CLASSICS REVISITED
Exiles and strangers
By Ravi Vyas
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Exile and the Kingdom, Albert Camus, first published in English translation 1957, Vintage, $6.50.
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Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is an unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and the true home: its essential sadness can never be overcome... But if true exile is a condition of terminal loss, why has it been transformed so easily into a potent, even enriching motif of modern culture?
Edward Said: Reflections on Exile
WHEN Albert Camus reviewed Sartre's first novel, Nausea, published in 1938 (the two men had not met till then) he laid down his credo in the first few lines: "A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images...A work that has to endure cannot do without profound ideas. And this secret fusion of experience and thought, of life and reflection on the meaning of life, is what makes a great novelist." The philosophy of Camus was the philosophy of the absurd, and for him the absurd sprang from the relation of man to the world, a negative, destructive force that showed up the unreality of bourgeois ethics, the vanity and futility of human values. For Camus, the word "absurd" meant two different meanings. The absurd was both a state of fact and the lucid awareness which certain people acquire of this state of fact. The "absurd man" is the man who does not hesitate to draw the inevitable conclusion from a fundamental absurdity. So, he had gone on to say "the world is neither (completely) rational, nor quite irrational either". And he went to show that "custom" and "diversion" concealed "man's nothingness, his forlornness, his inadequacy, his impotence and his emptiness".
"The secret of Europe", Camus wrote in The Rebel, "is that it no longer loves life". Camus was certain at least on that score; he was passionately in love with life, whose least pleasures gave him instant and complete gratification. But not much more. The rest of his work (The Outsider, The Plague, The Fall, The Myth of Sisyphus, Carnets, Resistance, Rebellion and Death) like Exile and the Kingdom attempts to show what remains when you love only life, how you must conduct yourself without any of the other comforting abstractions: God, politics, nihilism, family, history, even love. But he seems to have been involved with morals without organised morality, with the politics of loneliness or Exile.
Exile and the Kingdom consists six stories — The Adulterous Woman, The Renegade, The Silent Men, The Guest, The Artist at Work and The Growing Stone. They are spun around the Arab-French world and they all deal with Camus' basic theme of the absurd. And because of the absurdity, the coherence of his work is not really logical. There is an individual coherence of something organic in which the interconnecting veins of life run between every part. The cult of the absurd gives way to his later rejection of nihilism, not by any clear intellectual choice, but by the process of natural growth. He did not adopt any new theory, he gave instead reasons for his ways of feeling; he argued it out in a way that was at once historically profound and very personal. He was an artist who was also an intellectual, rather than an intellectual, like Sartre, who used the arts for polemical and theoretical ends. (It was said of Sartre that his brains saved him from his feelings which probably explains why he counts for so little in the intellectual life of France today.)
Realistic account
Take some of the stories that depict people at decisive moments in their lives, although none of them strike us with the force of The Stranger, The Plague or even The Fall. All the same, in "The Silent Men", "The Guest", "The Adulterous Woman" we are given realistic accounts: there is always some detail that is attested to the brutish thoughtlessness of reality, which prevents the narrative from disappearing into the pure, inflexible line of myth. A wife betrays her husband to give herself to the desert night. A renegade missionary is brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish. A careful artist is caught between society's values and his own private yearning. What Camus is saying is that man is condemned by nature and circumstances to spiritual exile, always seeking an inner kingdom in which to be reborn.
In "The Guest", which is perhaps the most effective story in the collection, we see clearly that the conflict is not between solitude and fellowship, or liberty and submission. The hero doesn't swing between two forms of solitude: one of the cruellest of exiles is a solitude of incomprehension when the gestures of fraternity are of no help; the other in which we are aware of what we have done and to realise that it was necessary to do what we did. Is this the opposing of two attitudes? Building up to a good point and tracking down a bad one? Not necessarily. The story tries to probe the meaning of life which unfolds in a flash of light and then shuts up tight in obscurity: waxes and wanes. Neither reason nor unreason, which reminds you of Dostoevsky, "if everything in life was reasonable, nothing would happen".
Commitment to language
The philosophy that runs between the lines may take some time to figure out but what gives Exile and the Kingdom that sombre, unexpected beauty is something beyond mere style as artifice; it is the quality that controls and forms style, an unwavering commitment to language as the partner of truth:
"From the dawn of time, upon the dry, barren soil of this immeasurable land, a small band of men had trod relentlessly, owning nothing, serving no one; the wretched but free lords of a strange kingdom. Janine did not know why this idea filled her with a sadness so sweet and so vast that it obliged her to close her eyes. She knew only that this eternal kingdom had been promised her, and that, except for this fleeting moment, it would never be hers again..."
Does this passage yield possibilities of tenderness, of depth? In the very last lines she joins her sleeping husband and whispers, "my darling".
All said and done, it is always the way language moves you, that makes an eternal classic.
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