July 17, 2012
Sartre and Camus in New York
Andy Martin in the New York Times:
In December 1944, Albert Camus, then editor of Combat, the main newspaper of the French Resistance, made Jean-Paul Sartre an offer he couldn’t refuse: the job of American correspondent. Perhaps, in light of the perpetual tension and subsequent acrimonious split between the two men, he was glad to get him out of Paris. What is certain is that Sartre was delighted to go. He’d had enough of the austerities and hypocrisies of post-liberation France and had long fantasized about the United States. Camus himself would make the trip soon after, only to return with a characteristically different set of political, philosophical and personal impressions.
In some sense, existentialism was going home. The “roots” of 20th-century French philosophy are canonically located on mainland Europe, in the fertile terrain of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger. But it was not entirely immune to the metaphysical turmoil of the United States at the end of the 19th century. French philosophy retained elements of the pragmatism of C.S. Peirce and the psychologism of William James (each receives an honorable mention in Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”). More significantly, both Camus and Sartre had learned and borrowed from 20th-century writers like Faulkner, Hemingway and dos Passos —and, of course, from the films of Humphrey Bogart. Camus, in particular, cultivated the trench coat with the upturned collar and described himself as a mix of Bogart, Fernandel and a samurai.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 08:48 AM | Permalink
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Camus who has been lionized for standing up to the French Left when it was filled with admirers of Stalin--or at least Trotsky and Lenin--had a less than morally uplifting side to his own politics as well. A few excerpts from Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It that explore the colonial dimension of his outlook:
The success of The Fall did not alter Camus's decision to remain silent
on Algeria. Even the revelations about torture did not change his mind. In
the twenty-one months after the Algiers meeting, he spoke out only once,
when he was criticized in Encounter for being silent on Algeria while
denouncing the Soviet invasion of Hungary. In his reply he recalled
his record and that that colonialism should be ended by a creation of a
Swiss style confederation that would grant all communities a high degree
of autonomy.
Camus's fellow North African, Albert Memmi, whose first novel, The Pillar
of Salt, Camus had graced with a foreword, developed a term to explain
his kind of silence, the "colonizer of good will." Memmi had agreed
with Camus during his conflict with Sartre, but now in April 1957, Les
temps modernes ran the first two chapters of his forthcoming book, The
Colonizer and the Colonized. According to Memmi, the left-wing settler
sympathized with the plight of the colonized but could not genuinely
support their struggle without attacking his own existence as well as
his community. "There are, I believe, impossible historical situations
and this is one of them." Unable to imagine the end of his own people,
incapable of fully identifying with the colonized, the colonizer of
good will would come to feel politically impotent, slowly realizing that
"the only thing for him to do is to remain silent."...In December, Memmi
published a brief article, "Camus or the Colonizer of Good Will." Here,
with considerable sympathy, he made the link explicit: "Far from being
able to speak of North Africa, because he comes from there, Camus has been
rendered silent because everything that touches on North Africa paralyzes
him." Camus was unable to transcend his tribe and remain on a universal
plane. "Indeed, such is Camus's situation that he was assured of becoming
the target of the suspicion of the colonized, of the indignation of the
Left of metropolitan France, and the anger of his own people."
As this article was being read in France, "the colonizer of good will"
was in Stockholm receiving the Nobel Prize. Asked to comment now on all
manner of topics, Camus broke his silence about Algeria. On December 11,
the day after receiving the prize, Camus met with students at Stockholm
University. He brought up the subject of Algeria, and the room immediately
grew tense. A young Algerian student peppered him with criticisms and
interrupted him constantly. Angered, Camus demanded to be allowed to
complete this thoughts, and insisted that he had always worked for a "just
Algeria, where the two peoples should live in peace and equality." He
suggested that the student hectoring him no doubt had comrades who were
alive today thanks to his intervention. And then he shocked his audience:
"I have always condemned terror. I must also condemn a terrorism that is
carried out blindly, in the streets of Algiers for example, and may one
day strike my mother or family. I believe in justice, but I will defend
my my mother before justice."
Camus's honesty immediately created a stir in France, and he reaffirmed his
words in a letter to Le Monde. His mother before justice: his courage
in posting what he felt to be the real choice was not accompanied by any
understanding of why he was being harassed from all directions. Rather
than thinking of how it might appear to those who didn't face his choice,
he blamed them...
While making a show of condemning both Right and Left, Camus's comments
directed to the Right have a formulaic quality, while his criticism of
the Left is specific and shows a definite animus. He refuses to "protest
against torture in the company of those who readily accepted Melouza or
the massacre of European children." The Left, he charges, believes that
Algerian Arabs "have earned the right to slaughter and mutilate," whereas
he complained years ago "of Arab misery when there was still time to do
something, at a time that France was strong and when there was silences
among those who now find it easier to heap abuse, even from abroad,
upon their weakened country." Then Camus directly address those who,
like Sartre, speak of the responsibility of all the French for what was
unfolding in Algeria:
By situating himself within his tribe and reaffirming his choice of
family over abstractions, Camus was responding to Memmi. He clearly
believed that he could be true to principles of universal justice and
a member of his community:
The introductory and concluding essays were efforts by a pied-noir to do
justice to both communities in Algeria by holding tenaciously to the
middle ground despite its disappearance from the political and intellectual
landscape—by judging both sides' violence by the same standard, seeking
equality between both peoples, and reusing a justice for the Arabs
that would be unjust to the French. His intentions were honorable,
yet Camus dismissed Algerian nationalism as "a conception springing
wholly from emotion" and resulting from Nasser's "Arab imperialism"
and Russia's "anti-Western strategy." He buttressed these outrageous
claims with another: "There has never yet been an Algerian nation." But
their national "unreality", said Raymond Aron, replying to Camus in
his own book (his second on the Algerian conflict), "appears to me to
be tragically real" among the FLN guerrillas, Aron, the great realist,
not known for supporting leftist causes, continued to rebut Camus: "These
Muslims have not been a nation in the past, but the youngest among them
want to create one. Emotional demand? Of course, like all revolutionary
demands. This demand is born in revolt against the colonial situation
and poverty." Aron's analysis led to an inescapable conclusion: Algerian
nationalism was no more unreal than the pied-noir demands asserted by
Camus. Camus—and here Aron was borrowing from Memmi—revealed himself
as the "colonizer of good will" by claiming to favor a compromise while
simultaneously rejecting the legitimacy of Algerian nationalism and
insisting on giving up "none of the rights of the Algerian French." All
of which made a genuine compromise unthinkable.
The solution endorsed by Camus, the Lauriol Plan, was a masterpiece of
bad faith. Camus wanted the French government to proclaim that "the era
of colonialism is over" and that it was time "to grant full justice to the
Arabs of Algeria." The neocolonial scheme would then give each community
autonomy in areas pertaining to it alone, but the mainland French Assembly,
enlarged by Arab representatives, would decide all matters pertaining to
both communities. Decisive areas involving military and police power and
economic and foreign policy would continue to be run from Paris. In this way
Camus claimed to serve justice as well as his own people, while actually
serving neither. It was, of course, impossible to end colonialism and
leave existing French rights intact, a fact that Camus never faced. Instead,
he warned of "dreadful consequences" if his solution did not prevail. "This
is the last warning that a writer who for twenty years has been devoted
to the service of Algeria can voice before resuming his silence."
But why was it necessary to be silent? Camus's real reason led back to
his family and "terrorism as it is practiced in Algeria." He feared that
"by pointing out the long series of French mistakes, I may, without running
any risk myself, provide an alibi for the insane criminal who may throw his
bomb into an innocent crowd that includes my family." After saying this,
Camus recalls his remark about "my mother before justice" and then, whether
deliberately or not, separates himself from his critics by ending with a
word that unconsciously refers back to the controversy over Man in Revolt
and to the first pages of The Fall. "But those who, knowing it, still
think heroically that one's brother must die rather than one's principles,
I shall go no farther than to admire them from afar. I am of of their race."
The racial reference aside, Camus's remarks demand a closer look. They were
followed by his statement about his "natural solidarity" with his family in
danger and his primary commitment of the family's survival before worrying
about fairness. But how could something Camus had written have provided an
"alibi" for an FLN terrorist or endangered his own family? In his discussion
with students in Stockholm, Camus had said that his own interventions might
have risked "aggravating the terror." If he were to comment publicly, he
would criticize not only French government policy, as in fact he often did,
but also, perhaps more importantly, his own community's intransigence, which
he had never explicitly mentioned. Hearing of his criticisms, "insane" FLN
members might feel justified in killing French civilians. Thus, to protect
his endangered community, Camus would have to avoid speaking his mind.
Keeping quiet, however, did not mean remaining uninvolved. After Camus
received the Nobel Prize, the war was clearly his major concern. He
spoke to fiends about it, made notes about it, brooded over it. In March
1958, he arranged a meeting with de Gaulle, trying to convince him in
the event of his return to power that Camus's middle way was the best
solution. And he did what he could, privately and behind the scenes, to
intervene on behalf of dozens of Algerians accused or convicted by the
French authorities. Camus placed Algeria at the center of his new novel,
The First Man, which swept across the entire pied-noir experience from
he fist settlers to the war. It contained sweet childhood memories of a
poor but gifted pied-nor as well as Algérie française myths about the
working-class and indeed socialist settlers creating their country with
their own hands...
As the government pressed on with peace negotiations, the OAS carried
out a campaign of slaughter among Algerians and their supporters that
rivaled in little more than a year the number killed in seven years of
FLN terror. It hatched plots against de Gaulle and others in France,
including Sartre. In Algeria this frenzy created the very conditions,
once the FLN took power, that would force the pieds-noirs to abandon
Algeria completely. It was a bloodbath. When Algerian independence was
finally declared in July 1962, one million French Algerians were in the
midst of fleeing to France and Spain, destroying everything they could
not carry with them. Camus was dead, and so was his Algeria.
The first OAS bomb aimed at Sartre, in July 1961, had been mistakenly
placed on the floor above the one he lived on; the second in January
1962, damaged his apartment. Sartre and Beauvoir had been holed up at
an acquaintance's but Sartre's mother was home. Luckily, she was in
the bathroom when the bomb went off, and was unhurt. Camus had worried
publicly about FLN violence against his mother, but it was Sartre's mother
who came within a hair's breadth of being murdered by OAS violence...
Certainly Camus's hatred of Communism was legitimate and was understandably
fueled by his opposition to violence. But like many another anti-Communist,
he wrecked his own moral and political coherence by avoiding talking about
his own society. Casting blame on Soviet ambitions, Camus seemed to analyze
everything but the fundamental changes required to end colonialism. Unable
to speak about what his people would have to give up to become merely equal
citizens, indeed a minority in postcolonial Algeria, Camus fell silent.
Posted by: slr | Jul 17, 2012 9:24:07 PM
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