The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Camus was born in Algeria of impoverished parents, and the countryside and cityscapes of that sun-dried land are reflected with joyful intensity in many of his narratives. From the start he was a brilliant student, specializing in philosophy. Surviving a brief infection of Marxism, he retained for the rest of his life a sense of community with the poor and oppressed. As a journalist he was among the first to document the injus- tices from which the Algerians suffered and which were to spark the independence movement. During the German occu- pation of France and for part of the post-Liberation period he edited the Resistance paper Combat. During the Forties and Fifties he achieved his major work. In 1957 it was recognized by the award of the Nobel Prize. He was only forty-four. Three years later he was dead.

Camus is distinguished as journalist, polemicist, memoirist, and philosopher. He also contributed, as playwright and worker in the theater, to the tropical growth in the Forties of the theater of the absurd. But his most enduring work lies in his handful of novйis and especially in his major effort, The Plague. He once wrote: "We only think in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novйis." For him this was true; his novйis (as also his plays) dramatize involved moral and meta- physical problems.

While it is useful to have some acquaintance with his specifically politico-philosophical works, such as The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, one can, I think, effect entrance into Camus^ beautiful mind through a reading of his short novel The Stranger and his full-length effort The Plague. The Stranger, concerned with an act of seemingly gratuitous mur- der, is one of many studies of the rootless nonconformist sensi- bility so symptomatic of our time. The gesture of violence that delivers the hero up to society's power to punish also measures the gap separating him from the values that society takes for granted, but which are open to troubling questions. In an absurd universe, how may evil and good be distinguished or perhaps even identified?

His masterpiece, The Plague, may be interpreted (but there is no single interpretation) as Camus's resolution of the prob- lem. In his Preface to The Myth of Sisyphus he writes: "Even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism." Just because the universe seems absurd man must rebel against that very absurdity, guiding his actions by the twin lights of truth and justice. It is precisely in a world of apparently meaningless disaster that some develop, almost unconsciously, the power to recognize and act by truth, justice, and compassion.

This sounds very moralistic and old-fashioned, does it not? But The Plague, you will find, is neither one nor the other. Sometime in the Forties, Camus imagines, bubonic plague strikes the Algerian city of Oran. Quietly, coolly, Camus records in detail the differing ways in which men, women, and children react to agony, isolation, and death. Our eyes are never allowed to wander from a definite city, identifiable peo­ple, specific fates, and the particular character of the pesti- lence. And yet, as we read, we become deeply aware that this study of the effects of plague is also a study of the isolated con- dition of man in an uncaring universe and his attempts to tran- scend that condition. Camus prefaces his novel with a quota- tion from Defoe [51]: "It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not." At no time does Camus offer us a parable or allegory. The narrative is rigorously realis- tic. Yet reading it, we feel that, as Dorothy Canfield wrote in her review of The Plague, it "casts a light on ali catastrophes which shut men and women up in misery together." Life itself is such a catastrophe, Camus seems to be saying. But the cata- strophe is not total; such men as Dr. Rieux and Tarrou, such women as Dr. Rieux's mother, can compel, by the force of their moral character, community to emerge from isolation and a qualified freedom from human bondage.

C.F.

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SAUL BELLOW

1915-

The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Humboldtfs Gift

Saul Bellow may be the most intelligent imaginative writer now at work in our country. He also seems to me to exemplify beautifully the Western cultural tradition as a whole. The moral dilemmas at the heart of his fiction are not constructs; they evolve from the very nature of his characters. He is pene- trating rather than merely observant, wise rather than merely shrewd. A noble word currently derided in some quarters applies to him. He is a humanist.