Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi by Victor Brombert

Author:Victor Brombert
Format: epub

The Crimes of History

Ideology, in Camus’s view, is the lethal microbe, and ideology was especially virulent in the 1940s and 1950s. In his play The Just Assassins (Les justes), first staged in Paris in 1949 and largely based on incidents going back to the Russian revolutionary movement of 1905, Camus insists on the incompatibility of love and political violence. In contrast to Stepan, the radical archterrorist willing to blow up even children, Kalyaev (a real historical figure) abhors the ideology of death and objects to any notion of moral purity founded on destruction. The fanaticism of moral purpose and incorruptibility, Camus never ceased maintaining, leads necessarily to the guillotine: “Qui est vertueux doit couper les têtes” (whoever sits in virtuous judgment ends up chopping off heads), he wrote in June 1959, at the height of the Algerian war.²⁹ Rereading Camus over half a century after the heyday of Marxism and existentialism reveals more than ever the profound difference between him and the Parisian intellectuals of that time. The Rebel was bound to provoke a real break with Sartre and his allies.

Camus’s family background casts light on his resistance to any form of ideological intransigence. The First Man makes much of his having brought himself up alone, without a father, and without God. If we are to trust this autobiography in the form of fiction, religion played no role in his destitute home; no one in his family ever pronounced the word God. Years later, in 1951, writing to Jean Grenier, his former philosophy teacher and mentor, he acknowledged the beauty of the Gospels but insisted on denouncing the dogmatic misdeeds and even crimes of “historical Christianity.”³⁰

The poison of ideological absolutes is the subject of one of Camus’s most remarkable stories, “The Confused Mind” (“L’esprit confus”), which appeared in the literary journal La nouvelle nouvelle revue française in 1956 and was republished a year later under the title “Le Renégat” in Exile and the Kingdom (L’exil et le royaume). It is the story of a student in a theological seminary who sets out for an allegorical City of Salt deep inside Africa to convert a savage tribe to the truth of his faith. Beaten, tortured, and mutilated, it is he who is converted to savagery and who soon accepts violence as the only truth.

Camus’s virtuosity as a master of images, sounds, and incantatory rhythms is nowhere more in evidence than in this story’s hallucinatory interior monologue, which convincingly suggests the pulp-like state of the narrator’s mind. Ironically, the missionary is converted by the very fetish he set out to destroy. The allegorical meaning of the story is clear enough. In his obsessive quest for some absolute, the missionary becomes the servile accomplice of his tormentors. He is a sick prophet, filled with self-hatred, and given to self-negation and self-destruction. His allegorical identity can be defined even more precisely. He is the modern intellectual espousing totalitarian values, seeking tyranny in order to submit to it. He becomes the grave digger who prepares his own burial.

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