Nietzsche, to kill God is to become god oneself; it is to realize on
this earth the eternal life of which the Gospel speaks.[21] But if this
metaphysical crime is enough for man’s fulfillment, why add
suicide? Why kill oneself and leave this world after having won
freedom? That is contradictory. Kirilov is well aware of this, for he
adds: “If you feel that, you are a tsar and, far from killing yourself,
you will live covered with glory.” But men in general do not know
it. They do not feel “that.” As in the time of Prometheus, they
entertain blind hopes.[22] They need to be shown the way and
cannot do without preaching. Consequently, Kirilov must kill
himself out of love for humanity. He must show his brothers a
royal and difficult path on which he will be the first. It is a
pedagogical suicide. Kirilov sacrifices himself, then. But if he is
crucified, he will not be victimized. He remains the man-god,
convinced of a death without future, imbued with evangelical
melancholy. “I,” he says, “am unhappy because I am obliged to
assert my freedom.”
But once he is dead and men are at last enlightened, this earth
will be peopled with tsars and lighted up with human glory.
Kirilov’s pistol shot will be the signal for the last revolution. Thus,
it is not despair that urges him to death, but love of his neighbor
for his own sake. Before terminating in blood an indescribable
spiritual adventure, Kirilov makes a remark as old as human
suffering: “All is well.”
This theme of suicide in Dostoevsky, then, is indeed an absurd
theme. Let us merely note before going on that Kirilov reappears in
other characters who themselves set in motion additional absurd
themes. Stavrogin and Ivan Karamazov try out the absurd truths in
practical life. They are the ones liberated by Kirilov’s death. They
try their skill at being tsars. Stavrogin leads an “ironic” life, and it
is well known in what regard. He arouses hatred around him. And
yet the key to the character is found in his farewell letter: “I have
not been able to detest anything.” He is a tsar in indifference. Ivan
is likewise by refusing to surrender the royal powers of the mind.
To those who, like his brother, prove by their lives that it is
essential to humiliate oneself in order to believe, he might reply
that the condition is shameful. His key word is: “Everything is
permitted,” with the appropriate shade of melancholy. Of course,
like Nietzsche, the most famous of God’s assassins, he ends in
madness. But this is a risk worth running, and, faced with such
tragic ends, the essential impulse of the absurd mind is to ask:
“What does that prove?”
* * *
Thus the novels, like the Diary, propound the absurd question.
They establish logic unto death, exaltation, “dreadful” freedom, the
glory of the tsars become human. All is well, everything is
permitted, and nothing is hateful—these are absurd judgments. But
what an amazing creation in which those creatures of fire and ice
seem so familiar to us. The passionate world of indifference that
rumbles in their hearts does not seem at all monstrous to us. We
recognize in it our everyday anxieties. And probably no one so
much as Dostoevsky has managed to give the absurd world such
familiar and tormenting charms.
Yet what is his conclusion? Two quotations will show the
complete metaphysical reversal that leads the writer to other
revelations. The argument of the one who commits logical suicide
having provoked protests from the critics, Dostoevsky in the
following installments of the Diary amplifies his position and
concludes thus: “If faith in immortality is so necessary to the
human being (that without it he comes to the point of killing
himself), it must therefore be the normal state of humanity. Since
this is the case, the immortality of the human soul exists without
any doubt.” Then again in the last pages of his last novel, at the
conclusion of that gigantic combat with God, some children ask
Aliocha: “Karamazov, is it true what religion says, that we shall
rise from the dead, that we shall see one another again?” And
Aliocha answers: “Certainly, we shall see one another again, we
shall joyfully tell one another everything that has happened.’’
Thus Kirilov, Stavrogin, and Ivan are defeated. The Brothers
Karamazov replies to The Possessed. And it is indeed a conclusion.
Aliocha’s case is not ambiguous, as is that of Prince Muichkin. Ill,
the latter lives in a perpetual present, tinged with smiles and
indifference, and that blissful state might be the eternal life of
which the Prince speaks. On the contrary, Aliocha clearly says:
“We shall meet again.” There is no longer any question of suicide
and of madness. What is the use, for anyone who is sure of
immortality and of its joys? Man exchanges his divinity for
happiness. “We shall joyfully tell one another everything that has
happened.” Thus again Kirilov’s pistol rang out somewhere in
Russia, but the world continued to cherish its blind hopes. Men did
not understand “that.”
Consequently, it is not an absurd novelist addressing us, but an
existential novelist. Here, too, the leap is touching and gives its
nobility to the art that inspires it. It is a stirring acquiescence,
riddled with doubts, uncertain and ardent. Speaking of The
Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky wrote: “The chief question that
will be pursued throughout this book is the very one from which I
have suffered consciously or unconsciously all life long: the
existence of God.” It is hard to believe that a novel sufficed to
transform into joyful certainty the suffering of a lifetime. One
commentator[23] correctly pointed out that Dostoevsky is on Ivan’s
side and that the affirmative chapters took three months of effort
whereas what he called “the blasphemies” were written in three
weeks in a state of excitement. There is not one of his characters
who does not have that thorn in the flesh, who does not aggravate
it or seek a remedy for it in sensation or immortality.[24] In any
case, let us remain with this doubt. Here is a work which, in a
chiaroscuro more gripping than the light of day, permits us to seize
man’s struggle against his hopes. Having reached the end, the
creator makes his choice against his characters. That contradiction
thus allows us to make a distinction. It is not an absurd work that is
involved here, but a work that propounds the absurd problem.
Dostoevsky’s reply is humiliation, “shame” according to
Stavrogin. An absurd work, on the contrary, does not provide a
reply; that is the whole difference. Let us note this carefully in
conclusion: what contradicts the absurd in that work is not its
Christian character, but rather its announcing a future life. It is
possible to be Christian and absurd. There are examples of
Christians who do not believe in a future life. In regard to the work
of art, it should therefore be possible to define one of the directions
of the absurd analysis that could have been anticipated in the
preceding pages. It leads to propounding “the absurdity of the
Gospel.” It throws light upon this idea, fertile in repercussions, that
convictions do not prevent incredulity. On the contrary, it is easy
to see that the author of The Possessed, familiar with these paths,
in conclusion took a quite different way. The surprising reply of
the creator to his characters, of Do-stoevsky to Kirilov, can indeed
be summed up thus: existence is illusory and it is eternal.
Ephemeral Creation
At this point I perceive, therefore, that hope cannot be eluded
forever and that it can beset even those who wanted to be free of it.
This is the interest I find in the works discussed up to this point. I
could, at least in the realm of creation, list some truly absurd
works.[25] But everything must have a beginning. The object of this
quest is a certain fidelity. The Church has been so harsh with
heretics only because she deemed that there is no worse enemy
than a child who has gone astray. But the record of Gnostic
effronteries and the persistence of Manichean currents have
contributed more to the construction of orthodox dogma than all
the prayers. With due allowance, the same is true of the absurd.
One recognizes one’s course by discovering the paths that stray
from it. At the very conclusion of the absurd reasoning, in one of
the attitudes dictated by its logic, it is not a matter of indifference
to find hope coming back in under one of its most touching guises.
That shows the difficulty of the absurd ascesis. Above all, it shows
the necessity of unfailing alertness and thus confirms the general
plan of this essay.
But if it is still too early to list absurd works, at least a
conclusion can be reached as to the creative attitude, one of those
which can complete absurd existence. Art can never be so well
served as by a negative thought. Its dark and humiliated
proceedings are as necessary to the understanding of a great work
as black is to white. To work and create “for nothing,” to sculpture
in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s
work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this
has no more importance than building for centuries—this is the
difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these
two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and
magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He
must give the void its colors.
This leads to a special conception of the work of art. Too often
the work of a creator is looked upon as a series of isolated
testimonies. Thus, artist and man of letters are confused. A
profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the
experience of a life and assumes its shape, likewise, a man’s sole
creation is strengthened in its successive and multiple aspects: his
works. One after another, they complement one an-other, correct or
overtake one another, contradict one another too. If something
brings creation to an end, it is not the victorious and illusory cry of
the blinded artist: “I have said everything,” but the death of the
creator which closes his experience and the book of his genius.
That effort, that superhuman consciousness are not necessarily
apparent to the reader. There is no mystery in human creation. Will
performs this miracle. But at least there is no true creation without
a secret. To be sure, a succession of works can be but a series of
approximations of the same thought. But it is possible to conceive
of another type of creator proceeding by juxtaposition. Their works
may seem to be devoid of interrelations. To a certain degree, they
are contradictory.
But viewed all together, they resume their natural grouping.
From death, for instance, they derive their definitive significance.
They receive their most obvious light from the very life of their
author. At the moment of death, the succession of his works is but
a collection of failures. But if those failures all have the same
resonance, the creator has managed to repeat the image of his own
condition, to make the air echo with the sterile secret he possesses.
The effort to dominate is considerable here. But human
intelligence is up to much more. It will merely indicate clearly the
voluntary aspect of creation. Elsewhere I have brought out the fact
that human will had no other purpose than to maintain awareness.
But that could not do without discipline. Of all the schools of
patience and lucidity, creation is the most effective. It is also the
staggering evidence of man’s sole dignity: the dogged revolt
against his condition, perseverance in an effort considered sterile.
It calls for a daily effort, self-mastery, a precise estimate of the
limits of truth, measure, and strength. It constitutes an ascesis. All
that “for nothing,” in order to repeat and mark time. But perhaps
the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal
it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of
overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his
naked reality.
* * *
Let there be no mistake in aesthetics. It is not patient inquiry,
the unceasing, sterile illustration of a thesis that I am calling for
here. Quite the contrary, if I have made myself clearly understood.
The thesis-novel, the work that proves, the most hateful of all, is
the one that most often is inspired by a smug thought. You
demonstrate the truth you feel sure of possessing. But those are
ideas one launches, and ideas are the contrary of thought. Those
creators are philosophers, ashamed of themselves. Those I am
speaking of or whom I imagine are, on the contrary, lucid thinkers.
At a certain point where thought turns back on itself, they raise up
the images of their works like the obvious symbols of a limited,
mortal, and rebellious thought.
They perhaps prove something. But those proofs are ones that
the novelists provide for themselves rather than for the world in
general. The essential is that the novelists should triumph in the
concrete and that this constitute their nobility. This wholly carnal
triumph has been prepared for them by a thought in which abstract
powers have been humiliated. When they are completely so, at the
same time the flesh makes the creation shine forth in all its absurd
luster. After all, ironic philosophies produce passionate works.
Any thought that abandons unity glorifies diversity. And
diversity is the home of art. The only thought to liberate the mind
is that which leaves it alone, certain of its limits and of its
impending end. No doctrine tempts it. It awaits the ripening of the
work and of life. Detached from it, the work will once more give a
barely muffled voice to a soul Forever freed from hope. Or it will
give voice to nothing if the creator, tired of his activity, intends to
turn away. That is equivalent.
* * *
Thus, I ask of absurd creation what I required from thought—
revolt, freedom, and diversity. Later on it will manifest its utter
futility. In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion
mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a
discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. The
required diligence, the doggedness and lucidity thus resemble the
conqueror’s attitude. To create is likewise to give a shape to one’s
fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as
much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us this: there is no
frontier between being and appearing.
Let me repeat. None of all this has any real meaning. On the
way to that liberty, there is still a progress to be made. The final
effort for these related minds, creator or conqueror, is to manage to
free themselves also from their undertakings: succeed in granting
that the very work, whether it be conquest, love, or creation, may
well not be; consummate thus the utter futility of any individual
life. Indeed, that gives them more freedom in the realization of that
work, just as becoming aware of the absurdity of life authorized
them to plunge into it with every excess.
All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside
of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is
liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What
bound him was the illusion of another world. The outcome of his
thought, ceasing to be renunciatory, flowers in images. It frolics—
in myths, to be sure, but myths with no other depth than that of
human suffering and, like it, inexhaustible. Not the divine fable
that amuses and blinds, but the terrestrial face, gesture, and drama
in which are summed up a difficult wisdom and an ephemeral
passion.
The Myth Of Sisyphus
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock
to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its
own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no
more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most
prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he
was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no
contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he
became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is
accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their
secrets. AEgina, the daughter of AEsopus, was carried off by
Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and
complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered
to tell about it on condition that AEsopus would give water to the
citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the
benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld.
Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto
could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He
dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of
her conqueror.
It is said also that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted
to test his wife’s love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body
into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the
underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to
human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in
order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of
this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no
longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of
anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing
the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A
decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the
impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, led
him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for
him.
You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He
is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn
of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him
that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted
toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid
for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in
the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life
into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a
body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it and push it up a
slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the
cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered
mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched,
the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very
end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without
depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone
rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he
will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back
down to the plain.
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A
face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that
man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the
torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a
breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the
hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves
the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is
superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious.
Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of
succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in
his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is
tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.
Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows
the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of
during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at
the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be
surmounted by scorn.
* * *
If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can
also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy
Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the
beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory,
when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that
melancholy rises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is
the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are
our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being
acknowledged. Thus, CEdipus at the outset obeys fate without
knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins.
Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the
only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then
a tremendous remark rings out: “Despite so many ordeals, my
advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that
all is well.” Sophocles’ CEdipus, like Dostoevsky’s Kirilov, thus
gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms
modern heroism.
One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to
write a manual of happiness. “What! by such narrow ways—?”
There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two
sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake
to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd
discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs
from happiness. “I conclude that all is well,” says CEdipus, and
that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of
man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out
of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a
preference for futile sufferings. It makes of fate a human matter,
which must be settled among men.
All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs
to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he
contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe
suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices
of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all
the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There
is no sun without shadow, and it is es-sential to know the night.
The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be
unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or
at least there is but one which he concludes is inevitable and
despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his
days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his
life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he
contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his
fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon
sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of
all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the
night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds
one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that
negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well.
This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither
sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of
that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle
itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must
imagine Sisyphus happy.
Appendix: Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka
The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to reread.
His endings, or his absence of endings, suggest explanations
which, however, are not revealed in clear language but, before they
seem justified, require that the story be reread from another point
of view. Sometimes there is a double possibility of interpretation,
whence appears the necessity for two readings. This is what the
author wanted. But it would be wrong to try to interpret everything
in Kafka in detail. A symbol is always in general and, however
precise its translation, an artist can restore to it only its movement:
there is no word-for-word rendering. Moreover, nothing is harder
to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends
the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more
than he is aware of expressing. In this regard, the surest means of
getting hold of it is not to provoke it, to begin the work without a
preconceived attitude and not to look for its hidden currents. For
Kafka in particular it is fair to agree to his rules, to approach the
drama through its externals and the novel through its form.
At first glance and for a casual reader, they are disturbing
adventures that carry off quaking and dogged characters into
pursuit of problems they never formulate. In The Trial, Joseph K.
is accused. But he doesn’t know of what. He is doubtless eager to
defend himself, but he doesn’t know why. The lawyers find his
case difficult. Meanwhile, he does not neglect to love, to eat, or to
read his paper. Then he is judged. But the courtroom is very dark.
He doesn’t understand much. He merely assumes that he is
condemned, but to what he barely wonders. At times he suspects
just the same, and he continues living. Some time later two well-
dressed and polite gentlemen come to get him and invite him to
follow them. Most courteously they lead him into a wretched
suburb, put his head on a stone, and slit his throat. Before dying the
condemned man says merely: “Like a dog.”
You see that it is hard to speak of a symbol in a tale whose
most obvious quality just happens to be naturalness. But
naturalness is a hard category to understand. There are works in
which the event seems natural to the reader. But there are others
(rarer, to be sure) in which the character considers natural what
happens to him. By an odd but obvious paradox, the more
extraordinary the character’s adventures are, the more noticeable
will be the naturalness of the story: it is in proportion to the
divergence we feel between the strangeness of a man’s life and the
simplicity with which that man accepts it. It seems that this
naturalness is Kafka’s. And, precisely, one is well aware what The
Trial means. People have spoken of an image of the human
condition. To be sure. Yet it is both simpler and more complex. I
mean that the significance of the novel is more particular and more
personal to Kafka. To a certain degree, he is the one who does the
talking, even though it is me he confesses. He lives and he is
condemned. He learns this on the first pages of the novel he is
pursuing in this world, and if he tries to cope with this, he
nonetheless does so without surprise. He will never show sufficient
astonishment at this lack of astonishment. It is by such
contradictions that the first signs of the absurd work are
recognized. The mind projects into the concrete its spiritual
tragedy. And it can do so solely by means of a perpetual paradox
which confers on colors the power to express the void and on daily
gestures the strength to translate eternal ambitions.
Likewise, The Castle is perhaps a theology in action, but it is
first of all the individual adventure of a soul in quest of its grace,
of a man who asks of this world’s objects their royal secret and of
women the signs of the god that sleeps in them. Metamorphosis, in
turn, certainly represents the horrible imagery of an ethic of
lucidity. But it is also the product of that incalculable amazement
man feels at being conscious of the beast he becomes effortlessly.
In this fundamental ambiguity lies Kafka’s secret. These perpetual
oscillations between the natural and the extraordinary, the
individual and the universal, the tragic and the everyday, the
absurd and the logical, are found throughout his work and give it
both its resonance and its meaning. These are the paradoxes that
must be enumerated, the contradictions that must be strengthened,
in order to understand the absurd work.
A symbol, indeed, assumes two planes, two worlds of ideas
and sensations, and a dictionary of correspondences between them.
This lexicon is the hardest thing to draw up. But awaking to the
two worlds brought face to face is tantamount to getting on the trail
of their secret relationships. In Kafka these two worlds are that of
everyday life on the one hand and, on the other, that of
supernatural anxiety.[26] It seems that we are witnessing here an
interminable exploitation of Nietzsche’s remark: “Great problems
are in the street.”
There is in the human condition (and this is a commonplace of
all literatures) a basic absurdity as well as an implacable nobility.
The two coincide, as is natural. Both of them are represented, let
me repeat, in the ridiculous divorce separating our spiritual
excesses and the ephemeral joys of the body. The absurd thing is
that it should be the soul of this body which it transcends so
inordinately. Whoever would like to represent this absurdity must
give it life in a series of parallel contrasts. Thus it is that Kafka
expresses tragedy by the everyday and the absurd by the logical.
An actor lends more force to a tragic character the more careful
he is not to exaggerate it. If he is moderate, the horror he inspires
will be immoderate. In this regard Greek tragedy is rich in lessons.
In a tragic work fate always makes itself felt better in the guise of
logic and naturalness. CEdipus’s fate is announced in advance. It is
decided supernaturally that he will commit the murder and the
incest. The drama’s whole effort is to show the logical system
which, from deduction to deduction, will crown the hero’s
misfortune. Merely to announce to us that uncommon fate is
scarcely horrible, because it is improbable. But if its necessity is
demonstrated to us in the framework of everyday life, society,
state, familiar emotion, then the horror is hallowed. In that revolt
that shakes man and makes him say: “That is not possible,” there is
an element of desperate certainty that “that” can be.
This is the whole secret of Greek tragedy, or at least of one of
its aspects. For there is another which, by a reverse method, would
help us to understand Kafka better. The human heart has a tiresome
tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness
likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable.
Modern man, however, takes the credit for it himself, when he
doesn’t fail to recognize it. Much could be said, on the contrary,
about the privileged fates of Greek tragedy and those favored in
legend who, like Ulysses, in the midst of the worst adventures are
saved from themselves. It was not so easy to return to Ithaca.
What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity
that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic. This is why
Samsa, the hero of Metamorphosis, is a traveling salesman. This is
why the only thing that disturbs him in the strange adventure that
makes a vermin of him is that his boss will be angry at his absence.
Legs and feelers grow out on him, his spine arches up, white spots
appear on his belly and—I shall not say that this does not astonish
him, for the effect would be spoiled—but it causes him a “slight
annoyance.” The whole art of Kafka is in that distinction. In his
central work, The Castle, the details of everyday life stand out, and
yet in that strange novel in which nothing concludes and
everything begins over again, it is the essential adventure of a soul
in quest of its grace that is represented. That translation of the
problem into action, that coincidence of the general and the
particular are recognized likewise in the little artifices that belong
to every great creator. In The Trial the hero might have been
named Schmidt or Franz Kafka. But he is named Joseph K. He is
not Kafka and yet he is Kafka. He is an average European. He is
like everybody else. But he is also the entity K. who is the x of this
flesh-and-blood equation.
Likewise, if Kafka wants to express the absurd, he will make
use of consistency. You know the story of the crazy man who was
fishing in a bathtub. A doctor with ideas as to psychiatric
treatments asked him “if they were biting,” to which he received
the harsh reply: “Of course not, you fool, since this is a bathtub.”
That story belongs to the baroque type. But in it can be grasped
quite clearly to what a degree the absurd effect is linked to an
excess of logic. Kafka’s world is in truth an indescribable universe
in which man allows himself the tormenting luxury of fishing in a
bathtub, knowing that nothing will come of it.
Consequently, I recognize here a work that is absurd in its
principles. As for The Trial, for instance, I can indeed say that it is
a complete success. Flesh wins out.
Nothing is lacking, neither the unexpressed revolt (but it is
what is writing), nor lucid and mute despair (but it is what is
creating), nor that amazing freedom of manner which the
characters of the novel exemplify until their ultimate death.
* * *
Yet this world is not so closed as it seems. Into this universe
devoid of progress, Kafka is going to introduce hope in a strange
form. In this regard The Trial and The Castle do not follow the
same direction. They complement each other. The barely
perceptible progression from one to the other represents a
tremendous conquest in the realm of evasion. The Trial propounds
a problem which The Castle, to a certain degree, solves. The first
describes according to a quasi scientific method and without
concluding. The second, to a certain degree, explains. The Trial
diagnoses, and The Castle imagines a treatment. But the remedy
proposed here does not cure. It merely brings the malady back into
normal life. It helps to accept it. In a certain sense (let us think of
Kierkegaard), it makes people cherish it. The Land Surveyor K.
cannot imagine another anxiety than the one that is tormenting
him. The very people around him become attached to that void and
that nameless pain, as if suffering assumed in this case a privileged
aspect. “How I need you,” Frieda says to K. “How forsaken I feel,
since knowing you, when you are not with me.” This subtle
remedy that makes us love what crushes us and makes hope spring
up in a world without issue, this sudden “leap” through which
everything is changed, is the secret of the existential revolution and
of The Castle itself.
Few works are more rigorous in their development than The
Castle. K. is named Land Surveyor to the Castle and he arrives in
the village. But from the village to the Castle it is impossible to
communicate. For hundreds of pages K. persists in seeking his
way, makes every advance, uses trickery and expedients, never
gets angry, and with disconcerting good will tries to assume the
duties entrusted to him. Each chapter is a new frustration. And also
a new beginning. It is not logic, but consistent method. The scope
of that insistence constitutes the work’s tragic quality. When K.
telephones to the Castle, he hears confused, mingled voices, vague
laughs, distant invitations. That is enough to feed his hope, like
those few signs appearing in summer skies or those evening
anticipations which make up our reason for living. Here is found
the secret of the melancholy peculiar to Kafka. The same, in truth,
that is found in Proust’s work or in the landscape of Plotinus: a
nostalgia for a lost paradise. “I become very sad,” says Olga,
“when Barnabas tells me in the morning that he is going to the
Castle: that probably futile trip, that probably wasted day, that
probably empty hope.”
“Probably”—on this implication Kafka gambles his entire
work. But nothing avails; the quest of the eternal here is
meticulous. And those inspired automata, Kafka’s characters,
provide us with a precise image of what we should be if we were
deprived of our distractions[27] and utterly consigned to the
humiliations of the divine.
In The Castle that surrender to the everyday becomes an ethic.
The great hope of K. is to get the Castle to adopt him. Unable to
achieve this alone, his whole effort is to deserve this favor by
becoming an inhabitant of the village, by losing the status of
foreigner that everyone makes him feel. What he wants is an
occupation, a home, the life of a healthy, normal man. He can’t
stand his madness any longer. He wants to be reasonable. He wants
to cast off the peculiar curse that makes him a stranger to the
village. The episode of Frieda is significant in this regard. If he
takes as his mistress this woman who has known one of the
Castle’s officials, this is because of her past. He derives from her
something that transcends him while being aware of what makes
her forever unworthy of the Castle. This makes one think of
Kierkegaard’s strange love for Regina Olsen. In certain men, the
fire of eternity consuming them is great enough for them to burn in
it the very heart of those closest to them. The fatal mistake that
consists in giving to God what is not God’s is likewise the subject
of this episode of The Castle. But for Kafka it seems that this is not
a mistake. It is a doctrine and a “leap.” There is nothing that is not
God’s.
Even more significant is the fact that the Land Surveyor breaks
with Frieda in order to go toward the Barnabas sisters. For the
Barnabas family is the only one in the village that is utterly
forsaken by the Castle and by the village itself. Amalia, the elder
sister, has rejected the shameful propositions made her by one of
the Castle’s officials. The immoral curse that followed has forever
cast her out from the love of God. Being incapable of losing one’s
honor for God amounts to making oneself unworthy of his grace.
You recognize a theme familiar to existential philosophy: truth
contrary to morality. At this point things are far-reaching. For the
path pursued by Kafka’s hero from Frieda to the Barnabas sisters is
the very one that leads from trusting love to the deification of the
absurd. Here again Kafka’s thought runs parallel to Kierkegaard. It
is not surprising that the “Barnabas story” is placed at the end of
the book. The Land Surveyor’s last attempt is to recapture God
through what negates him, to recognize him, not according to our
categories of goodness and beauty, but behind the empty and
hideous aspects of his indifference, of his injustice, and of his
hatred. That stranger who asks the Castle to adopt him is at the end
of his voyage a little more exiled because this time he is unfaithful
to himself, forsaking morality, logic, and intellectual truths in order
to try to enter, endowed solely with his mad hope, the desert of
divine grace.[28]
***
The word “hope” used here is not ridiculous. On the contrary,
the more tragic the condition described by Kafka, the firmer and
more aggressive that hope becomes. The more truly absurd The
Trial is, the more moving and illegitimate the impassioned “leap”
of The Castle seems. But we find here again in a pure state the
paradox of existential thought as it is expressed, for instance, by
Kierkegaard: “Earthly hope must be killed; only then can one be
saved by true hope,” [29]which can be translated: “One has to have
written The Trial to undertake The Castle.”
Most of those who have spoken of Kafka have indeed defined
his work as a desperate cry with no recourse left to man. But this
calls for review. There is hope and hope. To me the optimistic
work of Henri Bordeaux seems peculiarly discouraging. This is
because it has nothing for the discriminating. Malraux’s thought,
on the other hand, is always bracing. But in these two cases neither
the same hope nor the same despair is at issue. I see merely that the
absurd work itself may lead to the infidelity I want to avoid. The
work which was but an ineffectual repetition of a sterile condition,
a lucid glorification ol the ephemeral, becomes here a cradle of
illusions. It explains, it gives a shape to hope. The creator can no
longer divorce himself from it. It is not the tragic game it was to
be. It gives a meaning to the author’s life.
It is strange in any case that works of related inspiration like
those of Kafka, Kierkegaard, or Chestov—those, in short, of
existential novelists and philosophers completely oriented toward
the Absurd and its consequences—should in the long run lead to
that tremendous cry of hope.
They embrace the God that consumes them. It is through
humility that hope enters in. For the absurd of this existence
assures them a little more of supernatural reality. If the course of
this life leads to God, there is an outcome after all. And the
perseverance, the insistence with which Kierkegaard, Chestov, and
Kafka’s heroes repeat their itineraries are a special warrant of the
uplifting power of that certainty.[30]
Kafka refuses his god moral nobility, evidence, virtue,
coherence, but only the better to fall into his arms. The absurd is
recognized, accepted, and man is resigned to it, but from then on
we know that it has ceased to be the absurd. Within the limits of
the human condition, what greater hope than the hope that allows
an escape from that condition? As I see once more, existential
thought in this regard (and contrary to current opinion) is steeped
in a vast hope. The very hope which at the time of early
Christianity and the spreading of the good news inflamed the
ancient world. But in that leap that characterizes all existential
thought, in that insistence, in that surveying of a divinity devoid of
surface, how can one fail to see the mark of a lucidity that
repudiates itself? It is merely claimed that this is pride abdicating
to save itself. Such a repudiation would be fecund. But this does
not change that. The moral value of lucidity cannot be diminished
in my eyes by calling it sterile like all pride. For a truth also, by its
very definition, is sterile. All facts are. In a world where everything
is given and nothing is explained, the fecundity of a value or of a
metaphysic is a notion devoid of meaning.
In any case, you see here in what tradition of thought Kafka’s
work takes its place. It would indeed be intelligent to consider as
inevitable the progression leading from The Trial to The Castle.
Joseph K. and the Land Surveyor K. are merely two poles that
attract Kafka.[31] I shall speak like him and say that his work is
probably not absurd. But that should not deter us from seeing its
nobility and universality. They come from the fact that he managed
to represent so fully the everyday passage from hope to grief and
from desperate wisdom to intentional blindness. His work is
universal (a really absurd work is not universal) to the extent to
which it represents the emotionally moving face of man fleeing
humanity, deriving from his contradictions reasons for believing,
reasons for hoping from his fecund despairs, and calling life his
terrifying apprenticeship in death. It is universal because its
inspiration is religious. As in all religions, man is freed of the
weight of his own life. But if I know that, if I can even admire it, I
also know that I am not seeking what is universal, but what is true.
The two may well not coincide.
This particular view will be better understood if I say that truly
hopeless thought just happens to be defined by the opposite criteria
and that the tragic work might be the work that, after all future
hope is exiled, describes the life of a happy man. The more
exciting life is, the more absurd is the idea of losing it. This is
perhaps the secret of that proud aridity felt in Nietzsche’s work. In
this connection, Nietzsche appears to be the only artist to have
derived the extreme consequences of an aesthetic of the Absurd,
inasmuch as his final message lies in a sterile and conquering
lucidity and an obstinate negation of any supernatural consolation.
The preceding should nevertheless suffice to bring out the
capital importance of Kafka in the framework of this essay. Here
we are carried to the confines of human thought. In the fullest
sense of the word, it can be said that everything in that work is
essential. In any case, it propounds the absurd problem altogether.
If one wants to compare these conclusions with our initial remarks,
the content with the form, the secret meaning of The Castle with
the natural art in which it is molded, K.’s passionate, proud quest
with the everyday setting against which it takes place, then one
will realize what may be its greatness. For if nostalgia is the mark
of the human, perhaps no one has given such flesh and volume to
these phantoms of regret. But at the same time will be sensed what
exceptional nobility the absurd work calls for, which is perhaps not
found here. If the nature of art is to bind the general to the
particular, ephemeral eternity of a drop of water to the play of its
lights, it is even truer to judge the greatness of the absurd writer by
the distance he is able to introduce between these two worlds. His
secret consists in being able to find the exact point where they
meet in their greatest disproportion.
And, to tell the truth, this geometrical locus of man and the
inhuman is seen everywhere by the pure in heart. If Faust and Don
Quixote are eminent creations of art, this is because of the
immeasurable nobilities they point out to us with their earthly
hands. Yet a moment always comes when the mind negates the
truths that those hands can touch. A moment comes when the
creation ceases to be taken tragically; it is merely taken seriously.
Then man is concerned with hope. But that is not his business. His
business is to turn away from subterfuge. Yet this is just what I
find at the conclusion of the vehement proceedings Kafka institutes
against the whole universe. His unbelievable verdict is this hideous
and upsetting world in which the very moles dare to hope.[32]
Summer In Algiers
for
JACQUES HEURGON
The loves we share with a city are often secret loves. Old
walled towns like Paris, Prague, and even Florence are closed in on
themselves and hence limit the world that belongs to them. But
Algiers (together with certain other privileged places such as cities
on the sea) opens to the sky like a mouth or a wound. In Algiers
one loves the commonplaces: the sea at the end of every street, a
certain volume of sunlight, the beauty of the race. And, as always,
in that unashamed offering there is a secret fragrance. In Paris it is
possible to be homesick for space and a beating of wings. Here at
least man is gratified in every wish and, sure of his desires, can at
last measure his possessions.
Probably one has to live in Algiers for some time in order to
realize how paralyzing an excess of nature’s bounty can be. There
is nothing here for whoever would learn, educate himself, or better
himself. This country has no lessons to teach. It neither promises
nor affords glimpses. It is satisfied to give, but in abundance. It is
completely accessible to the eyes, and you know it the moment you
enjoy it. Its pleasures are without remedy and its joys without
hope. Above all, it requires clairvoyant souls—that is, without
solace. It insists upon one’s performing an act of lucidity as one
performs an act of faith. Strange country that gives the man it
nourishes both his splendor and his misery! It is not surprising that
the sensual riches granted to a sensitive man of these regions
should coincide with the most extreme destitution. No truth fails to
carry with it its bitterness. How can one be surprised, then, if I
never feel more affection for the face of this country than amid its
poorest men?
During their entire youth men find here a life in proportion to
their beauty. Then, later on, the downhill slope and obscurity. They
wagered on the flesh, but knowing they were to lose. In Algiers
whoever is young and alive finds sanctuary and occasion for
triumphs everywhere: in the bay, the sun, the red and white games
on the seaward terraces, the flowers and sports stadiums, the cool-
legged girls. But for whoever has lost his youth there is nothing to
cling to and nowhere where melancholy can escape itself.
Elsewhere, Italian terraces, European cloisters, or the profile of the
Provencal hills—all places where man can flee his humanity and
gently liberate himself from himself. But everything here calls for
solitude and the blood of young men. Goethe on his deathbed calls
for light and this is a historic remark. At Belcourt and Bab-el-Oued
old men seated in the depths of cafes listen to the bragging of
young men with plastered hair.
Summer betrays these beginnings and ends to us in Algiers.
During those months the city is deserted. But the poor remain, and
the sky. We join the former as they go down toward the harbor and
man’s treasures: warmth of the water and the brown bodies of
women. In the evening, sated with such wealth, they return to the
oilcloth and kerosene lamp that constitute the whole setting of their
life.
In Algiers no one says “go for a swim,” but rather “indulge in a
swim.” The implications are clear. People swim in the harbor and
go to rest on the buoys. Anyone who passes near a buoy where a
pretty girl already is sunning herself shouts to his friends: “I tell
you it’s a seagull.” These are healthy amusements. They must
obviously constitute the ideal of those youths, since most of them
continue the same life in the winter, undressing every day at noon
for a frugal lunch in the sun. Not that they have read the boring
sermons of the nudists, those Protestants of the flesh (there is a
theory of the body quite as tiresome as that of the mind). But they
are simply “comfortable in the sunlight.” The importance of this
custom for our epoch can never be overestimated. For the first time
in two thousand years the body has appeared naked on beaches.
For twenty centuries men have striven to give decency to Greek
insolence and naivete, to diminish the flesh and complicate dress.
Today, despite that history, young men running on Mediterranean
beaches repeat the gestures of the athletes of Delos. And living
thus among bodies and through one’s body, one becomes aware
that it has its connotations, its life, and, to risk nonsense, a
psychology of its own.[33] The body’s evolution, like that of the
mind, has its history, its vicissitudes, its progress, and its
deficiency. With this distinction, however: color. When you
frequent the beach in summer you become aware of a simultaneous
progression of all skins from white to golden to tanned, ending up
in a tobacco color which marks the extreme limit of the effort of
transformation of which the body is capable. Above the harbor
stands the set of white cubes of the Kasbah. When you are at water
level, against the sharp while background of the Arab town the
bodies describe a copper-colored frieze. And as the month of
August progresses and the sun grows, the white of the houses
becomes more blinding and skins take on a darker warmth. How
can one fail to participate, then, in that dialogue of stone and flesh
in tune with the sun and seasons? The whole morning has been
spent in diving, in bursts of laughter amid splashing water, in
vigorous paddles around the red and black freighters (those from
Norway with all the scents of wood, those that come from
Germany full of the smell of oil, those that go up and down the
coast and smell of wine and old casks). At the hour when the sun
overflows from every corner of the sky at once, the orange canoe
loaded with brown bodies brings us home in a mad race. And
when, having suddenly interrupted the cadenced beat of the double
paddle’s bright-colored wings, we glide slowly in the calm water
of the inner harbor, how can I fail to feel that I am piloting through
the smooth waters a savage cargo of gods in whom I recognize my
brothers?
But at the other end of the city summer is already offering us,
by way of contrast, its other riches: I mean its silence and its
boredom. That silence is not always of the same quality, depending
on whether it springs from the shade or the sunlight. There is the
silence of noon on the Place du Gouvernement. In the shade of the
trees surrounding it, Arabs sell for five sous glasses of iced
lemonade flavored with orange-flowers. Their cry “Cool, cool” can
be heard across the empty square. After their cry silence again falls
under the burning sun: in the vendor’s jug the ice moves and I can
hear its tinkle. There is the silence of the siesta. In the streets of the
Marine, in front of the dirty barbershops it can be measured in the
melodious buzzing of flies behind the hollow reed curtains.
Elsewhere, in the Moorish cafes of the Kasbah the body is silent,
unable to tear itself away, to leave the glass of tea and rediscover
time with the pulsing of its own blood. But, above all, there is the
silence of summer evenings.
Those brief moments when day topples into night must be
peopled with secret signs and summons for my Algiers to be so
closely linked to them. When I spend some time far from that
town, I imagine its twilights as promises of happiness. On the hills
above the city there are paths among the mastics and olive trees.
And toward them my heart turns at such moments. I see flights of
black birds rise against the green horizon. In the sky suddenly
divested of its sun something relaxes. A whole little nation of red
clouds stretches out until it is absorbed in the air. Almost
immediately afterward appears the first star that had been seen
taking shape and consistency in the depth of the sky. And then
suddenly, all consuming, night. What exceptional quality do the
fugitive Algerian evenings possess to be able to release so many
things in me? I haven’t time to tire of that sweetness they leave on
my lips before it has disappeared into night. Is this the secret of its
persistence? This country’s affection is overwhelming and furtive.
But during the moment it is present, one’s heart at least surrenders
completely to it. At Padovani Beach the dance hall is open every
day. And in that huge rectangular box with its entire side open to
the sea, the poor young people of the neighborhood dance until
evening. Often I used to await there a moment of exceptional
beauty. During the day the hall is protected by sloping wooden
awnings. When the sun goes down they are raised. Then the hall is
filled with an odd green light born of the double shell of the sky
and the sea. When one is seated far from the windows, one sees
only the sky and, silhouetted against it, the faces of the dancers
passing in succession. Sometimes a waltz is being played, and
against the green background the black profiles whirl obstinately
like those cut-out silhouettes that are attached to a phonograph’s
turntable. Night comes rapidly after this, and with it the lights. But
I am unable to relate the thrill and secrecy that subtle instant holds
for me. I recall at least a magnificent tall girl who had danced all
afternoon. She was wearing a jasmine garland on her tight blue
dress, wet with perspiration from the small of her back to her legs.
She was laughing as she danced and throwing back her head. As
she passed the tables, she left behind her a mingled scent of
flowers and flesh. When evening came, I could no longer see her
body pressed tight to her partner, but against the sky whirled
alternating spots of white jasmine and black hair, and when she
would throw back her swelling breast I would hear her laugh and
see her partner’s profile suddenly plunge forward. I owe to such
evenings the idea I have of innocence. In any case, I learn not to
separate these creatures bursting with violent energy from the sky
where their desires whirl.
* * *
In the neighborhood movies in Algiers peppermint lozenges are
sometimes sold with, stamped in red, all that is necessary to the
awakening of love: (1) questions: “When will you marry me?” “Do
you love me?” and (2) replies: “Madly,” “Next spring.” After
having prepared the way, you pass them to your neighbor, who
answers likewise or else turns a deaf ear. At Belcourt marriages
have been arranged this way and whole lives been pledged by the
mere exchange of peppermint lozenges. And this really depicts the
childlike people of this region.
The distinguishing mark of youth is perhaps a magnificent
vocation for facile joys. But, above all, it is a haste to live that
borders on waste. At Belcourt, as at Bab-el-Oued, people get
married young. They go to work early and in ten years exhaust the
experience of a lifetime. A thirty-year-old workman has already
played all the cards in his hand. He awaits the end between his
wife and his children. His joys have been sudden and merciless, as
has been his life. One realizes that he is born of this country where
everything is given to be taken away. In that plenty and profusion
life follows the sweep of great passions, sudden, exacting, and
generous. It is not to be built up, but to be burned up. Stopping to
think and becoming better are out of the question. The notion of
hell, for instance, is merely a funny joke here. Such imaginings are
allowed only to the very virtuous. And I really think that virtue is a
meaningless word in all Algeria. Not that these men lack
principles. They have their code, and a very special one. You are
not disrespectful to your mother. You see that your wife is
respected in the street. You show consideration for a pregnant
woman. You don’t double up on an adversary, because “that looks
bad.” Whoever does not observe these elementary commandments
“is not a man,” and the question is decided. This strikes me as fair
and strong. There are still many of us who automatically observe
this code of the street, the only disinterested one I know. But at the
same time the shopkeeper’s ethics are unknown. I have always
seen faces around me filled with pity at the sight of a man between
two policemen. And before knowing whether the man had stolen,
killed his father, or was merely a nonconformist, they would say:
“The poor fellow,” or else, with a hint of admiration: “He’s a
pirate, all right.”
There are races born for pride and life. They are the ones that
nourish the strangest vocation for boredom. It is also among them
that the attitude toward death is the most repulsive. Aside from
sensual pleasure, the amusements of this race are among the
silliest. A society of bowlers and association banquets, the three-
franc movies and parish feasts have for years provided the
recreation of those over thirty. Algiers Sundays are among the
most sinister. How, then, could this race devoid of spirituality
clothe in myths the profound horror of its life? Everything related
to death is either ridiculous or hateful here. This populace without
religion and without idols dies alone after having lived in a crowd.
I know no more hideous spot than the cemetery on Boulevard Bru,
opposite one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. An
accumulation of bad taste among the black fencings allows a
dreadful melancholy to rise from this spot where death shows her
true likeness. “Everything fades,” say the heart-shaped ex-votos,
“except memory.” And all insist on that paltry eternity provided us
cheaply by the hearts of those who loved us. The same words fit all
despairs. Addressed to the dead man, they speak to him in the
second person (our memory will never forsake you); lugubrious
pretense which attributes a body and desires to what is at best a
black liquid. Elsewhere, amid a deadly profusion of marble flowers
and birds, this bold assertion: “Never will your grave be without
flowers.” But never fear: the inscription surrounds a gilded stucco
bouquet, very time-saving for the living (like those immortelles
which owe their pompous name to the gratitude of those who still
jump onto moving buses). Inasmuch as it is essential to keep up
with the times, the classic warbler is sometimes replaced by an
astounding pearl airplane piloted by a silly angel who, without
regard for logic, is provided with an impressive pair of wings.
Yet how to bring out that these images of death are never
separated from life? Here the values are closely linked. The
favorite joke of Algerian undertakers, when driving an empty
hearse, is to shout: “Want a ride, sister?” to any pretty girls they
meet on the way. There is no objection to seeing a symbol in this,
even if somewhat untoward. It may seem blasphemous, likewise,
to reply to the announcement of a death while winking one’s left
eye: “Poor fellow, he’ll never sing again,” or, like that woman of
Oran who bad never loved her husband: “God gave him to me and
God has taken him from me.” But, all in all, I see nothing sacred in
death and am well aware, on the other hand, of the distance there is
between fear and respect. Everything here suggests the horror of
dying in a country that invites one to live. And yet it is under the
very walls of this cemetery that the young of Belcourt have their
assignations and that the girls offer themselves to kisses and
caresses.
I am well aware that such a race cannot be accepted by all.
Here intelligence has no place as in Italy. This race is indifferent to
the mind. It has a cult for and admiration of the body. Whence its
strength, its innocent cynicism, and a puerile vanity which explains
why it is so severely judged. It is commonly blamed for its
“mentality”—that is, a way of seeing and of living. And it is true
that a certain intensity of life is inseparable from injustice. Yet here
is a rate without past, without tradition, and yet not without
poetry—but a poetry whose quality I know well, harsh, carnal, far
from tenderness, that of their very sky, the only one in truth to
move me and bring me inner peace. The contrary of a civilized
nation is a creative nation. I have the mad hope that, without
knowing it perhaps, these barbarians lounging on beaches are
actually modeling the image of a culture in which the greatness of
man will at last find its true likeness. This race, wholly cast into its
present, lives without myths, without solace. It has put all its
possessions on this earth and therefore remains without defense
against death. All the gifts of physical beauty have been lavished
on it. And with them, the strange avidity that always accompanies
that wealth without future. Everything that is done here shows a
horror of stability and a disregard for the future. People are in haste
to live, and if an art were to be born here it would obey that hatred
of permanence that made the Dorians fashion their first column in
wood. And yet, yes, one can find measure as well as excess in the
violent and keen face of this race, in this summer sky with nothing
tender in it, before which all truths can be uttered and on which no
deceptive divinity has traced the signs of hope or of redemption.
Between this sky and these faces turned toward it, nothing on
which to hang a mythology, a literature, an ethic, or a religion, but
stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch.
* * *
To feel one’s attachment to a certain region, one’s love for a
certain group of men, to know that there is always a spot where
one’s heart will feel at peace these are many certainties for a single
human life. And yet this is not enough. But at certain moments
everything yearns for that spiritual home. “Yes, we must go back
there—there, indeed.” Is there anything odd in finding on earth that
union that Plotinus longed for? Unity is expressed here in terms of
sun and sea. The heart is sensitive to it through a certain savor of
flesh which constitutes its bitterness and its grandeur. I learn that
there is no superhuman happiness, no eternity outside the sweep of
days. These paltry and essential belongings, these relative truths
are the only ones to stir me. As for the others, the “ideal” truths, I
have not enough soul to understand them. Not that one must be an
animal, but I find no meaning in the happiness of angels. I know
simply that this sky will last longer than I. And what shall I call
eternity except what will continue after my death? I am not
expressing here the creature’s satisfaction with his condition. It is
quite a different matter. It is not always easy to be a man, still less
to be a pure man. But being pure is recovering that spiritual home
where one can feel the world’s relationship, where one’s pulse-
beats coincide with the violent throbbing of the two-o’clock sun. It
is well known that one’s native land is always recognized at the
moment of losing it. For those who are too uneasy about
themselves, their native land is the one that negates them. I should
not like to be brutal or seem extravagant. But, after all, what
negates me in this life is first of all what kills me. Everything that
exalts life at the same time increases its absurdity. In the Algerian
summer I learn that one thing only is more tragic than suffering,
and that is the life of a happy man. But it may be also the way to a
greater life because it leads to not cheating.
Many, in fact, feign love of life to evade love itself. They try
their skill at enjoyment and at “indulging in experiences.” But this
is illusory. It requires a rare vocation to be a sensualist. The life of
a man is fulfilled without the aid of his mind, with its backward
and forward movements, at one and the same time its solitude and
its presences. To see these men of Belcourt working, protecting
their wives and children, and often without a reproach, I think one
can feel a secret shame. To be sure, I have no illusions about it.
There is not much love in the lives I am speaking of. I ought to say
that not much remains. But at least they have evaded nothing.
There are words I have never really understood, such as “sin.” Yet
I believe these men have never sinned against life. For if there is a
sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life
as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable
grandeur of this life. These men have not cheated. Gods of summer
they were at twenty by their enthusiasm for life, and they still are,
deprived of all hope. I have seen two of them die. They were full
of horror, but silent. It is better thus. From Pandora’s box, where
all the ills of humanity swarmed, the Greeks drew out hope after
all the others, as the most dreadful of all. I know no more stirring
symbol; for, contrary to the general belief, hope equals resignation.
And to live is not to resign oneself. This, at least, is the bitter
lesson of Algerian summers. But already the season is wavering
and summer totters. The first September rains, after such violence
and hardening, are like the liberated earth’s first tears, as if for a
few days this country tried its hand at tenderness. Yet at the same
period the carob trees cover all of Algeria with a scent of love. In
the evening or after the rain, the whole earth, its womb moist with
a seed redolent of bitter almond, rests after having given herself to
the sun all summer long. And again that scent hallows the union of
man and earth and awakens in us the only really virile love in this
world: ephemeral and noble.
(1936)
The Minotaur or The Stop In Oran
for
PIERRE GALINDO
This essay dates from 1939. The reader will have to bear this in
mind to judge of the present-day Oran. Impassioned protests from
that beautiful city assure me, as a matter of fact, that all the
imperfections have been (or will be) remedied. On the other hand,
the beauties extolled in this essay have been jealously respected.
Happy and realistic city, Oran has no further need of writers: she is
awaiting tourists.
(1953)
There are no more deserts. There are no more islands. Yet there
is a need for them. In order to understand the world, one has to turn
away from it on occasion; in order to serve men better, one has to
hold them at a distance for a time. But where can one find the
solitude necessary to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind
collects itself and courage gauges its strength? There remain big
cities. Simply, certain conditions are required.
The cities Europe offers us are too full of the din of the past. A
practiced ear can make out the flapping of wings, a fluttering of
souls. The giddy whirl of centuries, of revolutions, of fame can be
felt there. There one cannot forget that the Occident was forged in
a series of uproars. All that does not make for enough silence.
Paris is often a desert for the heart, but at certain moments
from the heights of Pere-Lachaise there blows a revolutionary
wind that suddenly fills that desert with flags and fallen glories. So
it is with certain Spanish towns, with Florence or with Prague.
Salzburg would be peaceful without Mozart. But from time to time
there rings out over the Salzach the great proud cry of Don Juan as
he plunges toward hell. Vienna seems more silent; she is a
youngster among cities. Her stones are no older than three
centuries and their youth is ignorant of melancholy. But Vienna
stands at a crossroads of history. Around her echoes the clash of
empires. Certain evenings when the sky is suffused with blood, the
stone horses on the Ring monuments seem to take wing. In that
fleeting moment when everything is reminiscent of power and
history, can he distinctly heard, under the charge of the Polish
squadrons, the crashing fall of the Ottoman Empire. That does not
make for enough silence either.
To be sure, it is just that solitude amid others that men come
looking for in European cities. At least, men with a purpose in life.
There they can choose their company, take it or leave it. How
many minds have been tempered in the trip between their hotel
room and the old stones of the Ile Saint Louis! It is true that others
have died there of isolation. As for the first, at any rate, there they
found their reasons for growing and asserting themselves. They
were alone and they weren’t alone. Centuries of history and
beauty, the ardent testimony of a thousand lives of the past
accompanied them along the Seine and spoke to them both of
traditions and of conquests. But their youth urged them to invite
such company. There comes a time, there come periods, when it is
unwelcome. “It’s between us two!” exclaims Rasti-gnac, facing the
vast mustiness of Paris. Two, yes, but that is still too many!
The desert itself has assumed significance; it has been glutted
with poetry. For all the world’s sorrows it is a hallowed spot. But
at certain moments the heart wants nothing so much as spots
devoid of poetry. Descartes, planning to meditate, chose his desert:
the most mercantile city of his era. There he found his solitude and
the occasion for perhaps the greatest of our virile poems: “The first
[precept] was never to accept anything as true unless I knew it to
be obviously so.” It is possible to have less ambition and the same
nostalgia. But during the last three centuries Amsterdam has
spawned museums. In order to flee poetry and yet recapture the
peace of stones, other deserts are needed, other spots without soul
and without reprieve. Oran is one of these.
The Street
I have often heard the people of Oran complain: “There is no
interesting circle.” No, indeed! You wouldn’t want one! A few
right-thinking people tried to introduce the customs of another
world into this desert, faithful to the principle that it is impossible
to advance art or ideas without grouping together.[34] The result is
such that the only instructive circles remain those of poker-players,
boxing enthusiasts, bowlers, and the local associations. There at
least the unsophisticated prevails. After all, there exists a certain
nobility that does not lend itself to the lofty. It is sterile by nature.
And those who want to find it leave the “circles” and go out into
the street.
The streets of Oran are doomed to dust, pebbles, and heat. If it
rains, there is a deluge and a sea of mud. But rain or shine, the
shops have the same extravagant and absurd look. All the bad taste
of Europe and the Orient has managed to converge in them. One
finds, helter-skelter, marble greyhounds, ballerinas with swans,
versions of Diana the huntress in green galalith, discus-throwers
and reapers, everything that is used for birthday and wedding gifts,
the whole race of painful figurines constantly called forth by a
commercial and playful genie on our mantelpieces. But such
perseverance in bad taste takes on a baroque aspect that makes one
forgive all. Here, presented in a casket of dust, are the contents of a
show window: frightful plaster models of deformed feet, a group
of Rembrandt drawings “sacrificed at 150 francs each,” practical
jokes, tricolored wallets, an eighteenth-century pastel, a
mechanical donkey made of plush, bottles of Provence water for
preserving green olives, and a wretched wooden virgin with an
indecent smile. (So that no one can go away ignorant, the
“management” has propped at its base a card saying: “Wooden
Virgin.”) There can be found in Oran:
1) Cafes with filter-glazed counters sprinkled with the legs and
wings of flies, the proprietor always smiling despite his always
empty cafe. A small black coffee used to cost twelve sous and a
large one eighteen.
2) Photographers’ studios where there has been no progress in
technique since the invention of sensitized paper. They exhibit a
strange fauna impossible to encounter in the streets, from the
pseudo-sailor leaning on a console table to the marriageable girl,
badly dressed and arms dangling, standing in front of a sylvan
background. It is possible to assume that these are not portraits
from life: they are creations.
3) An edifying abundance of funeral establishments. It is not
that people die more in Oran than elsewhere, but I fancy merely
that more is made of it.
The attractive naivete of this nation of merchants is displayed
even in their advertising. I read, in the handbill of an Oran movie
theater, the advertisement for a third-rate film. I note the adjectives
“sumptuous,” splendid, extraordinary, amazing, staggering, and
“tremendous.” At the end the management informs the public of
the considerable sacrifices it has undertaken to be able to present
this startling “realization.” Nevertheless, the price of tickets will
not be increased.
It would be wrong to assume that this is merely a manifestation
of that love of exaggeration characteristic of the south. Rather, the
authors of this marvelous handbill are revealing their sense of
psychology. It is essential to overcome the indifference and
profound apathy felt in this country the moment there is any
question of choosing between two shows, two careers, and, often,
even two women. People make up their minds only when forced to
do so. And advertising is well aware of this. It will assume
American proportions, having the same reasons, both here and
there, for getting desperate.
The streets of Oran inform us as to the two essential pleasures
of the local youth: getting one’s shoes shined and displaying those
same shoes on the boulevard. In order to have a clear idea of the
first of these delights, one has to entrust one’s shoes, at ten o’clock
on a Sunday morning, to the shoe-shiners in Boulevard Gal-lieni.
Perched on high armchairs, one can enjoy that peculiar satisfaction
produced, even upon a rank outsider, by the sight of men in love
with their job, as the shoe-shiners of Oran obviously are.
Everything is worked over in detail. Several brushes, three kinds of
cloths, the polish mixed with gasoline. One might think the
operation is finished when a perfect shine comes to life under the
soft brush. But the same insistent hand covers the glossy surface
again with polish, rubs it, dulls it, makes the cream penetrate the
heart of the leather, and then brings forth, under the same brush, a
double and really definitive gloss sprung from the depths of the
leather. The wonders achieved in this way are then exhibited to the
connoisseurs. In order to appreciate such pleasures of the
boulevard, you ought to see the masquerade of youth taking place
every evening on the main arteries of the city. Between the ages of
sixteen and twenty the young people of Oran “Society” borrow
their models of elegance from American films and put on their
fancy dress before going out to dinner. With wavy, oiled hair
protruding from under a felt hat slanted over the left ear and
peaked over the right eye, the neck encircled by a collar big
enough to accommodate the straggling hair, the microscopic knot
of the necktie kept in place by a regulation pin, with thigh-length
coat and waist close to the hips, with light-colored and noticeably
short trousers, with dazzlingly shiny triple-soled shoes, every
evening those youths make the sidewalks ring with their metal-
tipped soles. In all things they are bent on imitating the bearing,
forthrightness, and superiority of Mr. Clark Gable. For this reason
the local carpers commonly nickname those youths, by favor of a
casual pronunciation, “Clarques.”
At any rate, the main boulevards of Oran are invaded late in the
afternoon by an army of attractive adolescents who go to the
greatest trouble to look like a bad lot. Inasmuch as the girls of Oran
feel traditionally engaged to these softhearted gangsters, they
likewise flaunt the make-up and elegance of popular American
actresses. Consequently, the same wits call them “Marlenes.” Thus
on the evening boulevards when the sound of birds rises skyward
from the palm trees, dozens of Clarques and Marlenes meet, eye
and size up one another, happy to be alive and to cut a figure,
indulging for an hour in the intoxication of perfect existences.
There can then be witnessed, the jealous say, the meetings of the
American Commission. But in these words lies the bitterness of
those over thirty who have no connection with such diversions.
They fail to appreciate those daily congresses of youth and
romance. These are, in truth, the parliaments of birds that are met
in Hindu literature. But no one on the boulevards of Oran debates
the problem of being or worries about the way to perfection. There
remains nothing but flappings of wings, plumed struttings,
coquettish and victorious graces, a great burst of carefree song that
disappears with the night.
From here I can hear Klestakov: “I shall soon have to be
concerned with something lofty.” Alas, he is quite capable of it! If
he were urged, he would people this desert within a few years. But
for the moment a somewhat secret soul must liberate itself in this
facile city with its parade of painted girls unable, nevertheless, to
simulate emotion, feigning coyness so badly that the pretense is
immediately obvious. Be concerned with something lofty! Just see:
Santa-Cruz cut out of the rock, the mountains, the flat sea, the
violent wind and the sun, the great cranes of the harbor, the trains,
the hangars, the quays, and the huge ramps climbing up the city’s
rock, and in the city itself these diversions and this boredom, this
hubbub and this solitude. Perhaps, indeed, all this is not
sufficiently lofty. But the great value of such overpopulated islands
is that in them the heart strips bare. Silence is no longer possible
except in noisy cities. From Amsterdam Descartes writes to the
aged Guez de Balzac: “I go out walking every day amid the
confusion of a great crowd, with as much freedom and tranquillity
as you could do on your garden paths.” [35]
The Desert in Oran
Obliged to live facing a wonderful landscape, the people of
Oran have overcome this fearful ordeal by covering their city with
very ugly constructions. One expects to find a city open to the sea,
washed and refreshed by the evening breeze. And aside from the
Spanish quarter,[36] one finds a walled town that turns its back to
the sea, that has been built up by turning back on itself like a snail.
Oran is a great circular yellow wall covered over with a leaden
sky. In the beginning you wander in the labyrinth, seeking the sea
like the sign of Ariadne. But you turn round and round in pale and
oppressive streets, and eventually the Minotaur devours the people
of Oran: the Minotaur is boredom. For some time the citizens of
Oran have given up wandering. They have accepted being eaten.
It is impossible to know what stone is without coming to Oran.
In that dustiest of cities, the pebble is king. It is so much
appreciated that shopkeepers exhibit it in their show windows to
hold papers in place or even for mere display. Piles of them are set
up along the streets, doubtless for the eyes’ delight, since a year
later the pile is still there. Whatever elsewhere derives its poetry
from the vegetable kingdom here takes on a stone face. The
hundred or so trees that can be found in the business section have
been carefully covered with dust. They are petrified plants whose
branches give off an acrid, dusty smell. In Algiers the Arab
cemeteries have a well-known mellowness. In Oran, above the
Ras-el-Ain ravine, facing the sea this time, flat against the blue
sky, are fields of chalky, friable pebbles in which the sun blinds
with its fires. Amid these bare bones of the earth a purple
geranium, from time to time, contributes its life and fresh blood to
the landscape. The whole city has solidified in a stony matrix. Seen
from Les Planteurs, the depth of the cliffs surrounding it is so great
that the landscape becomes unreal, so mineral it is. Man is
outlawed from it. So much heavy beauty seems to come from
another world.
If the desert can be defined as a soulless place where the sky
alone is king, then Oran is awaiting her prophets. All around and
above the city the brutal nature of Africa is indeed clad in her
burning charms. She bursts the unfortunate stage setting with
which she is covered; she shrieks forth between all the houses and
over all the roofs. If one climbs one of the roads up the mountain
of Santa-Cruz, the first thing to be visible is the scattered colored
cubes of Oran. But a little higher and already the jagged cliffs that
surround the plateau crouch in the sea like red beasts. Still a little
higher and a great vortex of sun and wind sweeps over, airs out,
and obscures the untidy city scattered in disorder all over a rocky
landscape. The opposition here is between magnificent human
anarchy and the permanence of an unchanging sea. This is enough
to make a staggering scent of life rise toward the mountainside
road.
There is something implacable about the desert. The mineral
sky of Oran, her streets and trees in their coating of dust—
everything contributes to creating this dense and impassible
universe in which the heart and mind are never distracted from
themselves, nor from their sole object, which is man. I am
speaking here of difficult places of retreat. Books are written on
Florence or Athens. Those cities have formed so many European
minds that they must have a meaning. They have the means of
moving to tears or of uplifting. They quiet a certain spiritual
hunger whose bread is memory. But can one be moved by a city
where nothing attracts the mind, where the very ugliness is
anonymous, where the past is reduced to nothing? Emptiness,
boredom, an indifferent sky, what are the charms of such places?
Doubtless solitude and, perhaps, the human creature.
For a certain race of men, wherever the human creature is
beautiful is a bitter native land. Oran is one of its thousand capitals.
Sports
The Central Sporting Club, on rue du Fondouk in Oran, is
giving an evening of boxing which it insists will be appreciated by
real enthusiasts. Interpreted, this means that the boxers on the bill
are far from being stars, that some of them are entering the ring for
the first time, and that consequently you can count, if not on the
skill, at least on the courage of the opponents. A native having
thrilled me with the firm promise that “blood would flow,” I find
myself that evening among the real enthusiasts.
Apparently the latter never insist on comfort. To be sure, a ring
has been set up at the back of a sort of whitewashed garage,
covered with corrugated iron and violently lighted. Folding chairs
have been lined up in a square around the ropes. These are the
“honor rings.” Most of the length of the hall has been filled with
seats, and behind them opens a large free space called “lounge” by
reason of the fact that not one of the five hundred persons in it
could take out a handkerchief without causing serious accidents. In
this rectangular box live and breathe some thousand men and two
or three women—the kind who, according to my neighbor, always
insist on “attracting attention.” Everybody is sweating fiercely.
While waiting for the fights of the “young hopefuls” a gigantic
phonograph grinds out a Tino Rossi record. This is the sentimental
song before the murder.
The patience of a true enthusiast is unlimited. The fight
announced for nine o’clock has not even begun at nine thirty and
no one has protested. The spring weather is warm and the smell of
a humanity in shirt sleeves is exciting. Lively discussion goes on
among the periodic explosions of lemon-soda corks and the tireless
lament of the Corsican singer. A few late arrivals are wedged into
the audience when a spotlight throws a blinding light onto the ring.
The fights of the young hopefuls begin.
The young hopefuls, or beginners, who are fighting for the fun
of it, are always eager to prove this by massacring each other at the
earliest opportunity, in defiance of technique. They were never
able to last more than three rounds. The hero of the evening in this
regard is young “Kid Airplane,” who in regular life sells lottery
tickets on cafe terraces. His opponent, indeed, hurtled awkwardly
out of the ring at the beginning of the second round after contact
with a fist wielded like a propeller.
The crowd got somewhat excited, but this is still an act of
courtesy. Gravely it breathes in the hallowed air of the
embrocation. It watches these series of slow rites and unregulated
sacrifices, made even more authentic by the propitiatory designs,
on the white wall, of the fighters’ shadows. These are the
deliberate ceremonial prologues of a savage religion. The trance
will not come until later.
And it so happens that the loudspeaker announces Amar, “the
tough Oranese who has never disarmed,” against Perez, “the
slugger from Algiers.” An uninitiate would misinterpret the yelling
that greets the introduction of the boxers in the ring. He would
imagine some sensational combat in which the boxers were to
settle a personal quarrel known to the public. To tell the truth, it is
a quarrel they are going to settle. But it is the one that for the past
hundred years has mortally separated Algiers and Oran. Back in
history, these two North African cities would have already bled
each other white as Pisa and Florence did in happier times. Their
rivalry is all the stronger just because it probably has no basis.
Having every reason to like each other, they loathe each other
proportionately. The Oranese accuse the citizens of Algiers of
“sham.” The people of Algiers imply that the Oranese are rustic.
These are bloodier insults than they might seem because they are
metaphysical. And unable to lay siege to each other, Oran and
Algiers meet, compete, and insult each other on the field of sports,
statistics, and public works.
Thus a page of history is unfolding in the ring. And the tough
Oranese, backed by a thousand yelling voices, is defending against
Perez a way of life and the pride of a province. Truth forces me to
admit that Amar is not conducting his discussion well. His
argument has a flaw: he lacks reach. The slugger from Algiers, on
the contrary, has the required reach in his argument. It lands
persuasively between his contradictor’s eyes. The Oranese bleeds
magnificently amid the vociferations of a wild audience. Despite
the repeated encouragements of the gallery and of my neighbor,
despite the dauntless shouts of “Kill him!”, “Floor him!”, the
insidious “Below the belt,”
“Oh, the referee missed that one!”, the optimistic “He’s
pooped,” “He can’t take any more,” nevertheless the man from
Algiers is proclaimed the winner on points amid interminable
catcalls. My neighbor, who is inclined to talk of sportsmanship,
applauds ostensibly, while slipping to me in a voice made faint by
so many shouts: “So that he won’t be able to say back there that
we of Oran are savages.”
But throughout the audience, fights not included on the
program have already broken out. Chairs are brandished, the police
clear a path, excitement is at its height. In order to calm these good
people and contribute to the return of silence, the “management,”
without losing a moment, commissions the loudspeaker to boom
out “Sambre-et-Meuse.” For a few minutes the audience has a
really warlike look. Confused clusters of com-batants and
voluntary referees sway in the grip of policemen; the gallery exults
and calls for the rest of the program with wild cries, cock-a-
doodle-doo’s, and mocking catcalls drowned in the irresistible
flood from the military band.
But the announcement or the big fight is enough to restore
calm. This takes place suddenly, without flourishes, just as actors
leave the stage once the play is finished. With the greatest
unconcern, hats are dusted off, chairs are put back in place, and
without transition all faces assume the kindly expression of the
respectable member of the audience who has paid for his ticket to a
family concert.
The last fight pits a French champion of the Navy against an
Oran boxer. This time the difference in reach is to the advantage of
the latter. But his superiorities, during the first rounds, do not stir
the crowd. They are sleeping off the effects of their first
excitement; they are sobering up. They are still short of breath. If
they applaud, there is no passion in it. They hiss without animosity.
The audience is divided into two camps, as is appropriate in the
interest of fairness. But each individual’s choice obeys that
indifference that follows on great expenditures of energy. If the
Frenchman holds his own, if the Oranese forgets that one doesn’t
lead with the head, the boxer is bent under a volley of hisses, but
immediately pulled upright again by a burst of applause. Not until
the seventh round does sport rise to the surface again, at the same
time that the real enthusiasts begin to emerge from their fatigue.
The Frenchman, to tell the truth, has touched the mat and, eager to
win back points, has hurled himself on his opponent. “What did I
tell you?” said my neighbor; “it’s going to be a fight to the finish.”
Indeed, it is a fight to the finish. Covered with sweat under the
pitiless light, both boxers open their guard, close their eyes as they
hit, shove with shoulders and knees, swap their blood, and snort
with rage. As one man, the audience has stood up and punctuates
the efforts of its two heroes. It receives the blows, returns them,
echoes them in a thousand hollow, panting voices. The same ones
who had chosen their favorite in indifference cling to their choice
through obstinacy and defend it passionately. Every ten seconds a
shout from my neighbor pierces my right ear: “Go to it, gob; come
on, Navy!” while another man in front of us shouts to the Oranese:
“Anda! hombre!” The man and the gob go to it, and together with
them, in this temple of whitewash, iron, and cement, an audience
completely given over to gods with cauliflower ears. Every blow
that gives a dull sound on the shining pectorals echoes in vast
vibrations in the very body of the crowd, which, with the boxers, is
making its last effort.
In such an atmosphere a draw is badly received. Indeed, it runs
counter to a quite Manichean tendency in the audience. There is
good and there is evil, the winner and the loser. One must be either
right or wrong. The conclusion of this impeccable logic is
immediately provided by two thousand energetic lungs accusing
the judges of being sold, or bought. But the gob has walked over
and embraced his rival in the ring, drinking in his fraternal sweat.
This is enough to make the audience, reversing its view, burst out
in sudden applause. My neighbor is right: they are not savages.
The crowd pouring out, under a sky full of silence and stars,
has just fought the most exhausting fight. It keeps quiet and
disappears furtively, without any energy left for post mortems.
There is good and there is evil; that religion is merciless. The band
of faithful is now no more than a group of black-and-white
shadows disappearing into the night. For force and violence are
solitary gods. They contribute nothing to memory. On the contrary,
they distribute their miracles by the handful in the present. They
are made for this race without past which celebrates its
communions around the prize ring. These are rather difficult rites
but ones that simplify everything. Good and evil, winner and loser.
At Corinth two temples stood side by side, the temple of Violence
and the temple of Necessity.
Monuments
For many reasons due as much to economics as to metaphysics,
it may be said that the Oranese style, if there is one, forcefully and
clearly appears in the extraordinary edifice called the Maison du
Colon. Oran hardly lacks monuments. The city has its quota of
imperial marshals, ministers, and local benefactors. They are found
on dusty little squares, resigned to rain and sun, they too converted
to stone and boredom. But, in any case, they represent
contributions from the outside. In that happy barbary they are the
regrettable marks of civilization.
Oran, on the other hand, has raised up her altars and rostra to
her own honor. In the very heart of the mercantile city, having to
construct a common home for the innumerable agricultural
organizations that keep this country alive, the people of Oran
conceived the idea of building solidly a convincing image of their
virtues: the Maison du Colon. To judge from the edifice, those
virtues are three in number: boldness in taste, love of violence, and
a feeling for historical syntheses. Egypt, Byzantium, and Munich
collaborated in the delicate construction of a piece of pastry in the
shape of a bowl upside down. Multicolored stones, most vigorous
in effect, have been brought in to outline the roof. These mosaics
are so exuberantly persuasive that at first you see nothing but an
amorphous effulgence. But with a closer view and your attention
called to it, you discover that they have a meaning: a graceful
colonist, wearing a bow tie and white pith helmet, is receiving the
homage of a procession of slaves dressed in classical style.[37] The
edifice and its colored illustrations have been set down in the
middle of a square in the to-and-fro of the little two-car trams
whose filth is one of the charms of the city.
Oran greatly cherishes also the two lions of its Place d’Armes,
or parade ground. Since 1888 they have been sitting in state on
opposite sides of the municipal stairs. Their author was named (
ain. They have majesty and a stubby torso. It is said that at night
they get down from their pedestal one after the other, silently pace
around the dark square, and on occasion uninate at length under the
big, dusty ficus trees. These, of course, are rumors to which the
people of Oran lend an indulgent ear. But it is unlikely.
Despite a certain amount of research, I have not been able to
get interested in Cain. I merely learned that he had the reputation
of being a skillful animal-sculptor. Yet I often think of him. This is
an intellectual bent that comes naturally in Oran. Here is a
sonorously named artist who left an unimportant work here.
Several hundred thousand people are familiar with the easygoing
beasts he put in front of a pretentious town hall. This is one way of
succeeding in art. To be sure, these two lions, like thousands of
works of the same type, are proof of something else than talent.
Others have created “The Night Watch,” “Saint Francis Receiving
the Stigmata,” “David,” or the Pharsalian bas-relief called “The
Glorification of the Flower.” Cain, on the other hand, set up two
hilarious snouts on the square of a mercantile province overseas.
But the David will go down one day with Florence and the lions
will perhaps be saved from the catastrophe. Let me repeat, they are
proof of something else.
Can one state this idea clearly? In this work there are
insignificance and solidity. Spirit counts for nothing and matter for
a great deal. Mediocrity insists upon lasting by all means,
including bronze. It is refused a right to eternity, and every day it
takes that right. Is it not eternity itself? In any event, such
perseverance is capable of stirring, and it involves its lesson, that
of all the monuments of Oran, and of Oran herself. An hour a day,
every so often, it forces you to pay attention to something that has
no importance. The mind profits from such recurrences. In a sense
this is its hygiene, and since it absolutely needs its moments of
humility, it seems to me that this chance to indulge in stupidity is
better than others. Everything that is ephemeral wants to last. Let
us say that everything wants to last. Human productions mean
nothing else, and in this regard Cain’s lions have the same chances
as the ruins of Angkor. This disposes one toward modesty.
There are other Oranese monuments. Or at least they deserve
this name because they, too, stand for their city, and perhaps in a
more significant way. They are the public works at present
covering the coast for some ten kilometers. Apparently it is a
matter of transforming the most luminous of bays into a gigantic
harbor. In reality it is one more chance for man to come to grips
with stone.
In the paintings of certain Flemish masters a theme of
strikingly general application recurs insistently: the building of the
Tower of Babel. Vast landscapes, rocks climbing up to heaven,
steep slopes teeming with workmen, animals, ladders, strange
machines, cords, pulleys. Man, moreover, is there only to give
scale to the inhuman scope of the construction. This is what the
Oran coast makes one think of, west of the city.
Clinging to vast slopes, rails, dump-cars, cranes, tiny trains ...
Under a broiling sun, toy-like locomotives round huge blocks of
stone amid whistles, dust, and smoke. Day and night a nation of
ants bustles about on the smoking carcass of the mountain.
Clinging all up and down a single cord against the side of the cliff,
dozens of men, their bellies pushing against the handles of
automatic drills, vibrate in empty space all day long and break off
whole masses of rock that hurtle down in dust and rumbling.
Farther on, dump-carts tip their loads over the slopes; and the
rocks, suddenly poured seaward, bound and roll into the water,
each large lump followed by a scattering of lighter stones. At
regular intervals, at dead of night or in broad daylight, detonations
shake the whole mountain and stir up the sea itself.
Man, in this vast construction field, makes a frontal attack on
stone. And if one could forget, for a moment at least, the harsh
slavery that makes this work possible, one would have to admire.
These stones, torn from the mountain, serve man in his plans. They
pile up under the first waves, gradually emerge, and finally take
their place to form a jetty, soon covered with men and machines
which advance, day after day, toward the open sea. Without
stopping, huge steel jaws bite into the cliff’s belly, turn round, and
disgorge into the water their overflowing gravel. As the coastal
cliff is lowered, the whole coast encroaches irresistibly on the sea.
Of course, destroying stone is not possible. It is merely moved
from one place to another. In any case, it will last longer than the
men who use it. For the moment, it satisfies their will to action.
That in itself is probably useless. But moving things about is the
work of men; one must choose doing that or nothing.[38] Obviously
the people of Oran have chosen. In front of that indifferent bay, for
many years more they will pile up stones along the coast. In a
hundred years—tomorrow, in other words—they will have to
begin again. But today these heaps of rocks testify for the men in
masks of dust and sweat who move about among them. The true
monuments of Oran are still her stones.
Ariadne’s Stone
It seems that the people of Oran are like that friend of Flaubert
who, on the point of death, casting a last glance at this
irreplaceable earth, exclaimed: “Close the window; it’s too
beautiful.” They have closed the window, they have walled
themselves in, they have cast out the landscape. But Flaubert’s
friend, Le Poittevin, died, and after him days continued to be added
to days. Likewise, beyond the yellow walls of Oran, land and sea
continue their indifferent dialogue. That permanence in the world
has always had contrary charms for man. It drives him to despair
and excites him. The world never says but one thing; first it
interests, then it bores. But eventually it wins out by dint of
obstinacy. It is always right.
Already, at the very gates of Oran, nature raises its voice. In
the direction of Canastel there are vast wastelands covered with
fragrant brush. There sun and wind speak only of solitude. Above
Oran there is the mountain of Santa-Cruz, the plateau and the
myriad ravines leading to it. Roads, once carriageable, cling to the
slopes overhanging the sea. In the month of January some are
covered with flowers. Daisies and buttercups turn them into
sumptuous paths, embroidered in yellow and white. About Sant-
Cruzz everything has been said. But if I were to speak of it, I
should forget the sacred processions that climb the rugged hill on
feast days, in order to recall other pilgrimages. Solitary, they walk
in the red stone, rise above the motionless bay, and come to
dedicate to nakedness a luminous, perfect hour.
Oran has also its deserts of sand: its beaches. Those
encountered near the gates are deserted only in winter and spring.
Then they are plateaus covered with asphodels, peopled with bare
little cottages among the flowers. The sea rumbles a bit, down
below. Yet already the sun, the faint breeze, the whiteness of the
asphodels, the sharp blue of the sky, everything makes one fancy
summer—the golden youth then covering the beach, the long hours
on the sand and the sudden softness of evening. Each year on these
shores there is a new harvest of girls in flower. Apparently they
have but one season. The following year, other cordial blossoms
take their place, which, the summer before, were still little girls
with bodies as hard as buds. At eleven a.m., coming down from the
plateau, all that young flesh, lightly clothed in motley materials,
breaks on the sand like a multicolored wave.
One has to go farther (strangely close, however, to that spot
where two hundred thousand men are laboring) to discover a still
virgin landscape: long, deserted dunes where the passage of men
has left no other trace than a worm-eaten hut. From time to time an
Arab shepherd drives along the top of the dunes the black and
beige spots of his flock of goats. On the beaches of the Oran
country every summer morning seems to be the first in the world.
Each twilight seems to be the last, solemn agony, announced at
sunset by a final glow that darkens every hue. The sea is
ultramarine, the road the color of clotted blood, the beach yellow.
Everything disappears with the green sun; an hour later the dunes
are bathed in moonlight. Then there are incomparable nights under
a rain of stars. Occasionally storms sweep over them, and the
lightning flashes flow along the dunes, whiten the sky, and give the
sand and one’s eyes orange-colored glints.
But this cannot be shared. One has to have lived it. So much
solitude and nobility give these places an unforgettable aspect. In
the warm moment before daybreak, after confronting the first
bitter, black waves, a new creature breasts night’s heavy,
enveloping water. The memory of those joys does not make me
regret them, and thus I recognize that they were good. After so
many years they still last, somewhere in this heart which finds
unswerving loyalty so difficult. And I know that today, if I were to
go to the deserted dune, the same sky would pour down on me its
cargo of breezes and stars. These are lands of innocence.
But innocence needs sand and stones. And man has forgotten
how to live among them. At least it seems so, for he has taken
refuge in this extraordinary city where boredom sleeps.
Nevertheless, that very confrontation constitutes the value of Oran.
The capital of boredom, besieged by innocence and beauty, it is
surrounded by an army in which every stone is a soldier. In the
city, and at certain hours, however, what a temptation to go over to
the enemy! What a temptation to identify oneself with those
stones, to melt into that burning and impassive universe that defies
history and its ferments! That is doubtless futile. But there is in
every man a profound instinct which is neither that of destruction
nor that of creation. It is merely a matter of resembling nothing. In
the shadow of the warm walls of Oran, on its dusty asphalt, that
invitation is sometimes heard. It seems that, for a time, the minds
that yield to it are never disappointed. This is the darkness of
Eurydice and the sleep of Isis. Here are the deserts where thought
will collect itself, the cool hand of evening on a troubled heart. On
this Mount of Olives, vigil is futile; the mind recalls and approves
the sleeping Apostles. Were they really wrong? They nonetheless
had their revelation.
Just think of Sakyamuni in the desert. He remained there for
years on end, squatting motionless with his eyes on heaven. The
very gods envied him that wisdom and that stone-like destiny. In
his outstretched hands the swallows had made their nest. But one
day they flew away, answering the call of distant lands. And he
who had stifled in himself desire and will, fame and suffering,
began to cry. It happens thus that flowers grow on rocks. Yes, let
us accept stone when it is necessary. That secret and that rapture
we ask of faces can also be given us by stone. To be sure, this
cannot last. But what can last, after all? The secret of faces fades
away, and there we are, cast back to the chain of desires. And if
stone can do no more for us than the human heart, at least it can do
just as much.
“Oh, to be nothing!” For thousands of years this great cry has
roused millions of men to revolt against desire and pain. Its dying
echoes have reached this far, across centuries and oceans, to the
oldest sea in the world. They still reverberate dully against the
compact cliffs of Oran. Everybody in this country follows this
advice without knowing it. Of course, it is almost futile.
Nothingness cannot be achieved any more than the absolute can.
But since we receive as favors the eternal signs brought us by roses
or by human suffering, let us not refuse either the rare invitations
to sleep that the earth addresses us. Each has as much truth as the
other.
This, perhaps, is the Ariadne’s thread of this somnambulist and
frantic city. Here one learns the virtues, provisional to be sure, of a
certain kind of boredom. In order to be spared, one must say “yes”
to the Minotaur. This is an old and fecund wisdom. Above the sea,
silent at the base of the red cliffs, it is enough to maintain a
delicate equilibrium halfway between the two massive headlands
which, on the right and left, dip into the clear water. In the puffing
of a coast-guard vessel crawling along the water far out bathed in
radiant light, is distinctly heard the muffled call of inhuman and
glittering forces: it is the Minotaur’s farewell.
It is noon; the very day is being weighed in the balance. His
rite accomplished, the traveler receives the reward of his liberation:
the little stone, dry and smooth as an asphodel, that he picks up on
the cliff. For the initiate the world is no heavier to bear than this
stone. Atlas’s task is easy; it is sufficient to choose one’s hour.
Then one realizes that for an hour, a month, a year, these shores
can indulge in freedom. They welcome pell-mell, without even
looking at them, the monk, the civil servant, or the conqueror.
There are days when I expected to meet, in the streets of Oran,
Descartes or Cesare Borgia. That did not happen. But perhaps
another will be more fortunate. A great deed, a great work, virile
meditation used to call for the solitude of sands or of the convent.
There were kept the spiritual vigils of arms. Where could they be
better celebrated now than in the emptiness of a big city
established for some time in unintellectual beauty?
Here is the little stone, smooth as an asphodel. It is at the
beginning of everything. Flowers, tears (if you insist), departures,
and struggles are for tomorrow. In the middle of the day when the
sky opens its fountains of light in the vast, sonorous space, all the
headlands of the coast look like a fleet about to set out. Those
heavy galleons of rock and light are trembling on their keels as if
they were preparing to steer for sunlit isles. O mornings in the
country of Oran! From the high plateaus the swallows plunge into
huge troughs where the air is seething. The whole coast is ready
for departure; a shiver of adventure ripples through it. Tomorrow,
perhaps, we shall leave together.
(1939)
Helen’s Exile
The mediterranean sun has something tragic about it, quite
different from the tragedy of fogs. Certain evenings at the base of
the seaside mountains, night falls over the flawless curve of a little
bay, and there rises from the silent waters a sense of anguished
fulfillment. In such spots one can understand that if the Greeks
knew despair, they always did so through beauty and its stifling
quality. In that gilded calamity, tragedy reaches its highest point.
Our time, on the other hand, has fed its despair on ugliness and
convulsions. This is why Europe would be vile, if suffering could
ever be so. We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for
her. First difference, but one that has a history. Greek thought
always took refuge behind the conception of limits. It never carried
anything to extremes, neither the sacred nor reason, because it
negated nothing, neither the sacred nor reason. It took everything
into consideration, balancing shadow with light. Our Europe, on
the other hand, off in the pursuit of totality, is the child of
disproportion. She negates beauty, as she negates whatever she
does not glorify. And, through all her diverse ways, she glorifies
but one thing, which is the future rule of reason. In her madness
she extends the eternal limits, and at that very moment dark
Erinyes fall upon her and tear her to pieces. Nemesis, the goddess
of measure and not of revenge, keeps watch. All those who
overstep the limit are pitilessly punished by her.
The Greeks, who for centuries questioned themselves as to
what is just, could understand nothing of our idea of justice. For
them equity implied a limit, whereas our whole continent is
convulsed in its search for a justice that must be total. At the dawn
of Greek thought Hera-clitus was already imagining that justice
sets limits for the physical universe itself: “The sun will not
overstep his measures; if he does, the Erinyes, the handmaids of
justice, will find him out.” 1 We who have cast the universe and
spirit out of our sphere laugh at that threat. In a drunken sky we
light up the suns we want. But nonetheless the boundaries exist,
and we know it. In our wildest aberrations we dream of an
equilibrium we have left behind, which we naively expect to find
at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the
fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our
history.
A fragment attributed to the same Heraclitus simply states:
“Presumption, regression of progress.” And, many centuries after
the man of Ephesus, Socrates, facing the threat of being
condemned to death, acknowledged only this one superiority in
himself: what he did not know he did not claim to know. The most
exemplary life and thought of those centuries close on a proud
confession of ignorance. Forgetting that, we have forgotten our
virility. We have preferred the power that apes greatness, first
Alexander and then the Roman conquerors whom the authors of
our schoolbooks, through some incomparable vulgarity, teach us to
admire. We, too, have conquered, moved boundaries, mastered 1
Bywater’s translation. [Translator’s note.]
heaven and earth. Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last,
we end up by ruling over a desert. What imagination could we
have left for that higher equilibrium in which nature balanced
history, beauty, virtue, and which applied the music of numbers
even to blood-tragedy? We turn our backs on nature; we are
ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the
office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the
color of printer’s ink.
This is why it is improper to proclaim today that we are the
sons of Greece. Or else we are the renegade sons. Placing history
on the throne of God, we are progressing toward theocracy like
those whom the Greeks called Barbarians and whom they fought to
death in the waters of Salamis. In order to realize how we differ,
one must turn to him among our philosophers who is the true rival
of Plato. “Only the modern city,” Hegel dares write, “offers the
mind a field in which it can become aware of itself.” We are thus
living in the period of big cities. Deliberately, the world has been
amputated of all that constitutes its permanence: nature, the sea,
hilltops, evening meditation. Consciousness is to be found only in
the streets, because history is to be found only in the streets—this
is the edict. And consequently our most significant works show the
same bias. Landscapes are not to be found in great European
literature since Dostoevsky. History explains neither the natural
universe that existed before it nor the beauty that exists above it.
Hence it chose to be ignorant of them. Whereas Plato contained
everything—nonsense, reason, and myth—our philosophers
contain nothing but nonsense or reason because they have closed
their eyes to the rest. The mole is meditating.
It is Christianity that began substituting the tragedy of the soul
for contemplation of the world. But, at least, Christianity referred
to a spiritual nature and thereby preserved a certain fixity. With
God dead, there remains only history and power. For some time
the entire effort of our philosophers has aimed solely at replacing
the notion of human nature with that of situation, and replacing
ancient harmony with the disorderly advance of chance or reason’s
pitiless progress. Whereas the Greeks gave to will the boundaries
of reason, we have come to put the will’s impulse in the very
center of reason, which has, as a result, become deadly. For the
Greeks, values pre-existed all action, of which they definitely set
the limits. Modern philosophy places its values at the end of
action. They are not but are becoming, and we shall know them
fully only at the completion of history. With values, all limit
disappears, and since conceptions differ as to what they will be,
since all struggles, without the brake of those same values, spread
indefinitely, today’s Messianisms confront one another and their
clamors mingle in the clash of empires. Disproportion is a
conflagration, according to Heraclitus. The conflagration is
spreading; Nietzsche is outdistanced. Europe no longer
philosophizes by striking a hammer, but by shooting a cannon.
Nature is still there, however. She contrasts her calm skies and
her reasons with the madness of men. Until the atom too catches
fire and history ends in the triumph of reason and the agony of the
species. But the Greeks never said that the limit could not he
overstepped. They said it existed and that whoever dared to exceed
it was mercilessly struck down. Nothing in present history can
contradict them.
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 for freedom today are ultimately fighting
for beauty. Of course, it is not a question of defending beauty for
itself. Beauty cannot do without man, and we shall not give our era
its nobility and serenity unless we follow it in its misfortune. Never
again shall we be hermits. But it is no less true that man cannot do
without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to
disregard. It steels itself to attain the absolute and authority; it
wants to transfigure the world before having exhausted it, to set it
to rights before having understood it. Whatever it may say, our era
is deserting this world. Ulysses can choose at Calypso’s bidding
between immortality and the land of his fathers. He chooses the
land, and death with it. Such simple nobility is foreign to us today.
Others will say that we lack humility; but, all things considered,
this word is ambiguous. Like Dostoevsky’s fools who boast of
everything, soar to heaven, and end up flaunting their shame in any
public place, we merely lack man’s pride, which is fidelity to his
limits, lucid love of his condition.
“I hate my time,” Saint-Exupery wrote shortly before his death,
for reasons not far removed from those I have spoken of. But,
however upsetting that exclamation, coming from him who loved
men for their admirable qualities, we shall not accept responsibility
for it. Yet what a temptation, at certain moments, to turn one’s
back on this bleak, fleshless world! But this time is ours, and we
cannot live hating ourselves. It has fallen so low only through the
excess of its virtues as well as through the extent of its vices. We
shall fight for the virtue that has a history. What virtue? The horses
of Patroclus weep for their master killed in battle. All is lost. But
Achilles resumes the fight, and victory is the outcome, because
friendship has just been assassinated: friendship is a virtue.
Admission of ignorance, rejection of fanaticism, the limits of
the world and of man, the beloved face, and finally beauty—this is
where we shall be on the side of the Greeks. In a certain sense, the
direction history will take is not the one we think. It lies in the
struggle between creation and inquisition. Despite the price which
artists will pay for their empty hands, we may hope for their
victory. Once more the philosophy of darkness will break and fade
away over the dazzling sea. O midday thought, the Trojan war is
being fought far from the battlefields! Once more the dreadful
walls of the modern city will fall to deliver up—“soul serene as the
ocean’s calm”—the beauty of Helen.
(1948)
Return To Tipasa
You have navigated with raging soul far from the paternal
home, passing beyond the sea’s double rocks, and you now inhabit
a foreign land.
—Medea
For five days rain had been falling ceaselessly on Algiers and
had finally wet the sea itself. From an apparently inexhaustible
sky, constant downpours, viscous in their density, streamed down
upon the gulf. Gray and soft as a huge sponge, the sea rose slowly
in the ill-defined bay. But the surface of the water seemed almost
motionless under the steady rain. Only now and then a barely
perceptible swelling motion would raise above the sea’s surface a
vague puff of smoke that would come to dock in the harbor, under
an arc of wet boulevards. The city itself, all its white walls
dripping, gave off a different steam that went out to meet the first
steam. Whichever way you turned, you seemed to be breathing
water, to be drinking the air.
In front of the soaked sea I walked and waited in that
December Algiers, which was for me the city of summers. I had
fled Europe’s night, the winter of faces. But the summer city
herself had been emptied of her laughter and offered me only bent
and shining backs. In the evening, in the crudely lighted cafes
where I took refuge, I read my age in faces I recognized without
being able to name them. I merely knew that they had been young
with me and that they were no longer so.
Yet I persisted without very well knowing what I was waiting
for, unless perhaps the moment to go back to Tipasa. To be sure, it
is sheer madness, almost always punished, to return to the sites of
one’s youth and try to relive at forty what one loved or keenly
enjoyed at twenty. But I was forewarned of that madness. Once
already I had returned to Tipasa, soon after those war years that
marked for me the end of youth. I hoped, I think, to recapture there
a freedom I could not forget. In that spot, indeed, more than twenty
years ago, I had spent whole mornings wandering among the ruins,
breathing in the wormwood, warming myself against the stones,
discovering little roses, soon plucked of their petals, which outlive
the spring. Only at noon, at the hour when the cicadas themselves
fell silent as if overcome, I would flee the greedy glare of an all-
consuming light. Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed
under a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then. Fifteen years later
I found my ruins, a few feet from the first waves, I followed the
streets of the forgotten walled city through fields covered with
bitter trees, and on the slopes overlooking the hay I still caressed
the bread-colored columns. But the ruins were now surrounded
with barbed wire and could be entered only through certain
openings. It was also forbidden, for reasons which it appears that
morality approves, to walk there at night; by day one encountered
an official guardian. It just happened, that morning, that it was
raining over the whole extent of the ruins.
Disoriented, walking through the wet, solitary countryside, I
tried at least to recapture that strength, hitherto always at hand, that
helps me to accept what is when once I have admitted that I cannot
change it. And I could not, indeed, reverse the course of time and
restore to the world the appearance I had loved which had
disappeared in a day, long before. The second of September 1939,
in fact, I had not gone to Greece, as I was to do. War, on the
contrary, had come to us, then it had spread over Greece herself.
That distance, those years separating the warm ruins from the
barbed wire were to be found in me, too, that day as I stood before
the sarcophaguses full of black water or under the sodden
tamarisks. Originally brought up surrounded by beauty which was
my only wealth, I had begun in plenty. Then had come the barbed
wire—I mean tyrannies, war, police forces, the era of revolt. One
had had to put oneself right with the authorities of night: the day’s
beauty was but a memory. And in this muddy Tipasa the memory
itself was becoming dim. It was indeed a question of beauty,
plenty, or youth! In the light from conflagrations the world had
suddenly shown its wrinkles and its wounds, old and new. It had
aged all at once, and we with it. I had come here looking for a
certain “lift”; but I realized that it inspires only the man who is
unaware that he is about to launch forward. No love without a little
innocence. Where was the innocence? Empires were tumbling
down; nations and men were tearing at one another’s throats; our
hands were soiled. Originally innocent without knowing it, we
were now guilty without meaning to be: the mystery was
increasing with our knowledge. This is why, O mockery, we were
concerned with morality. Weak and disabled, I was dreaming of
virtue! In the days of innocence I didn’t even know that morality
existed. I knew it now, and I was not capable of living up to its
standard. On the promontory that I used to love, among the wet
columns of the ruined temple, I seemed to be walking behind
someone whose steps I could still hear on the stone slabs and
mosaics but whom I should never again overtake. I went back to
Paris and remained several years before returning home.
Yet I obscurely missed something during all those years. When
one has once had the good luck to love intensely, life is spent in
trying to recapture that ardor and that illumination. Forsaking
beauty and the sensual happiness attached to it, exclusively serving
misfortune, calls for a nobility I lack. But, after all, nothing is true
that forces one to exclude. Isolated beauty ends up simpering;
solitary justice ends up oppressing. Whoever aims to serve one
exclusive of the other serves no one, not even himself, and
eventually serves injustice twice. A day comes when, thanks to
rigidity, nothing causes wonder any more, everything is known,
and life is spent in beginning over again. These are the days of
exile, of desiccated life, of dead souls. To come alive again, one
needs a special grace, self-forgetfulness, or a homeland. Certain
mornings, on turning a corner, a delightful dew falls on the heart
and then evaporates. But its coolness remains, and this is what the
heart requires always. I had to set out again.
And in Algiers a second time, still walking under the same
downpour which seemed not to have ceased since a departure I had
thought definitive, amid the same vast melancholy smelling of rain
and sea, despite this misty sky, these backs fleeing under the
shower, these cafes whose sulphureous light distorted faces, I
persisted in hoping. Didn’t I know, besides, that Algiers rains,
despite their appearance of never meaning to end, nonetheless stop
in an instant, like those streams in my country which rise in two
hours, lay waste acres of land, and suddenly dry up? One evening,
in fact, the rain ceased. I waited one night more. A limpid morning
rose, dazzling, over the pure sea. From the sky, fresh as a daisy,
washed over and over again by the rains, reduced by these repeated
washings to its finest and clearest texture, emanated a vibrant light
that gave to each house and each tree a sharp outline, an astonished
newness. In the world’s morning the earth must have sprung forth
in such a light. I again took the road for Tipasa.
For me there is not a single one of those sixty-nine kilometers
that is not filled with memories and sensations. Turbulent
childhood, adolescent daydreams in the drone of the bus’s motor,
mornings, unspoiled girls, beaches, young muscles always at the
peak of their effort, evening’s slight anxiety in a sixteen-year-old
heart, lust for life, fame, and ever the same sky throughout the
years, unfailing in strength and light, itself insatiable, consuming
one by one over a period of months the victims stretched out in the
form of crosses on the beach at the deathlike hour of noon. Always
the same sea, too, almost impalpable in the morning light, which I
again saw on the horizon as soon as the road, leaving the Sahel and
its bronze-colored vineyards, sloped down toward the coast. But I
did not stop to look at it. I wanted to see again the Chenoua, that
solid, heavy mountain cut out of a single block of stone, which
borders the bay of Tipasa to the west before dropping down into
the sea itself. It is seen from a distance, long before arriving, a
light, blue haze still confused with the sky. But gradually it is
condensed, as you advance toward it, until it takes on the color of
the surrounding waters, a huge motionless wave whose amazing
leap upward has been brutally solidified above the sea calmed all
at once. Still nearer, almost at the gates of Tipasa, here is its
frowning bulk, brown and green, here is the old mossy god that
nothing will ever shake, a refuge and harbor for its sons, of whom I
am one.
While watching it I finally got through the barbed wire and
found myself among the ruins. And under the glorious December
light, as happens but once or twice in lives which ever after can
consider themselves favored to the full, I found exactly what I had
come seeking, what, despite the era and the world, was offered me,
truly to me alone, in that forsaken nature. From the forum strewn
with olives could be seen the village down below. No sound came
from it; wisps of smoke rose in the limpid air. The sea likewise
was silent as if smothered under the unbroken shower of dazzling,
cold light. From the Chenoua a distant cock’s crow alone
celebrated the day’s fragile glory. In the direction of the ruins, as
far as the eye could see, there was nothing but pock-marked stones
and wormwood, trees and perfect columns in the transparence of
the crystalline air. It seemed as if the morning were stabilized, the
sun stopped for an incalculable moment. In this light and this
silence, years of wrath and night melted slowly away. I listened to
an almost forgotten sound within myself as if my heart, long
stopped, were calmly beginning to beat again. And awake now, I
recognized one by one the imperceptible sounds of which the
silence was made up: the figured bass of the birds, the sea’s faint,
brief sighs at the foot of the rocks, the vibration of the trees, the
blind singing of the columns, the rustling of the wormwood plants,
the furtive lizards. I heard that; I also listened to the happy torrents
rising within me. It seemed to me that I had at last come to harbor,
for a moment at least, and that henceforth that moment would be
endless. But soon after, the sun rose visibly a degree in the sky. A
magpie preluded briefly, and at once, from all directions, birds’
songs burst out with energy, jubilation, joyful discordance, and
infinite rapture. The day started up again. It was to carry me to
evening.
At noon on the half-sandy slopes covered with heliotropes like
a foam left by the furious waves of the last few days as they
withdrew, I watched the sea barely swelling at that hour with an
exhausted motion, and I satisfied the two thirsts one cannot long
neglect without drying up—I mean loving and admiring. For there
is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not
loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence
and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts
the love that nevertheless gave birth to it. In the clamor in which
we live, love is impossible and justice does not suffice. This is why
Europe hates daylight and is only able to set injustice up against
injustice. But in order to keep justice from shriveling up like a
beautiful orange fruit containing nothing but a bitter, dry pulp, I
discovered once more at Tipasa that one must keep intact in
oneself a freshness, a cool wellspring of joy, love the day that
escapes injustice, and return to combat having won that light. Here
I recaptured the former beauty, a young sky, and I measured my
luck, realizing at last that in the worst years of our madness the
memory of that sky had never left me. This was what in the end
had kept me from despairing. I had always known that the ruins of
Tipasa were younger than our new constructions or our bomb
damage. There the world began over again every day in an ever
new light. O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient
drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was
ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last
discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.
* * *
I have again left Tipasa; I have returned to Europe and its
struggles. But the memory of that day still uplifts me and helps me
to welcome equally what delights and what crushes. In the difficult
hour we are living, what else can I desire than to exclude nothing
and to learn how to braid with white thread and black thread a
single cord stretched to the breaking-point? In everything I have
done or said up to now, I seem to recognize these two forces, even
when they work at cross-purposes. I have not been able to disown
the light into which I was born and yet I have not wanted to reject
the servitudes of this time. It would be too easy to contrast here
with the sweet name of Tipasa other more sonorous and crueler
names. For men of today there is an inner way, which I know well
from having taken it in both directions, leading from the spiritual
hilltops to the capitals of crime. And doubtless one can always rest,
fall asleep on the hilltop or board with crime. But if one forgoes a
part of what is, one must forgo being oneself; one must forgo
living or loving otherwise than by proxy. There is thus a will to
live without rejecting anything of life, which is the virtue I honor
most in this world. From time to time, at least, it is true that I
should like to have practiced it. Inasmuch as few epochs require as
much as ours that one should be equal to the best as to the worst, I
should like, indeed, to shirk nothing and to keep faithfully a double
memory. Yes, there is beauty and there are the humiliated.
Whatever may be the difficulties of the undertaking, I should like
never to be unfaithful either to one or to the others.
But this still resembles a moral code, and we live for something
that goes farther than morality. If we could only name it, what
silence! On the hill of Sainte-Salsa, to the east of Tipasa, the
evening is inhabited. It is still light, to tell the truth, but in this light
an almost invisible fading announces the day’s end. A wind rises,
young like the night, and suddenly the waveless sea chooses a
direction and flows like a great barren river from one end of the
horizon to the other. The sky darkens. Then begins the mystery, the
gods of night, the beyond-pleasure. But how to translate this? The
little coin I am carrying away from here has a visible surface, a
woman’s beautiful face which repeats to me all I have learned in
this day, and a worn surface which I feel under my fingers during
the return. What can that lipless mouth be saying, except what I am
told by another mysterious voice, within me, which every day
informs me of my ignorance and my happiness:
“The secret I am seeking lies hidden in a valley full of olive
trees, under the grass and the cold violets, around an old house that
smells of wood smoke. For more than twenty years I rambled over
that valley and others resembling it, I questioned mute goatherds, I
knocked at the door of deserted ruins. Occasionally, at the moment
of the first star in the still bright sky, under a shower of
shimmering light, I thought I knew. I did know, in truth. I still
know, perhaps. But no one wants any of this secret; I don’t want
any myself, doubtless; and I cannot stand apart from my people. I
live in my family, which thinks it rules over rich and hideous cities
built of stones and mists. Day and night it speaks up, and
everything bows before it, which bows before nothing: it is deaf to
all secrets. Its power that carries me bores me, nevertheless, and on
occasion its shouts weary me. But its misfortune is mine, and we
are of the same blood. A cripple, likewise, an accomplice and
noisy, have I not shouted among the stones? Consequently, I strive
to forget, I walk in our cities of iron and fire, I smile bravely at the
night, I hail the storms, I shall be faithful. I have forgotten, in truth:
active and deaf, henceforth. But perhaps someday, when we are
ready to die of exhaustion and ignorance, I shall be able to disown
our garish tombs and go and stretch out in the valley, under the
same light, and learn for the last time what I know.”
(1952)
The Artist And His Time
I. As an artist, have you chosen the role of witness?
This would take considerable presumption or a vocation I lack.
Personally I don’t ask for any role and I have but one real vocation.
As a man, I have a preference for happiness; as an artist, it seems
to me that I still have characters to bring to life without the help of
wars or of law-courts. But I have been sought out, as each
individual has been sought out. Artists of the past could at least
keep silent in the face of tyranny. The tyrannies of today are
improved; they no longer admit of silence or neutrality. One has to
take a stand, be either for or against. Well, in that case, I am
against. But this does not amount to choosing the comfortable role
of witness. It is merely accepting the time as it is, minding one’s
own business, in short. Moreover, you are forgetting that today
judges, accused, and witnesses exchange positions with exemplary
rapidity. My choice, if you think I am making one, would at least
be never to sit on a judge’s bench, or beneath it, like so many of
our philosophers. Aside from that, there is no dearth of
opportunities for action, in the relative. Trade-unionism is today
the first, and the most fruitful among them.
II. Is not the quixotism that has been criticized in your recent
works an idealistic and romantic definition of the artist’s role?
However words are perverted, they provisionally keep their
meaning. And it is clear to me that the romantic is the one who
chooses the perpetual motion of history, the grandiose epic, and the
announcement of a miraculous event at the end of time. If I have
tried to define something, it is, on the contrary, simply the common
existence of history and of man, everyday life with the most
possible light thrown upon it, the dogged struggle against one’s
own degradation and that of others.
It is likewise idealism, and of the worse kind, to end up by
hanging all action and all truth on a meaning of history that is not
implicit in events and that, in any case, implies a mythical aim.
Would it therefore be realism to take as the laws of history the
future—in other words, just what is not yet history, something of
whose nature we know nothing?
It seems to me, on the contrary, that I am arguing in favor of a
true realism against a mythology that is both illogical and deadly,
and against romantic nihilism whether it be bourgeois or allegedly
revolutionary. To tell the truth, far from being romantic, I believe
in the necessity of a rule and an order. I merely say that there can
be no question of just any rule whatsoever. And that it would be
surprising if the rule we need were given us by this disordered
society, or, on the other hand, by those doctrinaires who declare
themselves liberated from all rules and all scruples.
III. The Marxists and their followers likewise think they are
humanists. But for them human nature will be formed in the
classless society of the future.
To begin with, this proves that they reject at the present
moment what we all are: those humanists are accusers of man.
How can we be surprised that such a claim should have developed
in the world of court trials? They reject the man of today in the
name of the man of the future. That claim is religious in nature.
Why should it be more justified than the one which announces the
kingdom of heaven to come? In reality the end of history cannot
have, within the limits of our condition, any definable significance.
It can only be the object of a faith and of a new mystification. A
mystification that today is no less great than the one that of old
based colonial oppression on the necessity of saving the souls of
infidels.
IV. Is not that what in reality separates you from the
intellectuals of the left?
You mean that is what separates those intellectuals from the
left? Traditionally the left has always been at war against injustice,
obscurantism, and oppression. It always thought that those
phenomena were interdependent. The idea that obscurantism can
lead to justice, the national interest to liberty, is quite recent. The
truth is that certain intellectuals of the left (not all, fortunately) are
today hypnotized by force and efficacy as our intellectuals of the
right were before and during the war. Their attitudes are different,
but the act of resignation is the same. The first wanted to be
realistic nationalists; the second want to be realistic socialists. In
the end they betray nationalism and socialism alike in the name of
a realism henceforth without content and adored as a pure, and
illusory, technique of efficacy.
This is a temptation that can, after all, be understood. But still,
however the question is looked at, the new position of the people
who call themselves, or think themselves, leftists consists in
saying: certain oppressions are justifiable because they follow the
direction, which cannot be justified, of history. Hence there are
presumably privileged executioners, and privileged by nothing.
This is about what was said in another context by Joseph de
Maistre, who has never been taken for an incendiary. But this is a
thesis which, personally, I shall always reject. Allow me to set up
against it the traditional point of view of what has been hitherto
called the left: all executioners are of the same family.
V. What can the artist do in the world of today?
He is not asked either to write about co-operatives or,
conversely, to lull to sleep in himself the sufferings endured by
others throughout history. And since you have asked me to speak
personally, I am going to do so as simply as I can. Considered as
artists, we perhaps have no need to interfere in the affairs of the
world. But considered as men, yes. The miner who is exploited or
shot down, the slaves in the camps, those in the colonies, the
legions of persecuted throughout the world—they need all those
who can speak to communicate their silence and to keep in touch
with them. I have not written, day after day, fighting articles and
texts, I have not taken part in the common struggles because I
desire the world to be covered with Greek statues and
masterpieces. The man who has such a desire does exist in me.
Except that he has something better to do in trying to instill life
into the creatures of his imagination. But from my first articles to
my latest book I have written so much, and perhaps too much, only
because I cannot keep from being drawn toward everyday life,
toward those, whoever they may be, who are humiliated and
debased. They need to hope, and if all keep silent or if they are
given a choice between two kinds of humiliation, they will be
forever deprived of hope and we with them. It seems to me
impossible to endure that idea, nor can he who cannot endure it lie
down to sleep in his tower. Not through virtue, as you see, but
through a sort of almost organic intolerance, which you feel or do
not feel. Indeed, I see many who fail to feel it, but I cannot envy
their sleep. This does not mean, however, that we must sacrifice
our artist’s nature to some social preaching or other. I have said
elsewhere why the artist was more than ever necessary. But if we
intervene as men, that experience will have an effect upon our
language. And if we are not artists in our language first of all, what
sort of artists are we? Even if, militants in our lives, we speak in
our works of deserts and of selfish love, the mere fact that our lives
are militant causes a special tone of voice to people with men that
desert and that love. I shall certainly not choose the moment when
we are beginning to leave nihilism behind to stupidly deny the
values of creation in favor of the values of humanity, or vice versa.
In my mind neither one is ever separated from the other and I
measure the greatness of an artist (Moliere, Tolstoy, Melville) by
the balance he managed to maintain between the two. Today, under
the pressure of events, we are obliged to transport that tension into
our lives likewise. This is why so many artists, bending under the
burden, take refuge in the ivory tower or, conversely, in the social
church. But as for me, I see in both choices a like act of
resignation. We must simultaneously serve suffering and beauty.
The long patience, “The strength, the secret cunning such service
calls for are the virtues that establish the very renascence we need.
One word more. This undertaking, I know, cannot be
accomplished without dangers and bitterness. We must accept the
dangers: the era of chairbound artists is over. But we must reject
the bitterness. One of the temptations of the artist is to believe
himself solitary, and in truth he bears this shouted at him with a
certain base delight. But this is not true. He stands in the midst of
all, in the same rank, neither higher nor lower, with all those who
are working and struggling. His very vocation, in the face of
oppression, is to open the prisons and to give a voice to the
sorrows and joys of all. This is where art, against its enemies,
justifies itself by proving precisely that it is no one’s enemy. By
itself art could probably not produce the renascence which implies
justice and liberty. But without it, that renascence would be
without forms and, consequently, would be nothing. Without
culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when
perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift
to the future.
(1953)