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We start with this phrase from Albert Camus (1913-1960): “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” On my last trip to Paris I visited my friend Sandrine, a professor at the Sorbonne, at her home in Neuilly sur Seine and I fell in love with her beautiful, always updated library and the interesting section of French authors where Camus is well represented with The Stranger, in a beautiful edition illustrated by Eduardo Úrculo (2001), The myth of Sisyphus, The plague and other authors that captivated me.
The Stranger (1942) is a provocative and challenging novel that invites us to reflect on the human condition and the search for meaning in a seemingly absurd world. An argument against the tyranny of conventions and the lies on which social life is based. The novel has influenced contemporary thought, and continues to be the object of study and analysis. Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.
Albert Camus (07-11-1913- Dréan-04-01-1960 Villeblevin) was a novelist, essayist, journalist and philosopher of Franco-Algerian nationality, who was born into a humble family. He created a philosophical theory that was based on atheistic existentialism that he defined as absurdist. His thinking develops under the influence of the philosophical reasoning of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and German existentialism.
His childhood and much of his youth were spent in Algeria. It was in Algiers where his teachers Jean Grenier and Louis Germain introduced him to reading philosophers. He began the study of Philosophy at the University of Algiers. He graduated with a thesis on the relationship between classical Greek thought and Christianity, based on the studies of Plotinus and Saint Augustine.
He formed an amateur theater company Teatro del Trabajo, which performed classic works before an audience made up of workers. He was an editor in a newspaper in the Algerian capital, while traveling intensively through Europe. In 1939 he published Weddings, a set of articles that included numerous reflections inspired by his readings and travels. In 1940 he went to Paris where he soon found work as an editor at Paris Soir.
Albert Camus began to be known in 1942, when he published his short novel The Stranger, set in Algeria, and the essay The Myth of Sisyphus, works that complement each other and reflect the influence that existentialism had on him. Such influence materializes in an absurd human destiny, and perhaps its best exponent was The Stranger in his novel (Meursault), incapable of participating in the passions of men and who lives even his own misfortune from an absolute indifference, the same, according to Camus, which marks the nature of the world.
During the Second World War he was involved in the events of the time, he was active in the Resistance and was one of the founders of the newspaper Combat. The problems that the war had raised inspired him to Letters to a German Friend.
The novel begins with these first words:
Today, mom died. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know. I received a telegram from the asylum: “mother deceased. Burial tomorrow. I feel your grief". It doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.
Thus begins The Stranger, a novel without duplicity, with a dry and frontal style, which came to move Western narrative. With austere language and from a desensitized protagonist narrator, the plot goes through that feeling of deep apathy that is reflected in a world shaken by Nazism, persecution, xenophobia, censorship and the occupation of Paris.
In The Stranger, the character – Mersault – who is the narrator, receives the news of the death of his mother and he himself has been sentenced to death for a crime and yet, he remains impassive throughout more than one hundred pages. . “I thought that, after all, it was just another Sunday, that mom was now buried, that she was going to go back to my job and that after all, nothing had changed.”
What Camus is showing in this work is his view on the world, which over time he would call absurdism. According to this philosophy, man is marked by the absurdity of his own destiny.
The myth of Sisyphus is a philosophical essay. It is forged as a metaphor, and opens with the following quote from Pindar “Do not strive, my soul, for an immortal life, but exhaust the scope of the possible.”
It describes everything that overwhelms men today, as well as Sisyphus to endure the different tests to which they were imposed to achieve freedom or deserve certain benefits.
In the contemporary world it would be the different feelings and tests that life puts on the path and the way in which the human being is willing to overcome them with the conviction of knowing that he is the only one who has the power to do so.
In The Plague, the story is set in Oran during a fictional bubonic plague pandemic. The city is isolated, the number of fatalities increases exponentially day after day. The characters, the doctor, the journalist, the state official, among others, establish work and circulation routines that are challenged by the advance of the pandemic.
Rieux, the doctor in The Plague, will spend the 280 pages searching for reagents and serums to inoculate his patients. Tarrou, an ad honorem official, will invent improvised hospitals and tents to care for the sick. Without memory and without hope, they lived installed in the present. “The plague had taken away everyone's possibility of love and even friendship. Well, love requires a little future and for us there were no more moments,” says the novel.
The novel The Plague (1947) represents a certain change in his thinking: the idea of solidarity and the capacity for human resistance in the face of the tragedy of living prevails over the notion of the absurd. The Plague is both a realistic and allegorical work, a mythical reconstruction of the feelings of post-war European man, of his most oppressive terrors. The author specified his new perspective in other writings, such as the essay Man in rebellion (1951) and in short stories such as The city, The exile and the kingdom, works in which he oriented his morals from rebellion towards an ideal that would save the higher moral and spiritual values, the need for which seems all the more evident to him the greater his conviction of the absurdity of the world.
He translated into French The Devotion of the Cross by Calderón de la Barca and The Knight of Olmedo by Lope de Vega. In 1957 he died as a result of a car accident. His remains rest in Lourmarin, a town in the south of France where he spent his holidays.
The letter that Camus wrote to his admired professor Louis Germain when he was nominated for the Nobel Prize is well known:
Dear Mr. Germain,
I have received an honor too great, which I did not ask for. I thought first of my mother and then of you. Without you, the affectionate hand that you extended to the poor little boy that was me, without his teaching and example, this would not have happened. Not that I attach much importance to such an honor. But it offers at least the opportunity to tell you what you have been and continue to be for me, and I can assure you that your efforts, your work and the generous heart that you put into it always continue to live on in one of your little disciples, who, at Despite the years, he has not stopped being his grateful student.
I send you a hug with all my heart.
Albert Camus
