The Camus centennial

Few are the writers who have had a lasting influence well into the century after their birth, but such is the case with the French Algerian Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus, whose books and works continue to be read and taught in college and university. Camus, author of the seminal novel The Stranger (sometimes translated as ‘The Outsider’), was born on Nov. 7, 1913. He has the same birthday as the songwriter-musician Joni Mitchell, whose songs particularly from the “Hejira” album might be apt soundtrack for any movie based on a story by Camus. Ah yes, although years apart, Camus and Mitchell sometimes meet at the 7-Eleven.

In the early 1980s just out of college, I had the good fortune to teach at the University of the Philippines Los Baños for a couple of years, and one of the required readings in literature courses was The Stranger. You should have seen the look on the kids’ faces whenever the novel was discussed: we started as strangers, but ended the semester as friends, as familiar as the Oblation in front of the Humanities building whose sartorial elegance kept being challenged by the campus activists.

Los Baños itself seems such a long time ago but you cannot mention it without thinking of Camus, one of the youngest ever to win the Nobel for literature. That’s big of course, since most of the laureates, like our National Artists, are well into the twilight years when they get the award. Not so Camus when he won it at age 44. It’s as if the committee that decides it was prescient: not three years later, the writer was dead in a car accident along with his publisher Gallimard. Just like James Dean, dead in a car crash at the peak of his powers.

Lately I’ve been reading a book rescued from the old homestead, Camus’ Notebooks from 1935 to 1942, key because it chronicles the peacetime shortly before the Pacific War, and already touches on themes tackled in his novels and stories. It’s the first of three notebooks, according to his biography, leading up to the abrupt end in January 1960.

In the notebooks we see drafts and passages that later, after endless revisions, would find their way into the final work itself, although with Camus, it’s hard to speak of anything as final. There are passages that seem plain as day, undecorated probably owing to his background as newsman, for Camus was a writer who spent some time in the newsroom. Not for him the purple long-windedness. He preferred the gentle, subtle lyric, the unassuming twist of phrase, which made you think twice rather than run to the dictionary.

As a matter of insight, his protagonists are subtle emblems in themselves, the hero as anti-hero, or vice versa. Even the spelling of the lead character’s name changes depending on the work in hand; is it Meursault or Mersault? What difference a letter makes, but in Camus’ case, it could likely be a world. But always there’s the nearness of the sea, as in his mythical Oran, city at the center of his novel The Plague, which was made into a movie starring, if memory serves, Robert Duvall.

According to online research, Camus shunned being called existentialist, refused to be lumped together with that other great French thinker, Jean Paul Sartre, though mention of both men’s names was perhaps unavoidable in coffee shop discussions. Both, after all, tackled roughly the same themes, but unlike Sartre, Camus was not wont to wave the banner of man’s inherent alienation, choosing to isolate his characters in the sparse, shape-shifting prose. Man’s condition may be naturally absurd and not necessarily tragic, but it’s not as if he — either writer or protagonist — can’t strive to do anything about it.

The Myth of Sisyphus is also often mentioned as key to our understanding of Camus’ philosophy, and makes the case for the absurd. Sisyphus, or a modern recreation of the Greek myth, you might still catch on the second floor of a bar and café in Malate, Manila side, not Oran.

Artist Yob Achacruz has an installation titled “Poems of Void” that features four empty canvases hanging from the ceiling of bar@1951, or at least it was there when last we dropped in. Four frames that reflected merely the blank, brick wall behind it. Not nihilist, no, but strangely reassuring.

And if art should reflect itself, why not? Just your imagination running away with you. Blocks away at the Oarhouse, Mitch Garcia’s matchboxes and Shenandoah Pacete’s likeness of rock stars go well with the beer and smoke of grill night. Further on down the road along Mabini, artist Lani Maestro (now based in Northern France) is rethinking the art of the album jacket along with the ambient noise band Sleepyheads. Maybe they’ve all read Camus. Or dreamt of lines from an unread work, the stranger, strangers strangely reassuring.

From Notebooks (translated by Philip Thody, Harvest HBJ 1963): “The mistake,” said M., “lies in thinking that you must choose, that you must do what you want and that there are conditions for happiness. Happiness either is or it isn’t. It’s the will to happiness which matters, a kind of vast, ever present awareness. Everything else — women, art, worldly triumphs — are just so many pretexts. An empty canvas for us to decorate.”