Hello,
Hierdie staan in geen argument met enige deelnemers hier nie en moes al eerder gepubliseer gewees het in November 2013 wat in tyd vir die herdenking van Albert Camus se geboorte sou gewees het. Die doel van hierdie brief is eerder om 'n paar radioprogramme te deel wat die luisteraar self kan ondersoek. Dit wat volg is precis van beperkte omvang in kontras tot soveel meer wat aangespreek kon word en is die skrywers verder self aan die woord.
Daar word begin met 'n opstel uit Victor Brombert, "Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi" en die aspekte daaruit geneem:
Camus over half a century after the heyday of Marxism and existentialism reveals more than ever the profound difference between him and the Parisian intellectuals of that time and Camus’s family background casts light on his resistance to any form of ideological intransigence. The poison of ideological absolutes is the subject of one of Camus’s most remarkable stories, “The Confused Mind” (“L’esprit confus”), which appeared in the literary journal La nouvelle nouvelle revue française in 1956 and was republished a year later under the title “Le Renégat” in Exile and the Kingdom (L’exil et le royaume).
It is the story of a student in a theological seminary who sets out for an allegorical City of Salt deep inside Africa to convert a savage tribe to the truth of his faith. Beaten, tortured, and mutilated, it is he who is converted to savagery and who soon accepts violence as the only truth.
The missionary is converted by the very fetish he set out to destroy.
The allegorical meaning of the story is clear enough. In his obsessive quest for some absolute, the missionary becomes the servile accomplice of his tormentors. He is a sick prophet, filled with self-hatred, and given to self-negation and self-destruction.
His allegorical identity can be defined even more precisely.
He is the modern intellectual espousing totalitarian values, seeking tyranny in order to submit to it.
No problem seems to have alarmed Camus more than this temptation of the absolute and the submissiveness of ideologues to values that declared war on the thinker and his thought.
Ideology was a form of death. In his reflections on death in all its forms, in his love of lost causes and desire to stand between victims and executioners, he seems indeed to espouse ahistorical values.
Tony Judt in "The burden of responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century bespreek Camus soos volg:
In a letter to her husband, dated May 1952 and reporting on her visit to Paris, Hannah Arendt wrote: “Yesterday I saw Camus: he is, undoubtedly, the best man now in France. He is head and shoulders above the other intellectuals.”
To his contemporaries, Camus seemed (in contrast) to have evolved from the engaged intellectual of the Resistance, through the maitre penseur of the postwar years, into the disabused and increasingly frustrated artist of the later fifties. From his own point of view there had been no evolution, simply a gradually increasing tension between his private needs and his public image, a pressure that boiled over on the sensitive issue of Algeria where his personal and political sentiments could no longer be kept apart.
Camus was an unpolitical man. Not that he was unconcerned with public affairs, or uncaring about political choices. But he was by instinct and temperament an unafiliated person (in his romantic life no less than in his public one), and the charms of engagement, which exercised so strong a fascination for his French contemporaries, held little appeal for him. If it is true, in Hannah Arendt’s words, that Camus and his generation were “sucked into politics as though with the force of a vacuum,” Camus, at least, was always resisting the pull. This was something that was held against him by many; not only because of his refusal to take a stance in the Algerian imbroglio but also, and perhaps especially, because his writings as a whole seemed to run against the grain of public passions. For a man who had exercised such enormous intellectual influence, Camus seemed to his peers almost irresponsible in his failure to invest his work with a lesson or a message-it was just not possible to derive from a reading of Camus any clear political message, much less a directive as to the proper use of one’s political energies. In Alain Peyrefitte’s words, “If you are politically faithful to Camus, it is hard to see how you could commit yourself to any party.”
Simone de Beauvoir castigated Camus for his assimilation of the plague to some kind of “natural” virus, his failure to “situate” it historically and politically-that is, to assign responsibility to a party or parties within the story. Sartre made the same criticism. Even Roland Barthes, who might have been thought a more subtle literary reader, found in Camus’s parable of the Vichy years an unsatisfactory failure to identify guilt.
The problem seems to arise from Camus’s transposition of political choices and outcomes into a resolutely moral and individual key which was precisely the reverse of contemporary practice, in which all personal and ethical dilemmas were typically reduced to political or ideological options.
Camus recognized something that many at the time still did not grasp:
What was most interesting, and most representative of people’s experience during the war (in France and elsewhere), was not simple binary divisions of human behavior into “collaboration” or “resistance,” but the infinite range of compromises and denials that constituted the business of survival; the “gray zone” where moral dilemmas and responsibilities were replaced by self-interest and a carefully calculated failure to see what was too painful to behold.
What Camus really wished to do or have the freedom to do if he so chose-was condemn the condemnable without resort to balance or counterreference, to invoke absolute standards and measures of morality, justice, and freedom whenever it was appropriate to do so, without casting fearful glances behind him to see if his line of moral retreat was covered. He had long known this, but as he confessed to his Curnets on March 4, 1950, “it is only belatedly that one has the courage of one’s understanding.”
It should not be inferred from this that Albert Camus was uncritical of the French stance in North Africa, or of colonialism in general. There was never any doubt about Camus’s sympathies. In the issue of Combat dated May 10, 1947, he wrote a corruscating attack on French policing and military practices in North Africa. The fact is, he told his readers, we use torture: “The facts are there, hideous and clear: we are doing, in these cases, just what we condemned the Germans for doing.” Camus
knew that something had to change in North Africa, and he deeply regretted the lost opportunity of 1945, when the French could have proposed political reforms, a degree of self-government, and even eventual autonomy to an Algerian community that was not yet polarized and in which progressive Europeans and and moderate Arabs might work together as he had proposed a decade earlier.
I have so far presented Camus’s relationship to his time and place in rather disjunctive terms. That he was not a philosopher, others had made clear. That he was not, in the established sense, a “public intellectual,” was something he himself had come to know. To his unsuitability for any political camp, and to the hyperpoliticized atmosphere of postwar France, his writings bear copious witness.
But he was, despite his misgivings at the idea, quite assuredly a moralist.
A “moralist” in France has typically been a man whose distance from the world of influence or power allows him to reflect disinterestedly upon the human condition, its ironies and truths, in such a way as to confer upon him (usually posthumously) a very special authority of the sort commonly reserved in religious communities for outstanding men of the cloth. In another time and place the secular term employed was soothsayer, whose etymology captures part of the point: a moralist in France was someone who told the truth.
“These ideologies (socialism and capitalism), born a century ago in a time of steam engines and complacent scientific optimism, are outdated now; in their present form they are incapable of addressing the problems of an age of atoms and relativity"
This did not mean by this that human beings should respond to their situation with resignation, circumspection, or even moderation. He continued to believe in the need (psychological and social) for "revolte" against evil in its manifold forms.
In a culture so resolutely polarized between extremes of Right and Left, Camus was unassimilable.
In "La Peste" the enduring image is of men of moderation and moral measure revolting not for an ideal but against intolerance and intransigence.
Camus (also) threw out a challenge.
In a discussion with Sartre, Malraux, Koestler that took place on the evening of October 29, 1946, Camus suddenly addressed his companions the following question:
“Don’t you agree that we are all responsible for the absence of values? What if we, who all come out of Nietzscheanism, nihilism, and historical realism, what if we announced publicly that we were wrong; that there are moral values and that henceforth we shall do what has to be done to establish and illustrate them. Don’t you think that this might be the beginning of hope?”
Camus wager is still on the table-now more than ever. In all his uncertainty and his ambivalence, with his limitations and his reticence, Camus got it right where so many others went astray for so long. Perhaps Hannah Arendt was correct all those years ago-Albert Camus, the lifelong outsider, was indeed the best man in France.
Susan Sontag in 'n opstel beskryf Camus as "The ideal husband", ironies gegewe sy veelvuldige verhoudings, maar daar is iets in die voorbeeld wat Camus stel as 'n morele persoon en is dit dalk die verduideliking vir die besonderse aantrekking wat Camus nou nog behou vir die wat belang stel vandag.
Nou vir die programme en was dit 'n fees van programme en het net luiheid my verhoed om dit in November te plaas en onsekerheid of daar 'n mark daarvoor sou wees.
Daar is die altyd uitstekende Eleanor Wachtel van CBC se Writers and Company se onderhoud met Olivier Todd, biograaf van Albert Camus. Ongelukkig is hierdie nie in Kindle-formaat beskikbaar nie, wat jammer is, aangesien dit die biografie is wat ek graag sou wou aanskaf. (Slegs die onderhoud is beskikbaar).
Die onderhoud self kan hier geluister word:
http://www.cbc.ca/writersandcompany/popupaudio.html?clipIds=2414423808
BBC Radio 3 het ook 'n program gehad en kan hier geluister word as deel van BBC se reeks programme oor Albert Camus en aangebied deur Professor Andrew Hussey:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/player/b03g2r5j
WPR se "To the Best of our Knowledge" het ook 'n feesviering gehad.
http://www.ttbook.org/wprplayer/popup
En dan lank voor dit soos altyd, Melvyn Bragg, 'n gunsteling van my, net soos Eleanor Wachtel. Melvyn Bragg se program aangebied, 3 Jan 2008 kan hier geluister word:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b008kmqp/In_Our_Time_Camus/
Bogenoemde programme word werklik aanbeveel en is die hoop dat dit geniet sal word.
Baie dankie
Wouter