In Our Time - Camus

Episode Date: January 3, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Algerian-French writer and Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus. Shortly after the new year of 1960, a powerful sports car crashed in the French town of Villeblevin in Burgundy, killing two of its occupants. One was the publisher Michel Gallimard; the other was the writer Albert Camus. In Camus’ pocket was an unused train ticket and in the boot of the car his unfinished autobiography The First Man. Camus was 46. Born in Algeria in 1913, Camus became a working class hero and icon of the French Resistance. His friendship with Sartre has been well documented, as has their falling out; and although Camus has been dubbed both an Absurdist and Existentialist philosopher, he denied he was even a philosopher at all, preferring to think of himself as a writer who expressed the realities of human existence. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, Camus’ legacy is a rich one, as an author of plays, novels and essays, and as a political thinker who desperately sought a peaceful solution to the War for Independence in his native Algeria. With Peter Dunwoodie, Professor of French Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London; David Walker, Professor of French at the University of Sheffield; Christina Howells, Professor of French at Wadham College, University of Oxford.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. Shortly after the new year of 1960, a small family car crashed in the French town of Vill Bléva in Burgundy, killing two of its occupants.

One was the publisher Michel Gallemar, the other was the writer, Albert Camus. In Camus's pocket, it was a little bit of a bit of his pocket, an unused train ticket, and in the boot of the car, his unfinished autobiography, the first man. Camus was 46 when his life was cut short, but had already worked for the French resistance, editing an underground newspaper, befriended and fallen out with Jean-Paul Sartre, written a series of brilliant books and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And although he's been dead for nearly 50 years, his ideas on the absurdity of life and the richness

of his writing, live on. Here to discuss Arbe Camus, one of the most enigmatic, charismatic and talented writers of the 20th century are Peter Dunwoody, Professor of French Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, David Walker, Professor of French at the University of Sheffield, and Christina Howes, Professor of French at Wardham College, University of Oxford. Peter Dunwoody, Camus born in 1930, in Moldova in Algeria, and brought him in Belcour, a poor district of the capital, Alger's.

What kind of upbringing did he had, and did it, as it were, set the course of the rest of his life? Yes, I think one can say it did. His background is essentially working class, his father of French extraction, his mother of Spanish extraction, which is very typical of Algeria at the time. And probably the most marking thing in the early years was the disappearance of his father, who was killed at the Battle of the Marne in 1914. And that involved then the movement of the family to Belcour, as you say, to live with his grandmother. I think the two factors.

working class background, absence of a father, and then within the reconstituted family, the overbearing presence of the grandmother, out of which he then evolves some of his key themes, clearly. When you say working class, it's a French colonial place, in that sense, ruled like France,

with Departement, the same educational system and so on, from which he benefited? Yes, he did, because one of the advantages of the French system for the Europeans in Algeria, was precisely the way it duplicated the metropolitan system. So in Camry's case, for example, that meant that he was able to have a scholarship to the Algiers Lise, that he then went on in 1923 to the university, so that he followed a normal French system, but within a colonial territory, yes.

And it was a great authority. He dedicated a Nobel Prize speech to his teacher. That's right, he did indeed, yes. He talked about his background being the world of poverty and light. Can you say something about that? Yes, he felt very strongly that out of poverty had come some of the moral principles which guided him, that the lived experience of the working class, its honesty, its dignity, it's the effort that it put in simply to making ends meet resulted in a cohesion.

and a solidarity, which he felt very strongly, was essential to the moral makeup of the individual. The other key, as you say, was in fact light by which, of course, he means, as you can imagine. Everything in Algeria had already meant for so long for the Europeans. Sun, warmth, pleasure, sensuality, and his childhood is marked, in fact, by that kind of thing, by the beach, by swimming, dancing, sensuality. So these are the two key elements that he identifies as central in the Algerian experience. And this young, as it were,

athlete, athletic young man, a brilliant young man, was struck down by tuberculosis when he was 17. What impact did that have on his career? Well, that's the dark side. We've talked about light. This is the dark side in the sense. At the age of 17, the first attack of tuberculosis, which has in a sense multiple effects because, okay, it's life-threatening, first of all,

but it also interrupts his studies. It interferes with the kind of physical life that he'd been leading up until then, his football, etc., etc., and more significantly, it impacts on the future because it meant that a certain number of obvious professions for the working-class boy coming out of a university education such as teaching were closed. The consequence being that when he does, go out to earn a living, he has to take a series of sometimes peculiar jobs,

car salesman, car accessory salesman, employee in the local Met Office, and so on. In a sense, he says afterwards, it liberated him from the civil service kind of functionaire world and set him free to become what we know as Camus today. David Walker, throughout his life,

Cammy was passionately interested in the theatre and at the very end he was hoping to set up his own theatre in Paris indeed. How did that start? Well, it started as a part of his political commitment in 1935 when the cultural front that had been initiated by the Moscow Line, the Communist Party, generated a number of cultural activities. And Camus set up an amateur theatre group, basically, which he called Teatro du Travaise, or the workers' theatre.

And he began with... This is in Algiers. This is in Algiers. When is it at university? When is at university? He mounted a notably a production, a sort of adjet prop, collective creation, as he called it, called Revolt in Asturias,

which was about the repression of a minor strike in northern Spain, which had happened in 1934. So it was a militant production, and it was forbidden. The authorities denied them access to the hall in which they would perform it. So already it was a left-wing initiative, if you like. But it went much further than that,

because when Camille left the Communist Party, he continued to stage plays. His great hero was Jacques Coupe, who, before the First World War and then during the 1920s, created the Teatro de Vieux Colombier, an almost single-handedly revolutionized French theatre, introduced notions of acting, training of actors, stripped back the theatre to the bare boards,

in order to bring to prominence the words of the text and the body of the actor. And this was something that Camille was very, very interested in doing, and he pursued through his own stage adaptations. And he was in rehearsal with a production of Othello, which he had translated, in which he was to play Othello when war broke out, and that was interrupted. He found other values in the theatre. As he says, he found in football, he found most he knew about teamwork and morality.

It's been much exaggerated how good he was at football, but he played for the university as a goalkeeper, and he was good enough to do that, and he was passionate about it and so on and so forth. So can you just bring those to that idea together of the morality? Well, they're both rule-bound activities to which people collectively subscribe for the purpose of working together. That's what they have in common, I think.

And, of course, in terms of acting, there's a further dimension, I think, which, I mean, his first work, the myth of Sisyphus includes as one of the absurd heroes, the actor. The actor's existential status is analogous to the condition of the human being in the absurd universe.

In 1930, we still, is in the theory, but in 1935, he's a fully-paid member of the Communist Party. I suppose the two questions are, why did he join and why did he leave? Well, he joined because he was born in poverty. And as he said, poverty made me aware that there were lots of things wrong with the world and with society in particular,

even though, as he then went on to say, the splendors of nature reminded me that politics and history are not everything. But politics took over at an early stage. He joined the Communist Party, His teacher Jean Grenier encouraged him. One suspects that it was a kind of experience that Grenier thought might be good for him.

But anyway, he was given the responsibility within the party of recruiting Arabs to the party. This was a time when the Communist Party was seeking to produce a sort of collective front to resist fascism, for example, and at the time was very active in its attacks on colonialism. And so Camus, who was deeply concerned with the status of the Arabs within Algeria,

within Algeria was concerned also then to militate and activate to improve the status and standing of Arabs within the colonial setup. It wasn't strictly speaking colonial, at least according to the French authorities since Algeria was a part of France. But these Arabs who, in theory were French citizens, didn't have anything like the same rights as the minority of Europeans in Algeria.

So Kamie was intent on putting matters right, doing what he could, to bring some measure of justice and dignity to the Arab population. And why and when did he leave it? Well, he left because, given the rise of Hitler in Europe, the Moscow party line changed. It became clear that fascism was the great enemy, and therefore the communist parties in Europe

should form allegiances and alliances with the governments in place, and the Franco-Soviet pact was signed in 1935, following which local communist parties were told to soft pedal on the anti-colonialist line. And Camus then found himself then out of favour. And he was not at all inclined to this movement of Realpolitik on issues which he considered to be perennially important. Christina Howells the Second World War broke out, as we all know, in 1939.

And the left-wing newspaper Camus had been working for, the Al-Gillé republican was suppressed. And so in 1940 he did the opposite of what everybody else was doing. He went to Paris. when people were trying to get out of Paris. Why did he do that and what did you find when he got there? I suppose the short answer to why he did that was unemployed. He'd been unemployed for three months, I think.

He was also rather fed up, I think, with a lot of pressure being put on him at the time to get married. And he wanted to make a new start in Paris. His fiancé was supposed to be going to follow him. And he signed up as, I suppose, a copy editor probably in English, for Francois, not a very left-wing newspaper at all, rather a popular newspaper. I think when he arrived,

he only had a couple of months working in Paris, in fact, before they were all evacuated to Clement Feron. And indeed, the period, that initial period in Paris, was not very long-lived, because after a while he was driven back to Algeria. He went back to Nigeria, then he was kicked out of Algeria. Absolutely, kicked out again, had to come back to Paris. Yes.

And went to Lyon? Yes. went to Lyon. And of course he was writing all this time. Well, he's working for the Comba. His reputation then is the reputation of a journalist working in an underground, influential newspaper, La Comba. Yes. Of which he eventually became editor.

Yes, I think that he seems to have felt, though, that his most important work was still producing literary works. He was still writing theatre. I mean, when he came across in 1940, he'd already got a draft of Calicula, half of Le Tanger, quite a bit of Leit de Sisyph, ready-written. And he went on with that while he was embarrassed at the same time as doing this political journalism.

In 1942, Le Tranger, the Stranger was published. It got very, very well received from people who mattered massively then, and Malro and Sartre and so on. Can you tell us briefly about the part of that novel and what he was trying to express in it? Ah, well, the plot. That could be summed up, I suppose, as a Frenchman in Algeria kills an Arab and is executed.

But obviously that's a rather short plot summary. There are three deaths in Le Tranger. It starts with a death when the major protagonist, Merser, the absurd hero, if you like, learns of the death of his mother and has a rather unusually impassive reaction to it. Goes off to the cinema, goes to the beach with his girlfriend,

and sleeps with his girlfriend. And all this around the funeral of the mother, which he reacts to rather quietly. Then we have the climactic episode when Mersot has been with his rather suspect and seedy friend, Raymond, and Raymond has had an altercation with Arabs on the beach without a woman, and looks as though he's about to shoot an Arab. Mersault stops him.

He says, you can't shoot. without provocation, you can't shoot that Arab and he takes the gun from him and that's indeed why he has a gun. Goes for a walk on the beach later. Extraordinary passage in fact, very lyrical passage when Merso shoots the Arab because Camus manages to get the reader to think

until the reader's step back from the text anyway that it's not really Merso's fault for shooting. It's because of the sun. There's a lot of heat there's the sun glinting on the knife that the Arab's holding and Merceau shoots almost as a reflex reaction. It says in French, La Gachette Acede Acede, the trigger gave way, and then shoots four more times into the dead body.

So that's the high point of the book and the low point of the book, really, and the end of part one. And the second part is the trial, a real fiasco and parody of a trial, when what seems to be on trial is Merceau's character, and he's condemned to death. There's a lot of reflection, suddenly in Merso, who's been a rather unreflective character,

and it ends with Merso waiting for his execution. It did strike a nerve in occupied France in 1942 and also brought into play, perhaps it had been earlier, Christine, you'll tell me, the notion of the absurd, which caught the imagination of a great number of people. Can you tell us what Camus himself meant by the absurd? It is rather an extraordinary novel, in fact, come out in the middle of the war,

no mention of the war in it, obviously, and set in Algeria, not Paris. Sometimes people think that the absurd means that the world is absurd. I think that's not right, and that's not what can be meant by it. For Kemi, the absurd arises from a clash, or a tension, if you like, between our human and natural desire for meaning and the fact that meaning is not pre-inscribed in the world around us. At least that's what he says in Lemit de Seas Eve.

So it's a meaningless world. The world is meaningless, and yet we're not. We are constantly seeking meaning. And that clash with the three elements is what constitutes the absurd. His reputation, Peter Dunmody, was heightened and perhaps confirmed. A year after La Troja's Stranger, he published the myth of Sisyphus. He'd hoped to publish him at the same time, but it didn't happen like that. Anyway, it came out near enough.

And again, I was received with great achlam. Can you tell us about that and how that perhaps does or does not bolt on to what Christine has been saying about the legislation? Yes, by the time the myth of Sisyph appears, Camus is better established. His role in combat, for example, had situated him in, for the French. But I think the link between the etrangee, the outsider and the myth of sycissipps, is in a sense at the level of experience. One of the things which he stresses in the essay is precisely that one learns the truth

about the absurd through everyday experience, banal experience, something that can hit you on the street corner. And that awakening is, I think, what is embodied in the outsider. I think in a sense, the banality of routine existence, for example, that kind of thing, the social pantomime,

the pastiche one has, of things like marriage, funerals, wakes, court cases. In fact, we talked about, parody there. The inadequacy of language. The fact that language, the term love doesn't cover anything that

Marceau understands. The term guilt doesn't cover what the court tries to impose in the second half. So language is fundamentally inadequate. But underneath at all, the awakening, the lucidity that finally

either is articulated towards the end of the novel, if indeed one thinks that he's not lucid at the outset, or maybe he is lucid at outset. There's a critical argument there. But in a sense, it's coming to an awareness, as he says himself, that it's what he says to the chaplain at the end of the story. We're all condemned to death.

We're all going to face the guillotine. It's just a question of waking up to the fact and living out the consequences. And the consequences, that he always said about the metisizif. The mitresizif is a starting point. because the consequences of that lucidity about the fact that we're all immortal is that you learn to live in the present for the here and now, you live in terms of intensity and immediacy and spontaneity and pleasure and happiness.

And you don't project your life of today forwards. You don't sacrifice the pleasures of today for something which may not happen tomorrow because you may not be here and one day you will not be here. David Walker. I think that reading of the novel is obviously a core one. but I think there's another strand running through that it's worth attending to, and it's this Christina referred to three deaths. There are, in a sense, two crimes in the novel. There's the crime of Mursault, and then there is a judicial crime with the execution at the end of the novel,

and Camus is very much an opponent of capital punishment. And that opposition is important also. You've got an absurd murder that happens by chance, which in a sense is understandable, if not forgivable. and a rational murder which is enforced by social mechanisms which ensure that it will take place regardless of whatever Merso feels or says. And that's a scandal as far as Camus concerned. And the other side to this is that Mersault refuses guilt. He's not a man who's impervious to guilt

since when he has to ask time off from his boss to go and attend his mother's funeral, he knows he's doing something wrong. And he's aware of displeasing people when his behaviour does. doesn't always fit the pattern. He smokes a cigarette by his mother's coffin, for example. But by the time he gets into the courtroom and he's been tried and found guilty, and then the chaplain comes to see him and says, you are a guilty man, he must commend yourself to God.

He says, I've committed a crime, I'll pay the price, don't ask me to feel remorse. Don't ask me to feel guilt. And that theme of guilt is really crucial to a proper understanding of Camus's thinking right the way through to his death. Can I come back, Christina Hours, to bring their life to bow as well as the ideas? Paris was liberated in 1944, Camus returned. He was much fated as the editor of Kumbar, the icon of the Resistance,

and these two books, and then he met Jean-Paul Sartre, and the two became friends. Can you tell us what significance that friendship had for Camus? Yes, I think that it was, in some ways it was a strange friendship. People tend to think of Sartre and Camus together. they sometimes think of them wrongly as both existentialists. They were such different characters. Camus from a poor background as we've been hearing, very attractive man, very attractive to women.

I suppose in some ways politically all the things that Sarch might have aspired to be. Sartre, of course, was bourgeois, ugly, attractive to women as well. But they did become friends. They became friends than Simond de Beauvoir says that she and Camus rather vied for Sarch's attention. So it seems as though Sartre was the centre. and Camus and Beauvoir had a bit of a rivalry around him. The friendship's usually seen as coming to a rather abrupt end in 52 over the question of the Long Revolti,

but in fact I think that it was almost from the outset permeated with problems, political disagreements, disagreements about democracy, for example, in 48. There was different points of view expressed quite vigorously about democracy. What work can you briefly tell us what the differences were, what they are? I suppose that they evolve, actually. I think early on, Camus seems the more political man. He's more involved in the resistance than Sarch, was he's more concerned about colonialism than Sartch.

Later, when he's attacked for his liberalism and reformism, Sartch comes to the fore as the stronger political character. I think that Camus's opposition to violence and to murder and to execution is probably one of the hearts of the difference between them, because for Camus, murder could never, well, that's not quite true, murder could almost never be justified, whereas for Sarge, the end could justify the means. And so when Camus is attacking the French history of violent revolution, Sartre's view was that revolution can often, in fact, bring about very beneficial change.

So, for example, their attitude to communism, Although Camus was the one who'd been in the Communist Party and Sarge never joined. Nonetheless, later on, it was Camus who recoiled from communism and Stalinism, while Saatch was still trying to be tolerant of it. And although we must pass this by, it's worth pointing out that they talk about ideas, alcohol and women, and they drank one thing and another on the boulevard Saint-Germain and established a little iconic, perfect way for a writer. Any writer thereafter to lead their life.

Peter Dunwoody, then after the war, 47, can you publish the plague, which is very different from the estranger, which is also called the outsider from time to time? How do you change, is this a very big and public changing of his philosophical and political ground, although he didn't like to be called a philosopher. He said he wasn't a philosopher,

said if you wanted to write philosophy, he'd write novels. A change, yes, a very fundamental change, I think, but not a change of his philosophy. If you remember what Merzal says in the stranger is that he had always been right, that he had been happy and was happy again, and that anything that he had done, he could just as easily not have done

or could have been done differently. In other words, what you have in the stranger is the individualism, the amorality, the immediacy, in what is called an ethic of quantity, living for the maximum in the present. Now, then what happens with the plague, I think, is something quite different. And in a sense,

the position in the plague is encapsulated by three characters, by the doctor, Dr. Rieu, by his friend Tarou, and by the outsider journalist, Hombert. And probably the... And you just tell us.

or is what the plague is. The plague is a real plague. The plague is a real plague which affects the town of Oron at an undisclosed date. And while the authorities initially resist calling it a plague because of the consequences that would have, eventually they're forced to close the town. So effectively you have a novel which is about the reactions of a population, reactions of individuals vis-à-vis the plague. It's generally taken as an allegory of fascism, for example. So you have sanitary squads which resist, you have the doctor who does his job, hence resists,

you have black marketeers who exploit the situation and so on. And then you have this rather peculiar figure of the journalist who's come from the outside to do a news report on the living conditions of the Arabs as it happens. And he considers he doesn't belong there, so his only preoccupation is to get out. Eventually, two-thirds of the way through the book, he does get the opportunity to escape. and then turns up again the next day and the doctor says well you had an opportunity to get out and be happy why didn't you take it and he replies

because there can be something shameful about being the only one to be happy and I think that literally encapsulates the shift if the outsider is about happiness and one's right to happiness this one is about where the moment when an individual discovers that the collectors

transcends the individual, and that even the philosophical position of the myth of Sisyphus, for example, can be shown to be in a particular situation, can be inadequate, and it needs a new moral response. So the philosophical position, I think, doesn't change, but I think it brings a moral dimension, which is quite new. The philosophical dimension doesn't change, it develops from absurd to revolt in the key terms, which are often used to here. The absurd, as Christaida said earlier, arises from the tension that exists between the human beings' desire for happiness and meaning

and the world's refusal to provide that. Revolt is a step further in a sense. It's the realisation that this the world's refusal to meet our needs is a kind of metaphysical injustice which has been done to mankind and that mankind's a purpose in existing,

with getting into essentialism here, I know, but it is nonetheless the case, that man can have a purpose in existing, to say by resisting the injustice which is done, trying to make the world inhabitable, though plague, for example, comes along and makes the world a horrible place.

And just as the plague is a metaphor for fascism and totalitarian regimes, Nazism in the first instance, so revolt can be translated into the practical philosophical political sphere, it's revolt and rebellion against oppressive tyrannies.

And so the novel the plague is about the way in which resistance can be put up against oppressive regimes. Staying with the books for a little while longer, Christina, can you tell us about the importance of the rebel published in 1951 and how that fix was being said about the other books? I think that the rebel is an extraordinarily interesting book. It's often considered to be rather overpopular, but it didn't go down at all well. It didn't go down well because it was seen as too liberal and not revolutionary enough.

Also, it was seen by Sarch as an attack on his philosophy. Sartre isn't mentioned by name in it, but I think he was quite right to think that he was being criticized here. In Sartz's journal, Eton Modern, there was a review, quite naturally, of L'Henrevoltae, and it was not written by Sartre. It was written by his right-hand man, Francis Jensen, and it was very, very critical. In fact, it was quite cruel.

It attacked Camus' politics, it attacked Camus for not being a philosopher. It attacked Camus for not having read all the books that he claimed to have read, only reading the critics. Camus devastated by the critique of his book, which he was very proud of, and he replies, he doesn't reply to Jean-Saint. He replies directly to Sartre, Monsieur Lidier-Eactor, and he writes a long and bitter response,

which, in fact, is replied to by Sartre, also cruelly, quite sarcastically. I'll have at least this in common, with Hegel, he says, Camus read neither of us. So he had a sharp tongue, and that was really the moment of their breakup, and I don't think that they were reconciled since. Although, at the very end, both of them, it was found in Camus' papers after his death writings which were much more conciliatory about Sartre,

and when Camus died, Sartre does write a very touching obituary. Yes, I think the quarrel with Sartre has made, gives you one dimension of Lomévali, but I think think it's worth saying that the problem that Camus had was he located himself right in the middle between warring parties. He was anti-capitalist and he was anti-communist and this was in the middle of the Cold War so he was not going to get blessings from either side. And the attacks from Sautil were the most notable ones but there were lots of others from the other side as well. Peter? Yes, just one other aspect of the rebel I think which Camus himself said was underestimated.

David's quite right when he says he's caught between two opposing blocks in the middle, But he does propose in the rebel an alternative And he regrets that no one took it seriously And that alternative is libertarianism And I think one tends to forget in a polarised vision of Camus That from the early days in Nigeria, in fact, when he was still writing for the local newspaper One of the reasons that the newspaper was finally condemned

Was because the owners felt that there was a libertarian tendency at work in the newspaper that they didn't approve of. And that is precisely, it comes from Camry's interest in Spain, it comes from his resistance to Franco, etc. But there's a very fundamental strand there, which is an alternative to the conventional left, and most radically an alternative to the communist left. Can we go back to Algeria and bring that in?

Because in 1954, there began a war for independence in Algeria, which was a French colony, as we've said, and he'd had the Europeans there, the French and the Arabs. Once more, as you've said earlier, David, Camus was in the middle against communism, against capitalism, and now again he finds him off, as it were. Will you enlighten me, Peter, Don't believe if I'm wrong, in the middle, in this situation? Yes, I think one has to be very careful here when one is talking about Camus and the Algerian war, because we're not talking about Camus and Algeria.

We know how important that is and how many of his values come from that. We're not talking about Camus and the Algerians because all of his writing from the 30s to 1959 make it perfectly obvious that he wants equality and justice for all Algerians. Camry is an interesting case. Whether the Arabs are. That's right. As far as he's concerned, that's not negotiable.

and the other interesting thing is that in a sense Camus is one of the few people who took the notion of assimilation seriously because for Camus way ahead of his time in a sense assimilation meant respecting cultural difference whereas of course traditionally assimilation for the Pianois population meant you lost your Arab Muslim characteristics and you became a typical Frenchman

so in a sense he's ahead of his time there but of course being ahead of your time in the middle of a civil war is perhaps not of a comfortable position to be in. One thing that he opposed, and the one thing that in a sense keeps him in the middle, is that he opposes the means by which one side was fighting for its liberation and the other side was resisting.

In a sense, what he opposes is violence in its terrorist and counter-terrorist form. Christina, can you develop that little? I think at the time, Camus probably seemed to be taking a very soft peddling position. He refused to take sides with the Arabs when the war was happening. He insisted on defending a kind of project of integration, which people thought more and more was not going to be feasible. And his compassion, I would say, and humanitarianism seems to have made it difficult for him actually to condemn what's increasingly seen

as a kind of imperialism or colonialism nowadays. So I think that Camus, in fact, through having his heart in the right place, maybe put himself on the wrong side of the political barrier. Yes, his heart was in the right place, but his mother was in the wrong place. She was in Algeria. Just to clarify, and if I'm being bumbling, you tell me, but just to get a clip, The Arabs are fighting for their own independence. Well, the Arabs...

And he still thinks that, come what may, this is part of France and should stay part of France. He became called a pro-colonial racist at some stage. Well, in many senses. The thing is that from the early 30s, there have been Arabs who have been seeking assimilation. In the face of the injustices, they were denied the chance just to be like other people. And time after time, government initiatives from Paris had been sabotaged by the ruling colonial oligarchy in Algeria. So even the Arabs who had claimed to want nothing more than assimilation had given up on such a soft approach by the time the 50s came

and begun to say there's no progress can be made unless we get rid of the colonial oligarchy. And that was the position, that was what put him in such a difficult position because many of the people who were fighting the terrorists were his friends. Five years after that book, he brought out, we've seen another novel The Fall, it's in 1956, Sartre praised this one to the sky, as I understand it. Where is ideas then?

Well, perhaps I'd say something first about Lashit, the fall, because it's a very intriguing book. David's been talking about guilt, Camuson guilt, and of course this book, which is the story of a lawyer who's given up being a lawyer and become a hang-around of bars in Amsterdam telling his story, the book is permeated by a very powerful sense of guilt. In some senses it's the antithesis.

of the stranger, because in the stranger, Merceau kills an Arab, and yet Camus seems to want us to exculpate him. In La Chute, Clamance hasn't killed anybody. He doesn't rescue a woman who's apparently committing suicide from a bridge, and he's tormented by this, makes him review his whole values, his whole idea of his life. He has, if you like, sinned by omission, but Clamance is extraordinarily guilty in his sense of himself,

whereas Mersso seemed to feel. feel no guilt at all. And I think that probably this is Camus speaking, both ironically and from the heart, if one can say this, because Camus was under attack and he is both confessing, if you like, Clamance who hadn't read the books, he'd just got them on his shelf, Clements, who was full of style and no content, Clamance, who was a real misogynist and slept around and was disrespectful to women. In all these ways, I think Camus is doing a kind of Mayor Culper, but he's also doing an attack, and he's attacking obliquely people who had put him in this

very uncomfortable position, which he didn't really feel he deserved, and he's also, once again, he's attacking Sarge. And I think that it's a brilliant book from a literary point of view, and it's a very complicated book from the point of view of its ideas. The thing about this book novel is that it's about guilt, it's about guilt about which one can do nothing. At the middle of it, there is the evocation of Christ, who, Clement says, discovered that on the night he was born, the slaughter of the innocence took place, and his birth was responsible for that. And therefore, and for Clamance, he never felt guilty until it was too late to do anything about it. The girl who threw herself to her death from the bridge, he'd not given a second

thought to until some years later the memory came back, and then something clicked in him, and suddenly all the things he had to feel guilty about came back to him. And what Camus, I think, is attacking there, and he says it on one or two occasions, is the disabling nature of guilt. fact that it disqualifies people ethically for taking responsibility for their own actions and of course for him the Communist Party and the Catholic Church are two such organisations which

say never mind about the guilt bring it to us we'll make it better and for him for Camus the crucial thing is people assuming responsibility for themselves what Clermont admits at the end of the novel he's running away from his freedom he says let's have an easy solution let's all declare that we're guilty otherwise

we'll have to be free and that's a terrible condemnation that's a terrible sentiment to have to carry. And the next year he was awarded 57, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, which I've read, caused him both anguish, embarrassment and, of course, pleasure. I think we can move on from that, because I'd rather stay with the idea.

He got the Nobel Prize, and he awarded us for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our time, suggests it's as much for his humanitarian, a little for his humanitarianism as for his literature. Would anybody like to comment on that, on that citation?

He thought that Malaw should have got it. Marlowe's great hero. And he was terrified at the thought that the award of the Nobel Prize might be seen as the final chapter in his own career. It's the sort of thing that's awarded to old men, as it were, old women sometimes too. In other words, it's the final bit, and he felt that he had enormous amounts still to write. At the time of his death, he was 46, when he was killed at his car crash,

he was working on an autobiographical novel, The First Man. It was only published quite recently in 1995. What did that, Peter Dunwoody, what does that bring to her? understanding of Camus and why it takes so long to publish it? Have you tried reading Camus' manuscripts? Yes, that's the normal answer that it has taken from 1960 to 1995 to decipher Camus' handwriting. The alternative possibility, which is that, as Catherine Camus, his daughter, has said on several occasions, it would have been highly destructive had they published the text in the 60s.

and that it has taken two or three decades for things to move on and for people to be able to look at this text as she feels it was intended. What the text attempts to do, one has to remember, first of all, that we're talking here about an unfinished, not just an unpublished, but an unfinished text, which has its disadvantages because one can draw conclusions which subsequently would have turned out to have been erroneous. but it has one key advantage

which is that it allows us a glimpse at the kind of fact-fiction interface in relation to the key sensitive point of Camry's existence which is of course his relation to Algeria. What happens is it's a text which is constructed around attempts to reconstruct a past. So there's the family memory and the family past which fails because there is no memory in the family.

There's the collective past, for example, the war, etc. And that fails in a sense because the soldiers that he goes to, their reminiscences are essentially about the situation, etc. So they're not talking about an individual. And then there's the entire dimension of colonial history. And what one finds is that throughout this quest, which is presented initially as a quest for the father,

and I think it's a quest for the father insofar as the father represents, capital F now, the father represents, the past legitimacy, etc. Because what Camry is seeking through the text is to legitimize the continuing French presence and of course the problem is that

the work that he focuses it around his family and again around poverty and so on and his argument is that these people have worked all their lives and they possess nothing. So of course they're totally unlike the normal exploitative colonial and the argument of course might work for the past but it doesn't justify

the continuation of the French presence into the future. And I think that's what the novel is attempting to do. I'm afraid I could stay a role day, but I have to bring this to a conclusion. How do you think his reputation stands now, David Walker? Well, I think it's a fact that he is the most widely read French writer in the Anglo-Saxon world. The stranger is still massively read, perhaps for wrong reasons, but it's a wonderful novel. And I think that his later work, the short stories, Exile and the Kingdom, which are a sort of prelude to the first man,

show the way in which his art was developing. His ambition was, as he said, having rewritten Dostoevsky, every writer's ambition is to rewrite Tolstoy. And he was trying to produce a Tolstoy a novel, which makes the death when it occurred such a, well, terrible thing. Christina. Yes, I think it's certainly as a literary figure

rather than as a philosopher that he stands and will continue into the future. And finally, Peter. Yes, I think probably for a lot of people today, it's his claim that we have an absolute right to happiness. But I think for me, it's probably, in a sense, I would apply to him what he said about Dostoevsky. He said that he learned to admire in Dostoevsky,

the writer who had explained the most clearly the problems of a historical destiny in human condition. And I think in many ways, if one were to say the same thing about Camus, I think that would be the image I would like to see of him in the future. Well, thank you very much, Peter and Woody, Christina Howes and David Walker and thank you very much for listening