Front Matter (introduction) Lyrical and Critical Essays by Albert Camus

Lyrical and Critical Essays by Albert Camus

Introduction [by editor, Philip Thody]

ALTHOUGH Camus’s greatest achievements as a creative writer are undoubtedly to be found in his novels and his plays, his literary career nevertheless both began and ended with the publication of a volume of essays. Between the appearance of L’Envers et l’Endroit in 1937 and the publication of his Nobel Prize speeches in 1958, he developed and extended his use of the essay form to express both his personal attitude toward life and certain artistic values. He also wrote articles on political topics, and a selection of these, under the title Actuelles, takes up three volumes of his complete works. But these articles, however perfect their style, did not really fall under Camus’s definition of the essay. For him, it was first and foremost what its etymology suggests: an attempt to express something, a trying out of ideas and forms, an experiment. It was not a polemical tool, although it could put forward very specific ideas. It was an attempt to record impressions and ideas that could later be used in other, more imaginative works. This is why the first two collections of essays included in this translation, L’Envers et l’Endroit (The Wrong Side and the Right Side) and Noces (Nuptials), provide so natural a commentary on Camus’s first novel, L’Etranger (The Stranger), and his first major philosophical work, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus). He is exploring, within the context of his own immediate experience, the ideas of the absurdity of the world, the inevitability of death, and the importance of the physical life, which will later be cast into a more intellectual mold in the philosophical work and into a more perfectly controlled artistic form in the novel. The Camus that emerges from these pages is, on an intellectual level, the young pagan rejecting Christianity, and the Mediterranean sensualist already preparing that criticism of Northern metaphysics which informs L’Homme révolté (The Rebel). He is also, on the more human level, the son seeking to communicate with his mother, the young man trying to come to terms with old age, and the lover of nature endeavoring to express this love in words.

The third volume of essays, L’Eté (Summer), has less unity of tone and subject matter than the first two. It brings together texts ranging over a wider period and already bears signs of that intense disillusionment with French political life that formed the starting point for La Chute (The Fall) in 1956. It also shows Camus as an ironically detached observer of his native Algeria, concerned less with the intensity of its physical joys than with the occasionally charming naïveté of its provincial culture. The first essays in Summer date from before the Second World War, and are again the working out of an experience that was to find its way into one of Camus’s major works, though this time in a less central position. The evocation of Oran at the beginning of La Peste (The Plague) clearly stems from essays such as The Minotaur, or Stopping in Oran, and offers in itself an example of the transition which Camus was making in that book from a provincial to a world-wide frame of reference. Camus is not, of course, suggesting that the lyrical or the humorous account which he gives of Algerian life is the whole story. The Algerian reports translated in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death have to be read side by side with the essays in Nuptials or in Summer if an accurate picture is to emerge of the relationship between Camus and his native land. His love for Algeria was essentially lucid. But it was in that land, as all these essays show, that he found his truest and most lasting inspiration.

Camus began his career as a literary critic when he was twenty-five and was working as a journalist on the left-wing newspaper Alger-Républicain. Of the twenty or so short articles he published on literary topics before this newspaper was virtually forced to close down by the French authorities in North Africa, only three are translated here. The reviews of Sartre’s first novel, La Nausée, and of his short stories, Le Mur, present an obvious interest for the enthusiasm that Camus showed for Sartre’s work at a time when the two had never met, and for the very considerable difference of attitude that already separated the two men. By the time he wrote the other literary essays included in the second part of this collection, Camus had already passed beyond the stage when he was required to provide a review of a particular length to match the requirements of a newspaper. He could now write more fully, exploring the different philosophical and aesthetic problems that he had already encountered in his own work: the problems of language, the nature of tragedy, the conflict within Europe between Mediterranean and Northern values, the scope and nature of the novel. Except for his enthusiasm for Faulkner, his literary preferences were classical and traditional: Madame de Lafayette, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Melville, and Martin du Gard attracted him most as novelists, the Greeks, Shakespeare, and the Spanish playwrights of the Golden Age as dramatists. It is as a record of the ideals which inspired him rather than of the influences which he underwent that his later literary criticism is so valuable.

Like the essays in The Wrong Side and the Right Side or in Nuptials, the texts in the third part of this volume are particularly valuable for the light which they throw on Camus as a creative writer. Both The Stranger and The Plague have been widely interpreted and criticized. This is how Camus thought they should be approached and how he felt they could be defended against the criticisms sometimes made of them. His three interviews also clarify his attitude toward his work as a whole, and particularly toward The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. These too were essays, but of a more perfect and finished kind: the expression within an intellectual and historical context of an attitude toward life already worked out in lyrical terms.

PHILIP THODY

For her generous counsel during the preparation of this volume, the editor and translator are much indebted to Germaine Brée.

Copyright © 1968 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.