SPRING BOOKS -2
Beyond the Pain Principle
BY ANTHONY HARTLEY IT has often been remarked—by Andre Mal- raux amongst others—that our era has a taste for the fragmentary in art and letters. In part, this is an inevitable consequence of the state in which the creation of the past has come down to us. Who would wish the Venus de Milo with arms? Since the eighteenth century we all dearly love a ruin, and now even the patina of a modern sculptor such as Marino Marini adopts something of the rough finish appropriate to an artifact long buried in the earth. In art the mere fact of priority implies a mutilation which can be fOund fashionable. In literature the merits of the fragmentary are somewhat different. There it is the thought in its raw and ambivalent state before the contradictions are ironed out of it which we value. In French literature it so hap- pens the modern liking for fragments has long been embodied in a carefully considered and classical form. Pascal's Pensees were genuinely pieces of an uncompleted work; Joubert's were not. As with diaries, so with notebooks : what began as an accident is continued as a sophisti- cated literary genre.
In Albert Camus's Carnets (Hamish Hamil- ton, 21s.)—now very carefully translated with a welcome profusion of notes by Philip Thody —there is no elaborate and deliberate construc- tion, but there is not a great deal of impromptu either. That is, these notebooks contain material, most of which was directed towards the writing of Camus's books and some of which actually appears, either unchanged or varied, in his pub- lished work. The descriptions of Italy, for in- stance, which Camus visited in 1937, were incorporated into Noces. There are ideas for La Peste, for Caligula—sometimes rather better ideas than those finally used.. There are also philosophical jottings of the kind which were to appear in Le Mythe de Sisyphe. These note- books run from 1935 to 1942, but all Camus's work up to and beyond La Peste is to be found in embryo.
These notes reveal to us the workshop of a great writer, and that is fascinating enough in itself, although not necessarily more revelatory of any hidden side of his personality than his novels or plays. Often, however, the fragments which are the starting-points of a work do enable us to see more clearly what the work is about. The original sketch for La Peste puts more clearly than the book itself the contrast between the normal and the catastrophic which is at the heart bf Camus's inspiration: The agency 'Ransdoc-S.V.P.' (information please), gives all information on the telephone. 'Two hundred victims today. A charge of two francs will be added to your telephone account.' 'Impossible, I'm afraid, no more coffins for four days. Consult the Transport Authority, A charge . . : The agency advertises, itself on the radio. 'Do you want to know the daily, weekly, or monthly number of, plague victims? Phone "Information Please"—six lines: 253-91 to 253-96: This was written between 1939 and 1942, and it strikes the authentic note of 'business as usual' —so familiar, so courageous in its way, and so absurd. Reading these lines, one can feel the establishment of a mood which in La Peste itself, because of certain longueurs, became more diluted and less sharply recognisable. Similarly, the fragment headed 'Absurd characters. Cali- gula. The sword and the dagger.' in some ways gives a clearer notion than the play Caligula of the dialectic between an absolute ruler and his mirror image : I don't think they quite understood me the day before yesterday when I battered the officiating priest over the head with the mallet that he was going to use to kill the heifer. Yet it was very simple. I wanted, just for once, to change the order of things—just to see what happened. And what I saw was that nothing was changed. The spectators were surprised and a little frightened. Apart from that the sun went down at the same time. The conclusion which I drew was that it doesn't matter if you change the order of things.
Few passages in Camus's completed work are as deeply stamped with the characteristics of his style, its passion and its spareness, as this. One effect of the fragmentary is to concentrate attention upon the details of style.
Such self-revelation as there is in these note- books, therefore, mostly consists of a throwing into higher relief of the main themes of Camus's work. Some sketches, however, seem both per- sonal and literary at the same time. The long passage on 'Jeanne'—Dater to be incorporated into La Peste—was apparently not based on Camus's first wife as had been thought, but it is hard to believe that it does not refer to some personal experience reproduced more directly, changed less, than is generally the case with a novelist's material. To read this episode without giving it an autobiographical interpretation in- volves an effort which may indicate that Camus was closer to it than he would have been had it been pure fiction. In other similar jottings it is often 'difficult to know whether author or character is speaking. Speeches read out of con- text take on an autonomous life, and the basis of Camus's fiction is usually his own opinions.
Throughout these notebooks runs the oppo- sition, which has disturbed more than one critic of Camus, between the absurdity of the human condition and a mystical appreciation of nature' (of Mediterranean nature) which is deemed to serve as a remedy to it. On the one hand, there are reminiscences of death and pain faced with a stoical grandeur by individual human beings. On the other, there are dithyrambic descriptions of a north African landscape with olives and carob-trees and white plastered houses and, above all, the sun and the sea. In this illumina- tion the writer is dazzled and exalted into momentary forgetfulness of his flawed condition. The physical impact of nature carries him beyond the weighing of pain or pleasure. There is much of Camus's inspiration in one of these fragments:
Lucid ecstasy and smiling destitution—the despair which we see in the virile acceptance
reflected in Greek stelae. Why do I need to write or to create, to love or to suffer? The part of my life which is now lost is not, basi- cally, the most important. Everything becomes pointless.
Neither despair nor joy seems justified be- fore this sky and the shining suffocating heat pouring down from it. The feeling is of awe, a sensation religious in quality, transcendent in its capacity for rising above the human values of an absurd world.
Camus has been criticised for his ready accept' ance of this emotion of psychological release as being in some sense an answer to the ab- surdities of death and disease which he analysed in so much of his work. Born into a world where, as he wrote, the men of his generation led the life of dogs, he clung to the consolations of nature and the forgetfulness which lies in physi- cal' sensation, but this was not a solution easilY communicable on any other level than of poetic expression. At the end of a work such as L'Homme Revoke it appeared out of place.
Perhaps Camus himself was conscious of the subjectivity of the values he was trying to estab- lish here. In La Peste and in other works there appears an answer more adapted to his own analysis of human ills. It is that of Dr. Rieu%, who wishes to cure men and not to save than, offering a sort of spiritual minimum vital rather than the rhapsodies of an attempt to rise above the earth. But in these carnets there is not much of the limited ambition of Dr. Rieux, though there is the same passionate rejection of the 'dirty, repulsive and slimy universe of pain.' The evolution towards Camus's later endeavour t° supply a solution on the human level can best be seen in the constant references to the need for self-discipline.
These are, after all, the notebooks of a Mart in his twenties, of a sensibility in passionate contact with the physical world. The moving quality of many passages in them comes "from a sense of youth gradually becoming aware of greys and neutral tones where at first all had seemed light or shadow. The world of the young Camus is ambivalent, containing infinite possi- bilities of joy or of pain. It was the task of the older writer to try to limit the damage.
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