Albert Camus - art and politics, the "rebel" vs. the "revolutionary"

[Mal7]

Here are some quotes on Albert Camus from Charles I. Glicksberg’s book The Literature of Commitment. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1976).
I found the whole book an interesting read. Besides Camus, it has chapters on Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Artaud, Dada, Surrealism, André Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Bertolt Brecht and Mayakovsky. One of the book’s themes is how literary authors have engaged with politics, and the conflicts that arise between ideals and the realpolitik embodiment of ideologies.

The chapter on Camus focuses in part on Camus’s dissatisfaction with the Communist Party, of which he was once a member. It shows Camus as making a distinction between the “rebel”, who must maintain the integrity of their own values, and the “revolutionary”, who is seen as having to sacrifice the integrity of their personal values to fit the role required of them by an ideology. Camus believed that God was dead, but did not believe that from this must follow nihilism. The idea that "God" was dead was perhaps appropriate and resonant in the context of this period of the twentieth century, following the massive horrors of World War One and the build-up to World War Two.

Apologies for the length of the quotes – I suggest only reading if interested in the topic. :)

In his study of the subtle and far-reaching ways in which Camus was influenced by the concept of commitment, Emmett Parker says: “Camus believed that the artist is obliged by his very art to bear witness to man’s basic right to freedom and justice in the face of the historical aberrations of his time.” Camus’s career demonstrates the temptations that beset the writer who commits himself politically. At the age of twenty-one, when he was still a student at the university, he became involved in politics. He joined the Communist party, but his membership was of short duration. He was repelled by the Party’s adoption of a policy that combined opportunism with expediency. In 1939 he lost whatever enthusiasm he had once felt for the Soviet Union. His early disenchantment with the power politics of the Communist Party explains in large part his reluctance – as a writer who cherished his freedom as an artist, his inalienable right to freedom of expression – to tie himself closely to some political organization. “The problem of just how deeply the intellectual’s commitment should involve him in political affairs occupied a place in Camus’s thought for some time after his break with the Communists. . . .” In his pursuit of the ideal of justice, the writer must shut his ear to the ideological songs the sirens sing. Camus struggled hard to preserve his artistic integrity and to purge his mind of all cant.

Neither the artist whose supreme dedication is to his art – which to Camus meant dedication to the truth above all else – nor the intellectual who cultivates his doubts and prefers to “keep his eyes open” is likely to adapt very easily to the restrictions imposed by political party discipline.

- Emmett Parker, Albert Camus: the Artist in the Arena, (1964), page xi.

Though the artist in these parlous times must take a stand, this does not mean that he must swear allegiance to some political system and act strictly in accordance with its dictates. Which, Camus asked himself, should come first: art or politics? Camus became convinced that “the artist could better serve the revolutionary cause by submitting to the discipline of his art instead of to political party disciple.” Less arrogant than Sartre in the presentation of his views, he contended that the writer is not a privileged being whose political pronouncements deserve special consideration. Camus, who looked upon himself as primarily an artist, became not a crusading anti-Communist like Arthur Koestler, but a principled non-Communist.

Throughout his life Camus consistently affirmed that the writer must bear the burden of responsibility to society. Camus drew the line at the injunction preached by Marxist critics that the writer must take part in the political struggle waged by the Left. The intellectual, the artist, has no particular competence in the field of politics. As a rule, he knows too little at firsthand about the socioeconomic conflicts of his age: neocolonialism, strikes for higher wages, imperialistic war, monopolistic control, but he must not, out of a sense of humility, keep silent, for then he allows the status quo to remain unchallenged. He must not forfeit his right to utter his cry of protest when things are in the saddle and injustice rides mankind. “The writer who allows himself to be fascinated by the political Gorgon,” Camus warned, “is doubtless making a mistake. But it is also a mistake to pass over the social problems of our time in silence.” Despite his limited knowledge and his realization that his words will not abolish the evil or the injustice he is denouncing, the writer must speak up.

There is no inconsistency between Camus’s participation in the Resistance movement and the philosophy of the absurd expressed in The Stranger, Caligula, The Misunderstanding, and The Myth of Sisyphus. Because he would not accept the leadership of the Communist Party nor agree that the end justified the mean, his political enemies labeled him an absurdist. They make no mention of the fact that Camus, the alleged incorrigible absurdist, joined the Communist Party toward the end of 1934, which assigned him the task of carrying on propaganda work among the Moslem people, and that he left the Party in 1935 (though some believe that he retained his membership card through 1937). They do not refer to his position as an editorial writer for Alger-Républicain, which dealt with Algerian political problems. Once he achieved recognition as a novelist, the French reading public paid no attention to these politically motivated calumnies and listened to his utterances as if he were an oracle even on matters outside the realm of literature. Roger Quilliot is one of the few French critics who sets the record straight in relation to Camus’s involvement in politics.

The fact that he [Camus] came to literature by way of a novel set in poverty, or that his first theatrical work should have paid vehement homage to the dead strikers of Oviedo in a text in which the class struggle erupts with virulence, could be only a literary accident or the result of a crisis of political puberty. However, among the writers who have counted during the past fifty years, Camus is one of the rare ones – along with Aragon or Eluard – to have played an active role for several years in a political party, and more precisely, the Communist Party.

- Quilliot, Roger, The Sea and Prisons: A Commentary on the Life and Thought of Albert Camus, (1970), p. 117.

Because he was neither a fanatic nor a camp follower, he was regarded with intense disfavor by critics on the Left. He exposed the limitations of the proposed Communist method for insuring the success of the proletarian revolution. He showed that both Communism and Fascism issued from the same philosophical source. The course of action followed by the devotees of German National Socialism bore out the thesis Camus had argued: that the death of God and the collapse of the moral sense led the Nazi leaders to believe that they could rely for the success of their plan to conquer the world on military power alone. The Nazis and the Communists assumed that there were no universal moral standards, that the fate of history is determined by the triumph of superior force. As Camus pointed out in The Rebel, they were firmly convinced that the end justified the means. Communism and Fascism thus represented an unprecedented outburst of nihilistic passion. Hitler practiced genocide in a “mad” organized effort to wipe out the Jewish people. Stalin resorted to terrorism in order to get rid of his “enemies” and to achieve the collectivization of the land; he killed those “kulaks” who opposed his plan and deported millions of muzhiks.
It took considerable courage for a French writer to attack Stalin and the Soviet Union after the war was over. It was more prudent to avoid a clash, to remain discreetly silent.

[. . .]

Camus’s critique of Marxism reveals by what unscrupulous, Machiavellian methods the leaders of the Communist Part in the Soviet Union sought to increase their power. The Party was the supreme authority in determining the nature of truth. It could revise the text of history by changing the character of the past. Its ambition went beyond this limited aim: it believed it could change human nature by a process of conditioning. Diehard rationalists, the Communist leaders ruled out the element of the irrational; they rejected the Freudian concept of the unconscious. Men are bundles of conditioned reflexes and they can be taught to practice the virtue of obedience to authority. The revolutionary, once is invested with power, becomes the accuser, the merciless judge, the executioner, all in one. He knows that men are expendable. History accepts no alibis. He who is not for the Revolution is against it. The individual who does not hold “the correct” Marxist outlook is potentially guilty of treason. The Grand Inquisitor rules unchallenged in the Fatherland of the Proletariat.

Such an exposé in The Rebel, Camus knew full well, would earn him the implacable hatred of the Communist Party in France. It caused the rupture of his friendship with Sartre. He never regretted the step he had taken. He was not convinced by the Sartrean logic, which held that rebellion must culminate in revolution. He believed that the rebel turns against the revolutionary. “Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic” (p. 249). He turns into a destructive nihilist. Camus does not bid man to give up this world in moral despair. Man must create and abide by the value that enables him to judge the vicissistudes of history, and he can find this supreme value in the ethic that underlies rebellion. This ethic categorically denies that man is but an object, a pawn to be moved about at will in the ruthless chess game of power. To protect ourselves against this source of nihilistic infection, we must recognize a nature common to all men [editorial suggestion: excepting OPs and psychopaths. . .] and establish a limit beyond which it is dangerous to go.

Is the rebel to remain silent while “legalized” murders are committed with impunity? Camus advocates a humanistic philosophy that sets limits to human ambition. The rebel knows that he is not omniscient. Unlike the revolutionary, he does not act in terms of absolute principles and thereby attempt to legitimize whatever evils are committed in his time. The rebel, on the other hand, confines himself to the sphere of the relative and strives only for what is possible. Rebellion, acting within a framework of limited aims, does not resort to terrorism to achieve its ends. It dedicates itself to the never-ending struggle against evil, and in doing so it is careful not to violate the liberation tradition. “Man can master, in himself, everything that can be rectified. And after he has done so, children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society” (p. 303). Since it is a movement that affirms life, rebellion has no use for the revolutionary abstractions that do violence to the true nature of man. It refuses to sacrifice the needs of the present on the altars of an unknown or problematical future. The adventure of revolutionary romanticism comes to an end when man realizes at last that he is not God.

By the time Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957, many Europeans regarded him as the conscience of the race of man, who voiced the need for justice and compassion in an age given over to terrorism concentration camps, death factories, and genocide. He spoke out with lucid yet impassioned conviction on the major issues that confronted his age. Whatever the theme he dealt with as a journalist – the war in Algiers, neocolonialism, capital punishment, Fascism, Communism, responsibility – his work was instinct with a profound awareness of the necessity for preserving a number of basic human values. Committed to the defense of these values, Camus endeavored to combat the political nihilism that argues that might was the final arbiter of right and that nothing mattered in the last analysis except the victory gained by superior force of arms. Camus never yielded to absolute despair nor lost his faith in man. The world was absurd, but not the destiny man chooses for himself or the ideals he struggles to establish on earth.

Once Camus made known his humanist position, his reaction after 1945 to the political crises and conflicts of his time was strikingly consistent. He did not bother to conciliate the antagonistic voices on the Left. He was his own man. When Gabriel Marcel protested against the fact that The State of Siege is situated in Spain, Camus replied that the play is an attack on totalitarianism wherever it happens to flourish. “No one in good faith can fail to see that my play defends the individual, the flesh in its noblest aspects – in short, human love – against the abstractions and terrors of the totalitarian state, whether Russian, German, or Spanish.” The bureaucratic State, absolutists in its exercise of power and repressive in function – that is the monstrous evil which must be abolished.”

In seeking to make reason prevail in Algeria, Camus condemned the enormities committed on both sides. If terroristic methods are used and the innocent are made to suffer, then nihilism triumphs. There is no justification for crime, no matter who commits it. He was opposed to the war and labored hard to avert the tragedy that was about to befall Algeria. Like Sartre, he attacked the counterrevolutionary regime installed in Hungary with the aid of Soviet troops and tanks. The Hungarian intellectuals, Camus charged, were intimidated, imprisoned, and executed because they had dared to protest against the intolerable conditions in their land. What happened in Hungary, he declared, underscored the bankruptcy of the forces of the Left. Though he continued to defend the cause of freedom, he urged the artist no to succumb to the spirit of hatred for life and of contempt for the human race. The writer cannot afford to cut himself off from society, but he must not become subservient to the wielders of political power.

- Glicksberg, Charles I., The Literature of Commitment, (1976), pages 240-3, 246-9.

So long as a political ideology frees and stimulates the creative imagination it will be a brilliant matrix for the production of literature and art. But unfortunately it is the fate of most political ideologies to be narrow, to misrepresent and oversimplify the complexities of the world, to insist on the rightness of a single way, to fanatically constrict those operations of the imagination on which art feed. And when this is the case (with either Marxist dogma or any other narrow ideology), then what demands for its health the infinite freedom of fantasy is forced into the rigid framework of an intellectual creed which nullifies its power. This is why there is so seldom a fruitful symbiosis between political insistence and creativity in the arts.

- Levi, Albert William, Humanism and Politics (1969), pp. 303-4

- ibid., page 289