Inside the Outsider
ALBERT CAMUS AND THE LITERATURE OF REVOLT, by John Cruickshank; Oxford University Press, English price 25/-.
(Reviewed by
Anton
Vogt
LBERT CAMUS won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, when he was only 44. He had written three novels: L’Etranger, La Peste, and La Chute. Apart from collaborations and translations, he had written four plays: Caligula, Le Malentendu, L’Etat de Siége, and Les Justes. He had written a handful of famous essays, including Le Mythe de Sisyphe and L’Homme Révolté; and a small volume of short stories. As editor of Combat, in the immediate post-war years, he had written three editorials a week denouncing "bourgeois hypocrisy, economic exploita-
tion, colonialism, the colour bar, Franco Spain" and everything else that incurred his ire. He was a Leftist, but not a Marxist; an atheist, but not a nihilist; a man in revolt, but not a revolutionary. Above all, he was (and is) an individualist. When informed that he had been given the Nobel award, he said it should have gone to Malraux. Dr Cruickshank has written an admirable critique of this remarkable man: describing, interpreting, and evaluating a creative mind perpetually engaged on contemporary problems. What emerges at the same time is a way of thinking and acting which is foreign to English genius. By French standards, English novelists and dramatists are "idealess and evasionaries . . ." The French, as exemplified by Camus, Malraux, Anouilh, Aragon and Sartre, are simultaneously intellectuals, artists and __ political activists. They may not solve France’s problems or their own, but they are continually engaged in problem solving. They write and fight with both hands, logically.
Camus begins his revolt as 2 reaction to the absurd: the meaninglessness of existence, the arbitrary callousness of fate, the inevitability of death. Rejecting absolutes, he rejects the revolution which encourages men "to s-ctifice the present to a hypothetical future." He quotes Marx: "An end requiring unjust means is not a just end." In spite of political action. he does not think that
man’s basic problems can be solved by politics; nor, as a modern, is he particularly interested in psychology. His sphere is strictly and paradoxically morals, and his interest lies in the morality of a single action in a particular circumstance. Concepts such as "peace," "freedom," and "justice," are defined by reference to specific events: the German Occupation, the Liberation, the wars in North Africa and IndoChina. Always modest, he yet contrives to be the conscience of ‘his generation. A cosmic pessimist, he still believes in individual man. Though life in the long Tun is meaningless, he believes it can be made meaningful transcendentall when given moral and artistic order. His Prose is as lucid as his thought complex. The Oxford University Press has made an uncommonly handsome book to house its exciting contents.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1049, 2 October 1959, Page 12
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466Inside the Outsider New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1049, 2 October 1959, Page 12
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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