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Before Ethics: Camus's Pudeur

1997; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 112; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mln.1997.0047

1080-6598

Marc Eli Blanchard,

Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism

Before Ethics: Camus’s Pudeur Marc Blanchard (bio) Ce que je veux dire: Qu’on peut avoir, sans romantisme, la nostalgie d’une pauvreté perdue. 1 These are now the Camus years. Politics, ideology, the Cold War and its aftermath, the debates on historicism and the plagues of Post-everything, 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 death, of the unfinished Le premier homme, there has been an unprecedented 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’homme révolté in Sartre’s leading Left Les temps modernes in the early fifties, one was able to go back and revisit a work now largely fallen into critical oblivion. 3 [End Page 666] 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 attendant Godot nor the characters of the Cantatrice chauve or Les chaises have anything in common with Meursault of L’étranger or the latter’s early incarnation, Zagreus, in La mort heureuse; language instruction and first year upper division French—generations of American students have now grown up with their own memorized version of L’étranger—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 Carnets or 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 [End Page 667] 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 memo-randum 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. Once we have read Gide’s L’immoraliste we are curious to read the parts of the journal that recount the writer’s struggle with his homo-sexuality, his troubled relation with his wife, his shifting politics, and 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 in awe with his Prison Diaries and his Notebooks. What fascinates us still is that, day after day, Gramsci was able less to talk to himself than to keep a critical journal of the books he had read and to report on the experience of sharing a cell with people who were like himself born poor but...