CONSULTING CAMUS
Albert Camus, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, was widely regarded as the moral voice of his generation. Putin should read him now.
My son Kurt called me from school midday with a literary question. He teaches English at Irvine Valley College and asked, “What’s that ‘grand allusion’ from Albert Camus that you taught us in Journalism as Literature?” He referred to a course I taught at CSULB that he took from me more than 30 years ago.
So far back in time. My brain was a muddle.
“Wasn’t it about Hamlet and Siegfried?” he continued.
“Something like that,” I said, “though I think there were others. I do know it was from Camus’s Letters to a German Friend…and he wrote it in 1944 when the Germans still occupied Paris, and Camus was a hunted man writing for the French underground.”
I searched my ebbing memory for more. With meager results. “Weren’t Don Quixote and Faust in there too?” I asked.
He didn’t seem to know. An impasse. We both decided to search it out separately.
It took me a few minutes to retrieve a copy of the syllabus I hadn’t opened in three decades. But I soon found the quote we were after in Camus’s third of four letters he had written to an imaginary Nazi.
Kurt called me back. He had also found the passage in question in the French Nobel Prize winner’s nonfiction collection of essays Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. He read it to me:
Remember, you said to me, one day when you were making fun of my outbursts: "Don Quixote is powerless if Faust feels like attacking him." I told you then that neither Faust nor Don Quixote was intended to attack the other and that art was not invented to bring evil into the world. You used to like exaggerated images and you continued your argument. According to you, there was a choice between Hamlet and Siegfried. At that time I didn't want to choose and, above all, it didn't seem to me that the West could exist except in the equilibrium between strength and knowledge. But you scorned knowledge and spoke only of strength. Today I know better what I mean and I know that even Faust will be of no use to you. For we have in fact accepted the idea that in certain cases choice is necessary. But our choice would be no more important than yours if we had not been aware that any choice was inhuman and that spiritual values could not be separated. Later on we shall be able to bring them together again, and this is some thing you have never been able to do. You see, it is still the same idea; we have seen death face to face. But we have paid dear enough for that idea to be justified in clinging to it. This urges me to say that your Europe is not the right one. There is nothing there to unite or inspire. Ours is a joint adventure that we shall continue to pursue, despite you, with the inspiration of intelligence.
“You could say the same thing today and it would be as true, ” Kurt added. “Just substitute Putin for the Nazis.”
“Right on,” I said. “And Europe is a battleground again.”
“It reminds me of Yeats’s lines from “The Second Coming,” Kurt said: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”
“Nice allusion yourself,” I said to my son. “Putin certainly has the passion and intensity. Nix on the moral intelligence.”
“And why not have Zelenskyy pinch-hit for Camus?”
“For now, why not?”
NB: Journalist, novelist, playwright, and philosopher, Camus was widely considered the moral voice of his generation and known as a fierce opponent of totalitarianism. He died in an auto accident in January 1960 at age 47. He is known for his clear writing style in French that translates well into English. It is lyric, direct, short on figurative language, but does lean heavily on the use of allusion and its twin brother among literary devices, personification. The latter device is used here with four figures from great works of literature, and may challenge the casual reader’s knowledge of literature, history, and philosophy. Siegfried is the Norse and German warrior of ancient times, the man of action, a figure who slays a dragon and is an all-around culture hero. Hamlet, on the other hand, is the dithering intellectual with a conscience whose morality prevents him from taking decisive action. Faust, based on a German Renaissance figure become legend, is a dissatisfied scholar who barters his soul with the devil in exchange for unlimited knowledge and the power to enjoy all earthly pleasures. He is pitted against the daft romantic bungler, Don Quixote, who follows his impossible dream. Each is a personified metaphor for different approaches to life. The basic issue here is the collision between an energized and destructive nihilism intent on domination with a passive humanism concerned with moral values and spirituality. Kinda like Russia versus Ukraine today.