Albert Camus: A Very Short Introduction by Oliver Gloag

Author:Oliver Gloag
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192511379
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2020-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

The importance of bonheur

One of the ways to face the absurd consciously is to live a life with as many moments of privileged interaction with nature as possible, moments of bonheur. Bonheur speaks to bliss, time spent in nature, under the sun, by the beach, among the ruins, when Camus felt at one with the world and freed from a sense of time. The privileged site for his feeling, aside from the Algerian sun, was the Roman ruins in Tipasa.

In an early collection of essays published in Algiers in 1938, Camus recounts a day trip to Tipasa (‘Nuptials in Tipasa’). In a densely lyrical text, Camus describes his moment of supreme unity with nature, which gives rise in him to feelings of love, and the sense of belonging to a ‘race’ which draws its greatness ‘in its simplicity, standing on the beaches and sending knowing smiles to the skies’ dazzling smile’. For all the grandiosity of the moment, it is temporary—Camus states that he would never stay more than a day there. Moments of bonheur are self-contained, short lived—then back to Algiers, back to his day job, like Sisyphus. In fact, the ethos of Camus, a life of work and dreariness interspersed with moments of communion with nature, oddly fits the office worker’s average life, with long weeks of drudgery broken up by weekends. Camus codifies and mythologizes the new life of the employee, now with paid vacations, one of the great victories of the French labour movement.

Over a decade later, Camus is back in his beloved ruins and writes ‘Return to Tipasa’; it is the same vibrant and lyrical expression of the irrevocable, primal connection Camus has with nature and this land—a connection which he calls love. Here is the absolute moment for the person aware of the absurd: unity with nature, rejection of civilization, reason, progress, and history. Of course, the irony here is that Tipasa was a colonial outpost of the Roman Empire. Although Camus wants to avoid human history and events, they keep coming; sometimes they manifest themselves from the outside, forcing changes in the text, as with Caligula, and sometimes they are part of the landscape, as in Tipasa.

Camus writes that life is meaningless but even meaninglessness lends it meaning. Thus, he gives meaninglessness a name. The notion of the absurd is a kind of contradiction, and Camus gives himself heroic status for noticing it and living in it. By advocating ignorance and the refusal of explanations as preconditions to happiness, Camus effectively theorizes his despair, which may have been caused by the intractable situation in colonial Algeria, and rationalizes his refusal to confront it. From here on, Camus rejects long-term political commitments and will intervene politically on a case-by-case basis.

The success and appeal of Camus’s notion of the absurd are perhaps what gives his readers a way to feel—and live with—their unhappiness; this is a sort of metaphysical turn in Camus. He tells his readers to accept their unhappiness, to put it at the centre of their lives and use it to help them live a better one.

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