Practicing Camus: the art of engagement

In 1957, just a week after the announcement of his Nobel Prize for Literature, Albert Camus was interviewed by the Parisian magazine Demain about how an artist engages in public life. At the time of publication, Camus was already a well-known novelist, journalist, and intellectual superstar who was called on frequently to give comment on the brutal war of independence raging in his home country of Algeria. Aggrieved by the bloodbath taking place in the name of justice and freedom, he felt compelled to offer a dour, unpopular assessment: an artist is "groping his way in the dark, just like the man in the street--incapable of separating himself from the world's misfortune and passionately longing for solitude and silence; dreaming of justice, yet being himself a source of injustice; dragged--even though he thinks he is driving it--behind a chariot that is bigger than he." (1)

Camus had many reasons for perceiving darkness around him. He witnessed his country under siege and feared that his own mother would be among the innocent targets of terrorism against French colonials. But he also encountered another form of darkness among his peers in Parisian intellectual circles, particularly Jean Paul Sartre. Once close friends, Sartre and Camus parted ways five years previously in a flurry of criticism that struck at Camus's book, The Rebel. Camus's arguments against revolutionary zeal hit the Marxist-steeped Sartre as a personal affront. They never reconciled, and their public quarrel excited debate on the rules that guided how a person participates in social and political life.

The French left adopted the word engagement to describe this participation. Applying engagement to artists and intellectuals, it was often translated as "commitment" and signified one's responsibility to the public good as well as the moral consequences of art. Camus agreed to the need for responsibility but was troubled by the popular style of engagement that was narrowly partisan, concerned with ideology and concrete programs of reaching out towards the proletariat in their struggle against bourgeoisie oppression. He found their brand of commitment too prescriptive, preaching freedom but demanding stifling allegiance. Soon, he found himself alone, arguing for a different kind of engagement. According to Camus, balancing the rights and responsibilities of the polis is an all-too-human endeavor, too delicate for political parties alone, too consequential not to account for human limitation, and too important to be of concern only to artists. Noble causes should not have to sacrifice the nobility of the individual.

Nearly fifty years have passed since Camus confessed to the darkness that surrounds public engagement. His words touch on the painful truth that stepping into public life is a deeply private experience, one that exposes our tangled histories and conflicting loyalties. Translating personal passions and convictions into public discourse puts one in the critical crossfire, yet without the personal connections, social and political language loses its ground. Camus insists that, despite the darkness, we need to speak for justice. But, gratefully, we are not alone. Lending us hope in this work are the voices of suffering, joy, beauty, and friendship that keep us company in the dark.

The Experience of the Absurd

Camus was well acquainted with the effort to challenge the darkness. His father had been killed in World War I when he was only a year old, and his mother withdrew into a silence that profoundly affected him. Later he reflected on the silences he knew: his mother's love spoken only with her eyes, the dignity of working class life, and the spectre of death. (2) Diagnosed with tuberculosis at seventeen, he lived his life in sporadic health and took comfort in his boyhood memories of Algeria's harsh beauty of the sea and sun.

But the sun can burn and a man can drown easily in the sea. Nature is indifferent to human concerns and perfectly willing to deal death with surprise. History is not much better, and any confidence in progress was hard to swallow for Camus, who found himself caught in the fickle turns of history when he was stranded in Paris during the Nazi occupation. To be alive is to be caught in a liminal or "in-between" world--between life and death, guilt and innocence, creature and agent. Camus desired to be a person who, in Pascal's words, does not show his "greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once." (3)

He wrote of tragedy because he believed it to be the most honest way to move through it. His journalism kept his eyes open to the horrors of totalitarian government, first at Alger-Republicain, where he catalogued anti-Arab policy, and then at the French Resistance paper Combat during and after the occupation. His novels, including The Plague and The Fall, along with his plays and short stories, exposed characters to dire situations in order to explore human motivation in the face of adversity.