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The Limits of Violence: Camus’s Tragic View of the Rebel

1972; Western Michigan University; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cdr.1972.0003

1936-1637

Alfred Schwarz,

North African History and Literature

The Limits of Violence: Camus’s Tragic View of the Rebel Alfred Schwarz When Camus became a culture hero of the young in the 1950’s, his impact on their political imagination was bracing, but it was impractical, remote from the actualities of public and private life in this country. The Rebel (L’Homme Révolté, 1951) was the most interesting textbook of modem history and political and moral philosophy to pass through the hands of the student generation. It was the first book in the post-war years to begin the process of politicizing the more intelligent and activist minds among them, and on the whole the effect was salutary at that time. Still, Camus’s lessons on the development of state terrorism and individual nihilism were only textbook situations for his American readers, to be earnestly discussed but hardly touching them as terrifying possibilities. Later, when his plays became available in English transla­ tion, the idea of the absurd and the different responses to it, the images of man caught in attitudes of despair in an irrational uni­ verse, were exhibited in concrete dramatic situations. But what were his youthful readers to make of these fables of violence, produced during the 1940’s, The Misunderstanding (Le Malen­ tendu) and Caligula, or the political allegory, State of Siege (L’Etat de siège)? The very popular novel The Stranger (L’Etranger) had found its young audience at once because of the vivid evocation of a life of sheer sensation devoid of any values beyond those which its hero, or anti-hero, could im­ mediately feel. But the tortured lives depicted in the plays were simply too improbable, the stories too intellectual in their im­ plications, to serve as objective correlative of what it felt like to live in mid-twentieth century America. The change has come very rapidly. The current student 28 Alfred Schwarz 29 generation, growing up in the violent 1960’s, has already de­ veloped a feeling for the precariousness of all that is human in a time of critical change. As a result it has also developed a passion for justice that contrasts sharply with the parochialism of the 1950’s. But though the emotional conviction is there in abundance, it is not buttressed by an understanding of what is at stake. Minds sheltered from the outrages committed in this century in the name of justice cannot conceive of politics as in­ volving tragic choices. It would seem that what is needed is another look at Camus’s exploration of the moral limits of politi­ cal action. An entry in Camus’s Notebooks furnishes an example of a political dilemma, that of reconciling liberty with justice, which twenty-five years later is as pertinent as ever and ought to become part of our present awareness. If the world is tragic, if we live torn asunder, it is not so much because of tyrants. You and I know that there is a liberty, a justice, a deep, shared joy, a common fight against the tyrants. When evil dominates, there is no problem. When the adversary is wrong, those who are fighting him are free and at peace. But the split develops because men equally eager for the good of mankind either want it at once or else aim for three generations from now, and that is enough to divide them forever. When the adversaries are both right, then we enter tragedy. . . .1 In the absence of contemporary texts of comparable lucidity and human understanding, I propose a re-examination of Camus’s last original play, Les Justes (1949). The distinction he draws there between rebellion and revolution goes beyond the corresponding historical analysis in The Rebel in that his youth­ ful hero, Kaliayev, and his friend, Dora, embody in human terms the tragic predicament of the rebel. Camus, the polemicist, sees the Russian terrorists of 1905 as having resolved for one short moment of history the dilemma which has plagued man up to the present time: how to secure justice without degrading man in the process. But in the play, though his admiration for his fictional counterparts is undiminished, he assesses unflinchingly the tragic cost of their...