Before Ethics: Camus's Pudeur Author(s): Marc Blanchard Source: MLN, Vol. 112, No. 4, French Issue (Sep.

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Before Ethics: Camus's Pudeur

Marc Blanchard
Ce que je veux dire: Qu'on peut avoir,sans romantisme,la nostalgied'une pauvrete
perdue.'

These are now the Camus years. Politics, ideology, the Cold War and its aftermath, the debates on historicism and the plagues of Posteverything,the Nobel Prize-perhaps the kiss of death for many authors-seemed to have relegated many once famous writers, including Camus, to the back benches of twentieth century literature.2 But recently, due mostly to the publication, thirty-five years after his homme,there has been an unprecdeath, of the unfinished Le premier edented renewal of interest in Camus. Camus has reentered the scene. It is also as though, after so many years of exile, especially following Francis Jeanson's bitter criticism of L'hommerevolte in in the early fifties, one was able Sartre's leading Left Les tempsmodernes to go back and revisit a work now largely fallen into critical oblivion.3
Mai 1935-Mars 1951, Lithographies originales de Carzou ' All references to Carnets: (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, Andre Sauret/Gallimard, 1962-64), 9. This is the first entry in the Carnets. 2 There are other French authors whom the Nobel has committed to oblivion: Roger Martin du Gard, and more recently, Claude Simon, about whom Isaac Bashevis Singer is said to have commented that giving the Nobel to Simon "wasn'tgoing to help the French woman [sic]." Perhaps the remark is telling in our days of multiculturalism. Camus is perceived as part of the French national heritage, and while that heritage is a legitimate subject of discussion and controversy (see, for instance, the interest in fascism and avantgarde discourses and their specific purveyors and peddlers-in France, Drieu, Barres, Brasillach), to the extent that Camus did NOT take positions pro or contra what has become the problem of the day, now that the Cold War is for all ideological intents and purposes, dead and buried, he is relegated to the backstage of history. 3 Camus is a dead senior white male, and though Algerian by birth, left behind by the epigones of Fanon, Genet, and the growing generations of Francophone and Maghr6bin MLN 112 (1997): 666-682 ? 1997 by TheJohns Hopkins University Press

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And yet, true to his hero, Camus the man remains a stranger to us. Three things come to mind. First Existentialism-but Camus was not an existentialist; then the Absurd-but the Absurd we see today is the absurd from Beckett's and Ionesco's plays, and that certainly wasn't the kind of absurd Camus had in mind: neither Estragon in En attendantGodot nor the characters of the Cantatrice chauveor Les chaises have anything in common with Meursault of L'etranger or the latter's early incarnation, Zagreus, in La mortheureuse; language instruction and first year upper division French-generations of American students have now grown up with their own memorized version of L'etranger-but Camus, despite a successful trip to the East Coast right after WWII, was interested neither in the United States nor in language teaching, and the future of French as a viable foreign language in the U.S. is in doubt, as the scramble for (French) Studies bears out. We remain largely unaware of who Camus was. In this paper, I want to concentrate on one of the lesser known works of Camus, his Carnetsor Notebooks, where, I will argue, the author of philosophical treatises, playwright and novelist have all come to face one another in a series of unrehearsed improvisations and annotations Camus kept committing to paper from 1935 till his death.4 I have chosen the Carnets,because they maintain a distance between the private and the public man and show Camus without appetite for the confessions and gossip which infect the journals and the diaries of his contemporaries.5

authors and their critics. Henry Louis Gates,Jr., has written lyrically about "Fanonism," and the legacy of Fanon has been mined more for his decanonization potential than for what it did bring to canonical French thought in the fifties: an historical beginning for what has now become a commodified discourse on "creolization" and "metissage." This generic anti-Camus parti-pris was brought home to me by one of my students, a Tunisian national writing his American Ph.D on the "alg6rienite" of Camus, who was told by an interviewing chair at the MLA convention that Camus was neither "maghrebin" nor Francophone nor "algerien" but only "pied-noir," and that he had written nothing that could be of interest to francophonie in general. The exact beginning of the Carets is a matter of some speculation. As Lottman has shown, Camus embarks on "Notes de lecture" at age nineteen in 1933, where he comments on his readings of the Greek classics, of his mentorJean Grenier's work Les iles, as well as elaborates the first sketches of a "maison mauresque" or "maison et l'endroit and in Le premier d'6motions," which will reappear in L'envers homme. r If comparisons are to be made, they should be made, not with Sartre, who, neither in his critical essays (Situations) nor in his autobiography ever wondered about who he was, but to more introspective and confessional writers. One such comparison will suffice. The following standard fare in interviews orjournals by Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet, the toasted duo of Modernist, Cosmopolitan and Leftist Paris during the

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Keeping a diary is perhaps the most common activity among writers and many people who have never published anything nor intended to make their daily records public commit a few lines to their life book everyday,following Samuel Pepys, who, without introspection, insisted on producing a "by-book"of his life, something more than a memorandum and less than a well-formed book. For us, the readers, diaries of famous writers are especially attractive; they hold the promise of letting us peek at the private behind the public figure. Once we have read Madame Bovary,we long to find out the most private sides of Flaubert that he kept from us and reserved for his Correspondance. we are curious to read the Once we have read Gide's L'immoraliste the writer's that recount the of struggle with his homojournal parts his his relation with troubled his wife, shifting politics, and sexuality, his travails as the godfather of twentieth century French literature. There are even writers for whom we have no alternative but to read their diaries because due to circumstances not of their making, they never produced anything else. Today, for instance, Gramsci holds us What fascinates us still in awe with his PrisonDiariesand his Notebooks. talk to himself than to less to able was Gramsci is that, day after day, to report on the and read he had books of the keep a critical journal himself born like were who experience of sharing a cell with people his many years in jail poor but had never read a book. We marvel that left him with enough gumption to analyze the world of theory and

Take Aragon: "Ainsi, encore qu'il eiut Camus decades, never appears in the Notebooks. fallu pres de trois ans, pour que le feu du Paysan de Paris se mit au manuscrit de La defense,on ne peut rien comprendre a ce qui s'est alors passe pour moi si on ne tient pas pour mon roman l'ensemble des demarches contradictoires, lesquelles m'ont finalement amene a etre ce que je fus, ce que je suis. Mais tenons-nous-en aux variations dontj'etais le siege, pour ce qui est du roman, de l'idee de roman.... (Je n'ai ou les incipit [Paris: Skira, 1969], 62). Take Triolet: "C'est entendu, jamais apprisa ecrire dans la vie.Je me suis trompee, parce qu'on m'a tromp6e. souvent me suis trompee je Ou plutot,je ne me suis pas tromp6e, on m'a trompee. Aveuglee par le soleil [sic] de la confiance,je n'y ai vu que du feu: le soleil. Voila qui n'a jamaisjoue dans mes ecrits. Je m'y suis tenue a ce queje pouvais palper,je marchais les mains en avant comme une aveugle, essayant de reconnaitre mon chemin.Je m'y suis tenue a l'ecart de tout ce que je n'avais pas directement sous la main, de ce qui etait pour moi impalpable. Je n'ai jamais eu a "corriger"mes romans." (La miseen mots [Paris: Skira, 1969], 23). No such complacency in the Carnetsand none to be expected if Camus had, like Aragon and Triolet, survived the sixties. When Camus has something to say about his illustrious contemporaries, his tone is apologetic: "Mounier me conseille dans Esprit de me detourner de la politique, n'ayant pas la tete a cela (cela, en effet, est 6vident), et de me contenter du role bien assez noble et qui m'irait si gentiment d'avertisseur. Mais 1948qu'est-ce qu'une tete politique? La lecture d'Espritne me l'apprend pas" (Carnets 1951, 329).

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fiction from afar and to fashion a new way to envision class struggle from Piranesi to Mussolini.6 Camus didn't think much of notebooks in general nor of his own in particular. On many pages the tone is tentative; there is no precise date; he wonders what he is doing; he also intends what he writes to be no more than the portable Carnetswe now have at our disposal. From the beginning they were to be his by-books. It is only much later, as it turned out, shortly before his death, that he allowed them to be published. Indeed, he makes clear notebooks are insignificant, by design. A la relecture:les Cahiersde Malte LaurisBrigge:livre insignifiant.Le Paris.C'estune defaiteparisienne.Une infection parisienne responsable: non surmontee. Exemple: "Le monde considere le solitaire comme un le monde s'en fout, et c'est bien son droit.La seule chose ennemi."Erreur, valable:l'histoired'Arvers, qui au momentde mourir,corrigeune faute de francais:il faut dire "collidor."7 And yet the Carnetsrepresent probably the most important part of Camus's work in that they give the lie to what Camus saw as the intellectual's-he had Sartre in mind-self-serving belief in a community deriving its existence from a phenomenological other always at hand to champion ideas and programs providing intellectual justifications for the less than noble choices of individual existence.8 But, as the entry of beginning 1945 makes clear, insignificancedoes not simply denote the preoccupation of someone reflecting in hard times (WWII, the Resistance, the Collaboration), on the banality which from Kafka andJoyce to Sartre, Gunter Grass and the Nouveau Roman, remains the grist of Modernism, and raises its head at random, not necessarily with all the seductive accoutrements of which Heideggerian boredom,curiosity and falling-into-consciousness
6 This is the place to note that Gramsci did write about literature, and that much of what he has to say about books is now forgotten in favor of what he has to say about class struggle, in the same way that Camus is more than the sum of his "classicalliterary fictions": L'etrange,La peste,and La chute,and his now forgotten, philosophical treatises which the poet Rene Char considered Camus's best book) revolte, (especially L'homme and many preliminary sketches which take much of the space of the Carnets,all of which made a doubtful, cautious and ever working class Camus no longer viable as a bourgeois engageParisian intellectual taking the Cold War in stride. Many people feel that Camus's Notebooks, which do not preach revolution, have nothing to offer because the author is only narcissistically interested in the banalities of his everyday readings. Wrong. 7 Camus, Carnets1939-1942, 141. H Camus, Carnets1945-1948, 293: "Sartreou la nostalgie de l'idylle universelle."

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from uninteresting banality separate an intriguing dailiness-at-hand and routine. The following might be an excellent example of what Camus had in mind when he meant that the insignificantconstitutes the core of a life lived:
Un essai sur la France dans bien des annees ne pourra pas se passer d'une reference a l'epoque actuelle. Cette idee venue dans un petit train departemental en voyant d6filer, masses dans des gares minuscules, ces visages et ces silhouettes de Francais qu'il me sera difficile d'oublier: vieux couples de paysans, elle parcheminee, lui, le visage lisse, eclaire de deux yeux clairs et d'une moustache blanche-silhouettes que deux hivers de privation ont tordues, vetues de costumes luisants et reprises. L'elegance a quitte ce peuple que la misere habite. Dans les trains les valises sont fatiguees, fermees avec des ficelles, rafistolees avec du carton. Tous les Francais ont l'air d'emigrants."

Nor is the insignificantthe drift of the Freudian uncanny. Camus has no interest in psychoanalysis (what Malraux used to call the science committed to "un miserable petit tas de secrets"). To admit to the unconscious would be to open a door out of the insignificantprison which occupies us here. (Nor is Camus's lack of interest in psychoanalysis based on principle. One of his biographers, Lottman, notes that Camus teaches lycee students about Freud and Pages.)10Rather, insignificanceis for Camus a matter for the writer writing, not one for academics, professors, philosophers or the beleaguered shrinks of our post-Freudian tradition. Indeed, as insignificantas it literally may be, the matter of insignificance remains on the agenda for Camus's lifetime, as is proven by his publishing in 1959, as a separate piece combining, in a revised, more literary format, "objective"philosophical musings with the interventions of the autobiographical subject, a It is the tentative, note extracted and reworked from the Notebooks. of the notion of insignificance which continues incomplete character for to hold the writer's attention and lets him choose his Notebooks
unburdening himself of something which he felt he would otherwise have had to formalize within the confines of more established literary forms like the essay or the novel. What appears tragic in Clamence's ramblings in La chute is limited here to the sketching of what must by design remain incomplete: Dirai-je que l'insignifiance se traduit dans tout ce qui est futile? Mais il y a d'dclatantes actions, des projets epouvantables et grandioses qui sont
"Camus, Carnets1942-1945, 171. 10Herbert H. Lottman, AlbertCamus (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 691, n.14.

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insignifiants. Les grands hommes savent cela. Au contraire, les plus futiles des faits, un nez que l'on gratte, des lettres d'imprimerie que l'on remplit au crayon, un lacet toujours denoue, la qualit6 d'un papier a lettres, une facon de parler du nez, de ne jamais s'essuyer les pieds, de toujours caresser les chats a rebrousse-poil, de dire "vous"a sa femme, de marcher systematiquement a la droite des personnes qu'on accompagne, de se raser les levres avant le menton, l'habitude d'acheter des souliers trop petits, de ne jamais aller seul au spectacle, de dormir sur le ventre, de siffler en prenant son bain; l'utilisation constante dans les discours de la propositon "n'est-ce pas," [Camus's nod to Freud] les lapsus, les actes manques, le cafe que l'on prend sans sucre, une certaine maniere de plier les billets de banque, de s'asseoir sur le bord des chaises ou de ne pas prendre les passages cloutes, sont des messages qui dans certains cas peuvent etre charg6s de sens." In this reprint from the Notebooks, Camus tries humor, sarcasm even, accentuating perhaps what was already acute in the passing that the Nouveau anguish of the Notebooks notation-something Romanciers were already working hard to erase, but which in the forties and fifties still carried its existential Angst (Robbe-Grillet eventually unplugs the Angst by arguing for the new, unlimited, descriptive powers of the scientific subject in his manifesto Pour un
nouveau roman).

By definition and design, then, notebooks are insignificant. First, they collect the dailyjetsam of the writer's practice: events, anecdotes, gossips, readings. To collect is to begin to accumulate and while the very act of collecting empowers the collector to make choices, to construct his own narrative out of formless pasts, the desire to collect binds the collector to the material he has collected, whatever the intention and the ideology, as both Baudrillard and Benjamin have shown. If there is judgment of anything, the Notebooks pin the judge alongside his victims Clamence style. To collect pieces makes you a piecemeal sort of guy: distracted, irresponsible, unaccountable, dans la lune. Why note the insignificant? In the forties or early fifties, Camus did not know nor would he have cared about Barthes's emergent theory of the notable in the Essais critiques, which Barthes devised precisely for that which is interesting because it can be made
" There are insignificantdifferences between the two versions. The tone in the Cahier (des saisons republication is, as Roger Quilliot notes in his Pleiade edition (Theatre,recits, nouvellt,s [Paris: NRF, 1974], 1895), humoristic and self-deprecating. Camus has borrowed from Clamence. But the self-mockery doesn't erase the bluntness of the reflection originating in the Carnets.

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into an annotation, our life being nothing else but a collection of notes ready for interpretation. As Barthes puts it in Roland Barthespar Roland Barthes: Lorsqueje feins d'ecrire sur ce que j'ai autrefoisecrit, il se produit de la meme facon un mouvementd'abolition,non de verite.Je ne cherche pas a mettre mon expressionpresente au servicede ma verit6anterieure (en regime classique,on auraitsanctifiecet effortsous le nom d'authenticite),je renonce a la poursuiteepuisante d'un ancien morceau de moi-meme,je ne cherche pas a me restaurer (comme on dit d'un monument).Je ne dis un texte, etje l'appelle R.B."'2 pas: "Jevais me decrire",mais:"J'ecris Barthes's insignificant is full of double entendre. In the Carnets, however, Camus tries very hard to avoid the double-entendre. What exactly is insignificant? The insignificant is less a debris of surplus repressed matter than the place where we have begun to notice the arbitrariness, the unreflective repetition of our life and thus come to question our role and responsibility for acting as we do. In this sense more than any other, Camus intercepts the premises of Being and Nothingness(that the self is part and parcel of an original intention to transcend the other), reprised in the Critiquede la raison dialectique (that the time we take consciously to commit ourselves is alreadya time of existence). For Sartre, Being cannot be postponedinto the of the project nor is it, as in Heidegger, given in the presence-at-hand world of the subject. Camus's problem in the Carnetsis that he is no metaphysician. He mistrusts the easy routes of history, the way that everything conveys the brute force of ideology along the way: ". . l'existentialisme athee, avec Husserl, Heidegger, et bient6t Sartre, se termine aussi par une divinisation qui est celle de l'histoire consideree comme le seul absolu. On ne croit plus en Dieu, mais on croit en l'histoire."'3 For Camus, the small things which give Le mur, for instance, the pointed value of existence and action (trading a smoke on the brink of death, against the wall), would be nicely crafted details: he's read and appreciated his Sartre. But Camus is not refuse to embellish Sartre's famous "moment an aesthete. The Carnets choisi": they remain his guideline for avoiding excesses, and, after his break from the Paris intelligentsia, his writerly refuge. For Camus, the writer holds no privilege over his readers. He cannot absolve himself
12 Roland de toujours, Barthes Barthes (Paris:Editionsdu Seuil, Ecrivains par Roland 1975), 60. Unevie [Paris: Camus: '1Servir20 Decembre 1945 (quoted in OlivierTodd, Albert NRF,1996], 416, n.7).

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nicely by becoming an existentialist nor can they absolve others. Everybody's guilty of attempting a redemption which saves others by sacrificing the individual or vice-versa.
* * *

In English we have multiple intellectual, literary and philosophical contexts for understanding the sort of activity sustained in the Carnets. Notebooks have something to do with autobiography, in which authors write the story of their life as though there were no doubt about their identity, who they are, what they have done, and only universal meaning to be derived from the private travailsof their single, integral, unshattered individual consciousness. Thus Augustine, Rousseau and de Quincey, authors with whom Camus was familiar, have no doubt that, although they may have sinned and their life is imperfect, they have learned something from it and can teach it to others.14Then there is the diary which, unlike autobiography, is not governed by the order of the finished narrative. Limited by the date of entry, concerned with the event, the anecdotal, it keeps a lifeline but remains private. Though others may eventually see it differently, it endures as an an affidavit, a document, or a curio, in a dossier, casually perused but rarely scrutinized (who's read Pepys's diaries in their entirety and what would one do with the knowledge?). Some diaries are so personal that the reader may feel that reading them is, much like stalking or peeping, performing a devastating intrusion into the intimate world of others. Gide's diaries make us feel awkward and conscious of our penchant for the pathological when he chooses to discuss the nonliterary side of his persona. Other writings, not necessarily diaries in the strict sense of the term, also document the intimate past or the professional present with an intensity that is sometimes hard to sustain page after page. Kafka's letters to Milena or to his father, Binswanger's considerations on the commitments of existential psychology and his reminiscences about
4 Though he never claimed to have written the story of his life, Camus always he had read and maintained a special affinity to Saint Augustine, whose Confessions studied, and who was by extension part of his dissertation on Plotinus. Lottman documents that Camus always remained faithful to Augustine, who had been a pagan, had remained a North African, and perhaps, more than any other confessioner, discussed his weaknesses in a systematic, daily manner reminiscent of the Carnets.As Lottman puts it, Augustine was to remain to Camus the "bishop of all writers,"precisely because his faith made him suffer more than the atheists, the Hedonists, but also the philosophers who, like the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Cynics, tried to make their case for a godless humanism (Lottman, AU)ert Camus,690, n.5).

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Freud are intensely private, concerning no one but the writer himself, as though an individual's thoughts about the people in his or her world remained too private to be disclosed to any stranger still, or as in Binswanger's case, shared with others in the culture. And then there is the journal, designed to keep the days, but in a way that is more public, giving an idea, for instance, of the pieces to be incorporated into works in progress or providing sketches and thus first drafts for belatedly famous manuscripts whose final form, taken by itself, is finally exposed as frighteningly deceptive. The Carnets could, along with the works of other contemporaries (Leiris, for instance), be seen as workbooks in progress. There are indeed instances of such transfers and interpolations which Camus's editors and biographers have documented. However, contrary to what Paul de Man argues, Camus doesn't use his notebooks as workbooks. In their properly Camusian, nonphenomenological, non-Sartrean word, the Notebooks must remain annotationsto a life being lived.'5 in an we are Today, age when the subject is split, displaced, creolized, fascinated with the memoirgenre, where an author attempts a montage of his or her own life experience without presuming to establish the truth, the veracity of autobiography, and it is thus plausible that, thirty-five years after publication, the Carnetsallow us yet another montage of a Camus persona, as though the real Camus were not someone like the Meursault of L'tranger,the Rieux of La peste,or the Clamence of La chute, but someone in between, less alienated and more human and vulnerable, who doesn't seek the aesthetic clarity of Sartre's or Gide's philosophical characters, of a Roquentin in La but who is attractive to nausee or an Edouard in Lesfaux-monnayeurs, us precisely because he suffers from not wanting to be only an intellectual hero for the author, as, say, Gisors is for Malraux in La condition humaine. As Nietzsche implied in Human, All Too Human, readers do not forgive their writers for creating images that are not beyond their reach yet long for the comfort of reading about someone like themselves. All his life, Camus remained uncomfortable with himself and we are uncomfortable with him as a person as, pace Mersault and Clamence, he maintains in Caligula, in his Mythe de that he remains this person, irreducible and in L'homme revolte Sisyphe to the strictures of a well-formed novelistic or dramatic narrative. Indeed, though an Algerian to the core, Camus remains perhaps
" Paul de Man, "The Mask of Albert Camus: Notebooks-1942-1951," in AlbertCamus, ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1989), 19-26.

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the most French of all our contemporary French authors. His preoccupation with the French classics (unlike Sartre's Situationsor even his autobiography Les mots, where he always makes clear his rational, phenomonological and Marxist positions without regard for canonical genres or literary conceits, Camus's references range the canonical from Madame de Lafayette to Chateaubriand and Proust) is in this respect compelling. In the history of French culture, perhaps because the self is, since Pascal and the seventeenth century French moralists, a public entity, there is no distinction between the diary and the journal. Both are 'journals" in French. Sontag, who knows refers enough French to criticize the translations from the Notebooks, to Leiris's Manhood as an attempt to keep a journal of the writer's major crises and, like others, she complains that we have little of this in Camus. Camus's Carnets,she argues, are not confiding in us quite enough, they are not the work of a big intellect.'6 She implies that they add little to a work on which there is already too little to comment, because Camus, wanting to be too human, didn't seem to properly understand that the writer's charge is not simply to represent reality, but to transform it, even though today most postmodern critics would agree that much of what passes for transformation is do not let us actually mimickry. Sontag also suggests that the Carnets the drama that awesome see enough of precedes the creation of the works, nor are they the testimony to the author's everyday life that she sees in Leiris's "autofictions." At the time that she was writing her piece on Camus-just a few years after his death-little did Sontag know that her idol Leiris had indeed kept ajournal that wasn't going to be published until one year after his death in 1992, where the same are mixed with essayispreoccupations which exist in Camus's Carnets tic comments on his own work. Camus, Sontag goes on, is not as sexy as Leiris, he doesn't know how to gamble with life; but Sontag had no way of knowing at the time of her writing that the lightning-swift effect that she applauds in Leiris's Manhoodwas for Leiris but the direct result of a long series of patient rewritings that had already occupied Leiris for most of his life, and that the difference between with which Sontag distinguishes between being sexyand husband-like, authors like Leiris on the one hand, and Camus on the other, is rather a superficial matter, in what would pass today for a Nonfeminist reading of Hemingway, Leiris, Malraux and Sartre as writer-heroes.
16 Susan in AgainstInterpretation (New York:FarrarStrauss Sontag, "Camus'Notebooks," and Giroux, 1986 [1964]), 52-60.

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Writing early in 1962, Sontag probably romanticizes the work of the writer more than she would care to do today.'7And the case could be and their made, contra Sontag, that Gide and Leiris with their Cahiers his and his their Gide, fiction, Leiris, Journals, Voyage Afriquefantome au Congo,only kept rewriting from one page to the next in the most banal and dreary daily husband-like way, a story that in the end exposes the vacuousness of bullfighting figures that Leiris shares with other Modernists of the time (Picasso, Lorca, Hemingway), and Gide, with the great Romantics who preceded him, about whom he had but little to say ("Victor Hugo: h6las!").'8 But, whether autobiographies, workbooks, diaries, cahiers, all of of self management, which Foucault would have identified as discourses Camus never allowed himself the entire range of these procedures. Was it because he remained all his life an intensely private person? Was it because parts of the notes have actually been lost? Olivier Todd and especially Herbert Lottman, in their biographies, make up for these losses by retrieving letters, burrowing through interviews, parts of conversations and journalistic pieces. But the long personal paper trail one expects from an author beside the letters he sends to others, the interviews he gives, and the articles he writes, which allows his editors and his critics to place him in the proper perspective, is in Camus's case largely missing. Unlike Gide, his idol, Camus never graduated from the Cahierto the Carnet.Only the full-fledged autoon which he was working homme, biography, which was to be Lepremier
17 Sontag is not the only one to think of Camus as superficial, as is suggested by her remark that he was a husband and not a lover. Sartre and others, especiallyJeanson, revoltehitthe presses. There was the feeling of had already said it, from the day L'homme a special relationship between the man and his work, and that relationship could be felt as superficial or, on the contrary, belonging to something almost Dantesque: "une Gerassi longue vie." Sartre had both to say. He apparently confided to his biographer that Camus was in fact a problem for him, because he had been inferior in his life to what he had been in his books. But then the quotation reveals that Sartre doesn't know how to make up his mind. He cherishes the friendship he and Simone de Beauvoir had for him ("Camus c'est probablement le dernier qui a ete un bon ami..... Alors on etait la avec sa femme et Castor qui feignaient d'etre scandalisees et on racontait des tas de cochonneries.J'ai eu deux ou trois ans de tres bons rapports avec Camus. Tres bons. Ce n'etait pas un gars qui etait fait pour tout ce qu'il a fait. C'etait un petit truand d'Alger tres marrant qui aurait pu ecrire quelques livres mais plut6t de truand: au lieu de ca on a l'impression que la civilisation lui a ete plaquee dessus et qu'il a fait ce qu'il a fait, c'est a dire rien" [Todd, AlbertCamus:une vie, 827, n.7]). 18 When we look at the private life of Leiris and Camus, we can see them both as husbands and lovers. Both remained married to the same woman, both had notorious affairs, except that Camus was not plagued by the sexual insecurities that plagued Leiris and Hemingway.

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at the time of his death, incorporates notes, thus retrospectively elevating the part of the Carnetsto that, coequal, of a partner in the fiction in progress. Now why is it that Camus, though more personal and personable, more in touch with the next man, the man, the woman, the child in the street than any of his famous contemporaries (one doesn't see Malraux or Sartre experiencing poverty and reporting on it), left us with less than we would have wished? Perhaps the question cannot be answered, especially since we are, like de Man and Sontag, so prone to criticize Camus for being too prosaic, too normalin the first place. The truth might be that Camus had wanted to keep his private life entirely separate from his public life, and never bothered to integrate the two in the seamless oeuvre that would establish the author's rank and reputation in the eyes of posterity. Some people might call it shame.But the true word is the French pudeur.The word carries with it a sexual connotation: it implies modesty, especially sexual modesty. Not that Camus in his Carnetsor anywhere else is ashamed of sex or reports sexual difficulties. In La chuteeven Judge Clamence speaks of the women he has been able to seduce and regrets that sex is so easy. Pace Sontag, Camus is clearly "un homme a femmes." He says: Ceux qui aiment toutes les femmes sont ceux qui sont en route vers l'abstraction.Ils d6passent ce monde, quoi qu'il y paraisse. Car ils se du cas singulier.L'hommequi fuiraittoute idee detournentdu particulier, et toute abstraction, le vraid6sesp6erest l'homme d'une seule femme. Par entetement dans ce visagesingulierqui ne peut satisfairea tout.'' And he goes on to quote Chateaubriand, presumably because he was struck by the confession which didn't apply to him: 'Je n'aijamais ete serr6 dans les bras d'une femme avec cette plenitude d'abandon, ces doubles noeuds, cette ardeur de passion quej'ai cherch6e et dont le charme vaudrait toute une vie."20So, clearly, sexual modesty is not Camus's suit. Rather he well understood that a married life is a life without illusion and he chose to have a family and women at the same time. Modeling himself after Stendhal, who was never married, was a
]' Camus, Carnet.s 1942-1945, 230. Camus, Carnets 1942-1945, 237 (quote from Chateaubriand's ("CH.") unpublished writings). Chateaubriand, for a while recently revived by the enthusiasm for Formalism and Poetics, is essential for understanding Camus, if only because Chateaubriand, French, noble, immodest and impudent, Gallic and Royalist, is the antithesis of the Algerian white trash boy-until you begin, like Camus, to scratch the surface.
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womanizer, but remained alone his whole life, he admits to this pudeur in the Carnets."Brulard. Mes compositions m'ont toujours inspire la meme pudeurque mes amours."21 But the pudeur of the Carnetslies somewhere else. It is in the realization that to assert one's own individuality is not as easy as committing oneself to a cause. How can one remain responsible if one adheres to a cause? Gardera la violence son caracterede rupture, de crime,-c'est a dire ne l'admettreque liee a une responsabilite Autrementelle est par personnelle. Elle n'est plus ordre, elle est dans l'ordre-ou la loi ou la metaphysique. Elle la elude contradiction. Elle rupture. representeparadoxalementun
saut dans le confort. On a rendu la violenceconfortable.22

Early in the CarnetsCamus tries to confront this paradox that to take responsibility would be pretentious because it would assert the importance of the individual separated from his social environment; because it would give the self an importance it doesn't deserve-at the same time that Camus also realizes that to defend a cause is to defend an order. This is the same theme that will be developed in the Hommerevolte.Man must be bound by personal limit and risk. Every action undertaken must be provisional: "L'action d6sormais ne nous parait justifiable que pour des objectifs limites. Ainsi parle l'homme suggest in a contemporain. II y a contradiction."23What the Notebooks form that is not systematic, and therefore not subject to order and genre criticism, is the real problem of any action, especially political action: the recognition of limits, the sensitivity to suffering-which, of course, the Marxists deride in the name of a confused aestheticismand the possibility of a compassion not simply philosophical.24 What can we say today about Paul de Man who, at the time he was still essentially a phenomonenological critic, chose in 1965 to write about the false or at least the inauthentic side of Camus? There is in a story about a masked man, the second volume of the Notebooks
Camus, Carnets1942-1945, 164. Camus, Carnets1945-1948, 289. 2s Camus, Carnets1945-1948, 288. 24 Francis Jeanson, the hatchet man of In his mordant critique of the Hommerevolte, the Temps modemes, bitterly reproaches Camus for his confused humanism, his hesitations. To be an existentialist, argues Jeanson, is to take a political position. One cannot be a writer and condone the colonial enterprise in Algeria and Indochina; one cannot forgive American imperialism; one cannot give up already on revolution. To which Camus answers (Carnets1954, quoted in Todd, AlbertCamus:Unevie, 581): "Selon nos existentialistes, tout homme est responsable de ce qu'il est. Ce qui explique la
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which may have been the first version of the Malentendu.But rather than taking stock of Camus's avowed love for theater and performance and his mistrust of theories, de Man already picks and chooses in Camus a pretext for his own forthcoming studies of a literary language caught in tropes that obscure logic. What to de Man is the mark of the inauthentic (the mask), is for Camus the reminder that the inauthentic (making up fictions, dressing up characters), is indeed the mark of the literary, and for Camus in the nineteen fifties, unlike today, still an ethical problem: Are authors responsible for far removed from a what they write? This is what makes the Notebooks personal journal: not that they do not help us understand Camus's creative process (pacede Man, they do), but that they revolve around and that Camus realizes that the telling of the literariness of literature, stories is in itself conditioned by a certain falsehood: the theatricality of a play; the novelization of narrative;the indeterminacy of the essay; the academicism of the treatise (L'homme revolte).In this constellation of falsehoods, then, the Notebooksremain the only place where, contrary to what de Man says, a writer can explore the condition of being a writer. Camus is especially sensitive to themes which can only with the greatest of difficulty be treated, e.g., death, murder, suicide, because, as Ren6 Girard has shown, Camus wants to expose the lie that literary creation is always dependent on a myth, a presupposition, that the world, even if it doesn't make sense, can be understood as such by a community of readers. Following Sartre in Situations, Girard writes that L'trangerwas only intended to be a contephilosophique, where the murder of the Arab could only in a small way be understood to be realistic.25Only a lower middle class person like Meursaultcould ever have been condemned for the murder of an Arab, and it is perhaps why Camus wrote it in the first place: precisely because its bourgeois readers would not take it at face value. Camus alwayssought to speak freely and directly, but he was hampered by the conventions of

disparition totale de la compassion dans leur univers de vieillards agressifs. Pourtant il [Sartre] pretend lutter contre l'injustice sociale. Il y a donc des gens qui ne sont pas responsables de ce qu'ils sont, le mis6rable est innocent de sa misere. Alors? Le mutile, la laide, le timide. Et, pour finir, la compassion, a nouveau?" So the big debate is about compassion. And the pudeur is about the right to be compassionate. Simone de Beauvoir has something to say about it in her intellectual memoir Les Mandarins. She acknowledges Camus's honesty. Sartre is too impatient. He hates pudeur.His compassion is only political. 25Rene Girard, "Camus' Stranger Retried," PMLA 79 (December 1964): 519-33.

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literature and the needs of its readers for books to tell "true"stories. Camus also said in his Notebooks that he had to depersonalize himself at all costs first (in Lepremier he speaks in the third person and homme, sets his own descriptions against the background of his family, of his tyrannical grandmother, his deaf-mute mother, and his dead father, whose grave he visits only when he has gotten to be older than his father himself), and that only later in life would he be able to speak in his own name. Clearly, he was prevented from speaking freely by an insecurity attached to his poor Algerian background. It is in this difference between the upper and the lower class that the Carnets show Camus as struggling with his own difference from the other intellectuals of his generation. But there is also perhaps another way in which Camus sets himself It has often been said that Camus is a man of apart from his confreres. the Mediterranean, the sea and the sun, and that no one like he knows how to describe nature in its resplendent difference. Sartre and Malraux rarely talk about this outside. When Malraux writes about Shanghai, Saigon or Madrid, it is with a dazzling shoot of his pen/camera, swiftly panning past people, objects, in the heroic pursuit of a tragic fate delayed. Sartre quickly shows how the streets of the city he or his characters inhabit only contribute to their common philosophical debacle. But Camus had lived, slowly, day by day, in the poorest part of Algiers, and he knew something about urban settings that couldn't be romanticized. It is true that in the early writings and in the Carnets, there is flourish. Even Meursault can wax lyrical about the pleasures of the flesh. Much of this Camus recounts that he discovered by reading at age eleven in the bourgeois library of Gide's Les nourritures terrestres his uncle Acicault. He admits to enjoying Chateaubriand and the "enchanteur's" expansive descriptions of America, the Middle East and the ruins of the Acropolis. Such descriptions pit the hero against an unresponsive nature. This is also the toposof Rousseau stopping his narrative of the Confessions to watch the thundering cascades on his hike to Switzerland. In such surroundings, the writing subject is both repelled and enthralled by nature. But in the Carnets, Camus's reaction to nature is altogether different: II s'enfoncait tous les jours dans la montagne et en revenait muet, les de toute unejournee. cheveuxpleins d'herbeset couvertdes egratignures Et chaque fois c'etaitla meme conquete sansseduction.I1flechissaitpeu a peu la resistancede ce pays hostile. II arrivaita se faire semblablea ces nuages ronds et blancs derriere l'unique sapin qui se detachaitsur une

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crete, semblable a ces champs d'epilobes rosatres, de sorbiers et de campanules.II s'integraita ce monde aromatiqueet rocheux.Parvenuau lointain sommet,devantle paysageimmensesoudaind6couvert,ce n'etait pas l'apaisementde l'amour qui naissaiten lui, mais une sorte de pacte interieurqu'il concluaitavec cette nature dtrangere,la treve qui s'etablit entre deux visagesdurset farouches,l'intimitede deux adversaires et non l'abandonde deux amis.2' The narrator describes himself, as he often does, in the third also tells us that the passage is person; the editor of the Notebooks written in pencil. Unlike Malraux, unlike Sartre, and unlike the characters of his novels, or the authors of essays who have to prove a thesis and appear sure of themselves, the writer of the Carnetsis uncertain. But this uncertainty doesn't make him flawed, lacking the perfection of great writers; it makes him more precise. Each sentence is measured and calibrated differently. And what Camus ends up finding in this nature he loves is not the communion of the Romantic hero with his surroundings, nor the latter's fear that he is going to be swallowed by a devouring Nature, but an intermediate stage between love and fear, where the writer remains separate, completely himself, surrounded by the world yet distant from it. It is this predicament that the narrator explores in the Notebooks: a pact of opposites. There is none of the complicity which engulfs Clamence in La chute, nor Sartre's characters in La nauseeor in the critical works, where the ensoi is always so close to the pour-soiand ready to share the "mauvaise foi." The Chateaubriand Camus then enjoys is one who can show him this difficult pact with nature, how to be a part of the world, while also remaining apart from it. Moreover, because Camus was born poor and closer to the earth than his Parisian contemporaries, the encounter with nature is fundamental. Nature is not a beautiful landscape a la Chateaubriand but what stands in the way of daily subsistence and can cause pain and suffering: not only labor but the time and hardship of doing labor in tasks that are too close to nature: mining, working the soil, transporting. The subject has to deal with the earth before he can deal with men. This is perhaps what is so poignantly expressed in his Notebookssoliloquies, in reference to himself: "Chercher les contacts. Tous les contacts. Si je veux 6crire sur les hommes, comment m'ecarter du paysage?"27-but also to writers like
Camus, Carnets1935-1937, 36-37. 1935-1942, February 13 1936, Significantly, this note is dated (Camus, Notebooks p. 15).
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Louis Guilloux and Paul Nizan, who specialized in stories about the working class and posed the question whether a work of fiction could be written about nonbourgeois heroes.28 Susan Sontag implies that Camus was, well, mediocre. But because they have to say something about the complicity of the writer with his books remind us in the end that authors and readers, the Notebooks their readers are the captives of a too easily conceived community Camus doesn't trust (the Sartrean idyll): Aller jusqu'au bout, ce n'est pas seulement resistermais aussi se laisser aller. J'ai besoin de sentir ma personne, dans la mesure ou elle est sentimentde ce qui me depasse.J'aibesoin parfoisd'ecriredes choses qui m'echappenten partie,amis qui precis6mentfont la preuvede ce qui est en moi plus fort que moi.2:' It is this essayistic mixture that makes the Carnets what they are. Far from being, as de Man sees them, the work of a man so bothered by his own inessentiality that he must abandon his dreams of communion, far from being, as Sontag sees them, the revelation of someone in fact reveal this the Carnets who is too normal to be a great litterateur, man on the brink, who, instead of being reduced to the limits of a single work, enjoys the laying out of various possibilities. Out of all those fragments, there emerges something unfinished, but true to the moment. In this, perhaps, Camus is not alone: "Montaigne. Changement de ton au chapitre XX du livre premier. Sur la mort. Etonnantes choses qu'il dit de sa peur devant la mort."30
Universityof California,Davis

28 Guilloux always remained of primordial importance to Camus all his life. Camus wrote the preface for the reprint of Guilloux's La maison du peuplein 1953, where he stated: "Nearly all French writers who pretend to speak in the name of the proletariat today were born of comfortable or well to do parents. This is not a fault; there is an accident in birth, and I find this neither good nor bad. I only call the attention of sociologists to this anomaly and subject of study" (quoted in Lottman, AlbertCamus, 430). Camus felt an attachment to Guilloux, because, like himself, Guilloux wasn't born in the bourgeoisie. Later in life, Guilloux was to take Camus to his father's tomb in Saint-Brieuc, in what is now one of the main passages of Le premierhomme (see Lottman, AlbertCamus, 429). 29Camus, Carnets1935-1937, 36. OCamus, Camets 1945-1948, 277-78.