A TRIBUTE TO ALBERT CAMUS - THE OUTSIDER

A TRIBUTE TO ALBERT CAMUS- THE OUTSIDER

“An awakening of conscience, no matter how confused it may be develops from any act of rebellion and is represented by the sudden realisation that something exists with which the rebel can identify himself, even if for a moment.” From ‘The Rebel’  by Albert Camus.

It all started with Camus thirty seven years ago, when I read his book ‘The Fall’. The first of his that I read and which till this day remains one of my favourites. I remember reading the book while travelling on the bus from Chembur to Flora Fountain in Mumbai (then Bombay), a good one hour drive. I can best describe the effect the book had on me, in Camus’s own words, when he wrote about Andre Gide’s impact on him “He untied deep down inside me a tangle of obscure bonds, whose hindrance I felt without being able to give them a name.” since then I have not left any of his books untouched.

His tryst with the absurd in his ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ and his subsequent exploration in ‘The Rebel’ stand as the highlights of his work. However it his novels that create the full impact of his philosophy. The Fall is a monologue, while The Outsider and The Plague are his outstanding novels. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957.

Jean Baptiste Clamence of ‘The Fall’ and Mersault of ‘The Outsider’ perhaps best describe Camus own personality, though he is best known for his creation of the Outsider. Colin Wilson in a wonderful analysis of the  Outsider in his book also titled ‘The Outsider’ covers the works and lives of various artists - including Kafka, Camus, Hemingway, Hesse, Lawrence, Van Gogh, Shaw, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky - Wilson explored the psyche of the Outsider, his effect on society and society's on him.

Wilson says, ”the outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. He sees too deep and too much, and what he sees is essentially chaos.”

‘The Fall’ is a first person narrative of Clamence, a monologue. It is more in the nature of a confession and reflects Camus’s quest for personal authenticity. He believes that the meaning of life and the nature of ‘the good’ are beyond human knowledge. In fact we can deduce that it is Camus’s confession to the world as to who he is and in the process cleanses himself.

It is in ‘The Outsider’ that Camus creates his most powerful personality. The outsider or the stranger is a person who does not care what society thinks of him and does not feel the need to succumb to what society expects him to be or thinks of him. It is the idea of free will that is brought out in this novel. Mersault’s is indifferent, that is why he is considered a stranger to society. It is while contemplating his impending death that he is forced to introspect. Only in formal trial and death does he acknowledge his mortality and responsibility for his own life. His emotional honesty overrides his self preservation, and he accepts the idea of punishment as a consequence of his own actions. To Camus it is the individual who can give a meaning to his life.

It is in ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ that he explores the plight of the individual in a meaningless world and likens it to the punishment meted out to Sisyphus by the Gods of rolling a rock up a hill which would continue to eternity. The individual in such a situation faces two situations. One he is confronted with the absurdity of the situation and commits suicide or he rebels. The theme of the Absurd is explored. ‘The Rebel’ is the sequel to ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’. The idea of rebellion in its various manifestations is explored here. This rebellion is on account of the basic contradiction between man’s continuous search for clarifications and the apparently meaninglessness nature of the world.

Albert Camus other novels and plays, but I have briefly tried to cover the underlying philosophy of his works. He died at the age of forty six in a road accident. Two of his novels ‘A Happy Death ‘and ‘The Last Man’(left unfinished) were published posthumously.

This is a tribute to a man, who through his writings has inspired so many, and made us look at ourselves with honesty, to strip ourselves bare of the hypocrisy inherent in us. As Hermann Hesse says in his book ‘Demian’ – “the life of everybody is road to himself”.