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Books By Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays /
The Plague /
The Stranger
/
The Fall
The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt
/
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays
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Create
Dangerously
A Lecture by Albert Camus
December 14, 1957
at the University of Uppsala in Sweden
An Oriental
wise man always used to ask the divinity in his
prayers to be so kind as to spare him from living in
an interesting era. As we are not wise, the divinity
has not spared us and we are living in an
interesting era. In any case, our era forces us to
take an interest in it. The writers of today know
this. If they speak up, they are criticized and
attacked. If they become modest and keep silent,
they are vociferously blamed for their silence.
In the midst of
such din the writer cannot hope to remain aloof in
order to pursue the reflections and images that are
dear to him. Until the present moment, remaining
aloof has always been possible in history. When
someone did not approve, he could always keep silent
or talk of something else. Today everything is
changed and even silence has dangerous implications.
The moment that abstaining from choice is itself
looked upon as a choice and punished or praised as
such, the artist is willy-nilly impressed into
service. “Impressed” seems to me a more accurate
term in this connection than “committed.” Instead of
signing up, indeed, for voluntary service, the
artist does his compulsory service. Every artist
today is embarked on the contemporary slave galley.
He has to
resign himself to this even if he considers that the
galley reeks of its past, that the slave-drivers are
really too numerous, and, in addition, that the
steering is badly handled. We are on the high seas.
The artist, like everyone else, must bend to his
oar, without dying if possible—in other words, go on
living and creating. To tell the truth, it is not
easy, and I can understand why artists regret their
former comfort. The change is somewhat cruel.
Indeed, history’s amphitheater has always contained
the martyr and the lion. The former relied on
eternal consolations and the latter on raw
historical meat. But until now the artist was on the
sidelines. He used to sing purposely, for his own
sake, or at best to encourage the martyr and make
the lion forget his appetite. But now the artist is
in the amphitheater. Of necessity, his voice is not
quite the same; it is not nearly so firm.
It is easy to
see all that art can lose from such a constant
obligation. Ease, to begin with, and that divine
liberty so apparent in the work of
Mozart. It is easier to understand why our works
of art have a drawn, set look and why they collapse
so suddenly. It is obvious why we have more
journalists than creative writers, more boy scouts
of painting than
Cézannes, and why sentimental tales or detective
novels have taken the place of
War and Peace or
The Charterhouse of Parma. Of course, one
can always meet that state of things with a
humanistic lamentation and become what
Stepan Trofimovich in The Possessed
insists upon being; a living reproach. One can also
have, like him, attacks of patriotic melancholy. But
such melancholy in no way changes reality. It is
better, in my opinion, to give the era its due,
since it demands this so vigorously, and calmly
admit that the period of the revered master, of the
artist with a camellia in his buttonhole, of the
armchair genius is over.
To create today
is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act,
and that act exposes one to the passions of an age
that forgives nothing. Hence the question is not to
find out if this is or is not prejudicial to art.
The question, for all those who cannot live without
art and what it signifies, is merely to find out
how, among the police forces of so many ideologies
(how many churches, what solitude!), the strange
liberty of creation is possible. It is not enough to
say in this regard that art is threatened by the
powers of the State. If that were true, the problem
would be simple: the artist fights or capitulates.
The problem is more complex, more serious too, as
soon as it becomes apparent that the battle is waged
within the artist himself. The hatred for art, of
which our society provides such fine examples, is so
effective today only because it is kept alive by
artists themselves.
The doubt felt
by the artists who preceded us concerned their own
talent. The doubt felt by artists of today concerns
the necessity of their art, hence their very
existence.
Racine in 1957 would make excuses for writing
Berenice when he might have been fighting to defend
the Edict of Nantes. That questioning of art by the
artist has many reasons, and the loftiest need be
considered. Among the best explanations is the
feeling the contemporary artist has of lying or of
indulging in useless words if he pays no attention
to history’s woes. What characterizes our time,
indeed, is the way the masses and their wretched
condition have burst upon contemporary
sensibilities. We now know that they exist, whereas
we once had a tendency to forget them. And if we are
more aware, it is not because our aristocracy,
artistic or otherwise, has become better—no, have no
fear—it is because the masses have become stronger
and keep people from forgetting them.
There are still
other reasons, and some of them less noble, for this
surrender of the artist. But, whatever those reasons
may be, they all work toward the same end: to
discourage free creation by undermining its basic
principle, the creator’s faith in himself. “A man’s
obedience to his own genius,”
Emerson says magnificently, “is faith in its
purest form.” And another American writer of the
nineteenth century added: “So long as a man is
faithful to himself, everything is in his favor,
government, society, the very sun, moon, and stars.”
Such amazing optimism seems dead today. In most
cases the artist is ashamed of himself and his
privileges, if he has any. He must first of all
answer the question he has put to himself: is art a
deceptive luxury?
1
The first straightforward reply
that can be made is this: on occasion art may be a
deceptive luxury. On the poop deck of slave galleys
it is possible, at any time and place, as we know,
to sing of the constellations while the convicts
bend over the oars and exhaust themselves in the
hold; it is always possible to record the social
conversation that takes place on the benches of the
amphitheater while the lion is crunching the victim.
And it is very hard to make any objections to the
art that has known such success in the past. But
things have changed somewhat, and the number of
convicts and martyrs has increased amazingly over
the surface of the globe. In the face of so much
suffering., if art insists on being a luxury, it
will also be a lie.
Of what could art speak,
indeed? If it adapts itself to what the majority of
our society wants, art will be a meaningless
recreation. If it blindly rejects that society, if
the artist makes up his mind to take refuge in his
dream, art will express nothing but a negation. In
this way we shall have the production of
entertainers or of formal grammarians, and in both
cases this leads to an art cut off from living
reality. For about a century we have been living in
a society that is not even the society of money
(gold can arouse carnal passions) but that of the
abstract symbols of money. The society of merchants
can be defined as a society in which things
disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class
measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or
the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures
corresponding ideally to a certain number of
exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to
setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of
its experience and its universe.
A society
founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial
society in which man’s carnal truth is handled as
something artificial. There is no reason for being
surprised that such a society chose as its religion
a moral code of formal principles and that it
inscribes the words “liberty” and “equality” on its
prisons as well as on its temples of finance.
However, words cannot be prostituted with impunity.
The most misrepresented value today is certainly the
value of liberty. Good minds (I have always thought
there were two kinds of intelligence—intelligent
intelligence and stupid intelligence) teach that it
is but an obstacle on the path of true progress. But
such solemn stupidities were uttered because for a
hundred years a society of merchants made an
exclusive and unilateral use of liberty, looking
upon it as a right rather than as a duty, and did
not fear to use an ideal liberty, as often as it
could, to justify a very real oppression.
As a result, is
there anything surprising in the fact that such a
society asked art to be, not an instrument of
liberation, but an inconsequential exercise and a
mere entertainment? Consequently, a fashionable
society in which all troubles were money troubles
and all worries were sentimental worries was
satisfied for decades with its society novelists and
with the most futile art in the world, the one about
which
Oscar Wilde, thinking of himself before he knew
prison, said that the greatest of all vices was
superficiality. In this way the manufacturers of art
(I did not say the artists) of middle-class Europe,
before and after 1900, accepted irresponsibility
because responsibility presupposed a painful break
with their society (those who really broke with it
are named
Rimbaud,
Nietzsche,
Strindberg, and we know the price they paid).
From that
period we get the theory of art for art’s sake,
which is verily a voicing of that irresponsibility.
Art for art’s sake, the entertainment of a solitary
artist, is indeed the artificial art of a factitious
and self-absorbed society. The logical result of
such a theory is the art of little cliques or the
purely formal art fed on affectations and
abstractions and ending in the destruction of all
reality. In this way a few works charm a few
individuals while many coarse inventions corrupt
many others. Finally art takes shape outside of
society and cuts itself off from its living roots.
Gradually the artist, even if he is celebrated, is
alone or at least is known to his nation only
through the intermediary of the popular press or the
radio, which will provide a convenient and
simplified idea of him.
The more art
specializes, in fact, the more necessary
popularization becomes. In this way millions of
people will have the feeling of knowing this or that
great artist of our time because they have learned
from the newspapers that he raises canaries or that
he never stays married more than six months. The
greatest renown today consists in being admired or
hated without having been read. Any artist who goes
in for being famous in our society must know that it
is not he who will become famous, but someone else
under his name, someone who will eventually escape
him and perhaps someday will kill the true artist in
him.
Consequently,
there is nothing surprising in the fact that almost
everything worth while created in the mercantile
Europe of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—in
literature, for instance—was raised up against the
society of its time. It may be said that until
almost the time of the French Revolution current
literature was, in the main, a literature of
consent. From the moment when middle-class society,
a result of the revolution, became stabilized,
a literature of revolt developed instead. Official
values were negated, in France, for example, either
by the bearers of revolutionary values, from the
Romantics to
Rimbaud, or by the maintainers of aristocratic
values, of whom
Vigny and
Balzac
are good examples. In both cases the masses and the
aristocracy—the two sources of all civilization—took
their stand against the artificial society of their
time.
But this
negation, maintained so long that it is now rigid,
has become artificial too and leads to another sort
of sterility. The theme of the exceptional poet born
into a mercantile society (Vigny
’s Chatterton is the finest example) has hardened
into a presumption that one can be a great artist
only against the society of one’s time, whatever it
may be. Legitimate in the beginning when asserting
that a true artist could not compromise with the
world of money, the principle became false with the
subsidiary belief that an artist could assert
himself only by being against everything in general.
Consequently, many of our artists long to be
exceptional, feel guilty if they are not, and wish
for simultaneous applause and hisses. Naturally,
society, tired or indifferent at present, applauds
and hisses only at random. Consequently, the
intellectual of today is always bracing himself
stiffly to add to his height.
But as a result
of rejecting everything, even the tradition of his
art, the contemporary artist gets the illusion that
he is creating his own rule and eventually takes
himself for God. At the same time he thinks he can
create his reality himself. But, cut off from his
society, he will create nothing but formal or
abstract works, thrilling as experiences but devoid
of the fecundity we associate with true art, which
is called upon to unite. In short, there will be as
much difference between the contemporary subtleties
or abstractions and the works of a
Tolstoy or a
Moliere as between an anticipatory draft on
invisible wheat and the rich soil of the furrow
itself.
2
In this way art
may be a deceptive luxury. It is not surprising,
then, that men or artists wanted to call a halt and
go back to truth. As soon as they did, they denied
that the artist had a right to solitude and offered
him as a subject, not his dreams, but reality as it
is lived and endured by all. Convinced that art for
art’s sake, through its subjects and through its
style, is not understandable to the masses or else
in no way expresses their truth, these men wanted
the artist instead to speak intentionally about and
for the majority. He has only to translate the
sufferings and happiness of all into the language of
all and he will be universally understood. As a
reward for being absolutely faithful to reality, he
will achieve complete communication among men. This
ideal of universal communication is indeed the ideal
of any great artist.
Contrary to the
current presumption, if there is any man who has no
right to solitude, it is the artist. Art cannot be a
monologue. When the most solitary and least famous
artist appeals to posterity, he is merely
reaffirming his fundamental vocation. Considering a
dialogue with deaf or inattentive contemporaries to
be impossible, he appeals to a more far-reaching
dialogue with the generations to come. But in order
to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of
what all know and of the reality common to us all.
The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle
against death—these are the things that unite us
all. We resemble one another in what we see
together, in what we suffer together. Dreams change
from individual to individual, but the reality of
the world is common to us all. Striving toward
realism is therefore legitimate, for it is basically
related to the artistic adventure.
So let’s be
realistic. Or, rather, let’s try to be so, if this
is possible. For it is not certain that the word has
a meaning; it is not certain that realism, even if
it is desirable, is possible. Let us stop and
inquire first of all if pure realism is possible in
art. If we believe the declarations of the
nineteenth-century naturalists, it is the exact
reproduction of reality. Therefore it is to art what
photography is to painting: the former reproduces
and the latter selects. But what does it reproduce
and what is reality? Even the best of photographs,
after all, is not a sufficiently faithful
reproduction, is not yet sufficiently realistic.
What is there more real, for instance, in our
universe than a man’s life, and how can we hope to
preserve it better than in a realistic film?
But under what
conditions is such a film possible? Under purely
imaginary conditions. We should have to presuppose,
in fact, an ideal camera focused on the man day and
night and constantly registering his every move. The
very projection of such a film would last a lifetime
and could be seen only by an audience of people
willing to waste their lives in watching someone
else’s life in great detail. Even under such
conditions, such an unimaginable film would not be
realistic for the simple reason that the reality of
a man’s life in not limited to the spot in which he
happens to be. It lies also in other lives that give
shape to his—lives of people he loves, to begin
with, which would have to be filmed too, and also
lives of unknown people, influential and
insignificant, fellow citizens, policemen,
professors, invisible comrades from the mines and
foundries, diplomats and dictators, religious
reformers, artists who create myths that are
decisive for our conduct—humble representatives, in
short, of the sovereign chance that dominates the
most routine existences.
Consequently,
there is but one possible realistic film: the one
that is constantly shown us by an invisible camera
on the world’s screen. The only realistic artist,
then, is God, if he exists. All other artists are,
ipso facto, unfaithful to reality. As a result, the
artists who reject bourgeois society and its formal
art, who insist on speaking of reality, and reality
alone, are caught in a painful dilemma. They must be
realistic and yet cannot be. They want to make their
art subservient to reality, and reality cannot be
described without effecting a choice that makes it
subservient to the originality of an art. The
beautiful and tragic production of the early years
of the Russian Revolution clearly illustrates this
torment. What Russia gave us then with
Blok and the great
Pasternak,
Maiakovski and
Essenine,
Eisenstein and the first novelists of cement and
steel, was a splendid laboratory of forms and
themes, a fecund unrest, a wild enthusiasm for
research.
Yet it was necessary to
conclude and to tell how it was possible to be
realistic even though complete realism was
impossible. Dictatorship, in this case as in others,
went straight to the point: in its opinion realism
was first necessary and then possible so long as it
was deliberately socialistic. What is the meaning of
this decree? As a matter of fact, such a decree
frankly admits that reality cannot be reproduced
without exercising a selection, and it rejects the
theory of realism as it was formulated in the
nineteenth century. The only thing needed, then, is
to find a principle of choice that will give shape
to the world. And such a principle is found, not in
the reality we know, but in the reality that will be—in
short, the future. In order to reproduce properly
what is, one must depict also what will be. In other
words, the true object of socialistic realism is
precisely what has no reality yet.
The contradiction is rather
beautiful. But, after all, the very expression
socialistic realism was contradictory. How, indeed,
is a socialistic realism possible when reality is
not altogether socialistic? It is not socialistic,
for example, either in the past or altogether in the
present. The answer is easy: we shall choose in the
reality of today or of yesterday what announces and
serves the perfect city of the future. So we shall
devote ourselves, on the one hand, to negating and
condemning whatever aspects of reality are not
socialistic, and, on the other hand, to glorifying
what is or will become so. We shall inevitably get a
propaganda art with its heroes and its villains—an
edifying literature, in other words, just as remote
as formalistic art is from complex and living
reality. Finally, that art will be socialistic
insofar as it is not realistic.
This aesthetic that intended to
be realistic therefore becomes a new idealism, just
as sterile for the true artist as bourgeois
idealism. Reality is ostensibly granted a sovereign
position only to be more readily thrown out. Art is
reduced to nothing. It serves and, by serving,
becomes a slave. Only those who keep from describing
reality will be praised as realists. The others will
be censured, with the approval of the former.
Renown, which in bourgeois society consisted in not
being read or in being misunderstood, will in a
totalitarian society consist in keeping others from
being read. Once more, true art will be distorted or
gagged and universal communication will be made
impossible by the very people who most passionately
wanted it.
The easiest
thing, when faced with such a defeat, would be to
admit that so-called socialistic realism has little
connection with great art and that the
revolutionaries, in the very interest of the
revolution, ought to look for another aesthetic. But
is well known that the defenders of the theory
described shout that no art is possible outside it.
They spend their time shouting this. But my
deep-rooted conviction is that they do not believe
it and that they have decided, in their hearts, that
artistic values must be subordinated to the values
of revolutionary action. If this were clearly
stated, the discussion would be easier. One can
respect such great renunciation on the part of men
who suffer too much from the contrast between the
unhappiness of all and the privileges sometimes
associated with an artist’s lot, who reject the
unbearable distance separating those whom poverty
gags and those whose vocation is rather to express
themselves constantly. One might then understand
such men, try to carry on a dialogue with them,
attempt to tell them, for instance, that suppressing
creative liberty is perhaps not the right way to
overcome slavery and that until they can speak for
all it is stupid to give up the ability to speak for
a few at least.
Yes,
socialistic realism ought to own up to the fact that
it is the twin brother of political realism. It
sacrifices art for an end that is alien to art but
that, in the scale of values, may seem to rank
higher. In short, it suppresses art temporarily in
order to establish justice first. When justice
exists, in a still indeterminate future, art will
resuscitate. In this way the golden rule of
contemporary intelligence is applied to matters of
art—the rule that insists on the impossibility of
making an omelet without breaking eggs. But such
overwhelming common sense must not mislead us. To
make a good omelet it is not enough to break
thousands of eggs, and the value of a cook is not
judged, I believe by the number of broken eggshells.
If the artistic cooks of our time upset more baskets
of eggs than they intended, the omelet of
civilization may never again come out right, and art
may never resuscitate. Barbarism is never temporary.
Sufficient
allowance is never made for it, and, quite
naturally, from art barbarism extends to morals.
Then the suffering and blood of men give birth to
insignificant literatures, and ever-indulgent press,
photographed portraits, and sodality plays in which
hatred takes the place of religion. Art culminates
thus in forced optimism, the worst of luxuries, it
so happens, and the most ridiculous of lies. How
could we be surprised? The suffering of mankind is
such a vast subject that it seems no one could touch
it unless he was like Keats so sensitive, it is
said, that he could have touched pain itself with
his hands. This is clearly seen when a controlled
literature tries to alleviate that suffering with
official consolations. The lie of art for art’s sake
pretended to know nothing of evil and consequently
assumed responsibility for it.
But the
realistic lie, even though managing to admit
mankind’s present unhappiness, betrays that
unhappiness just as seriously by making use of it to
glorify a future state of happiness, about which no
one knows anything, so that the future authorizes
every kind of humbug. The two aesthetics that have
long stood opposed to each other, the one that
recommends a complete rejection of real life and the
one that claims to reject anything that is not real
life, end up, however, by coming to agreement, far
from reality, in a single lie and in the suppression
of art. The academicism of the Right does not even
acknowledge a misery that the academicism of the
Left utilizes for ulterior reasons. But in both
cases the misery is only strengthened at the same
time that art is negated.
3
Must we
conclude that this lie is the very essence of art? I
shall say instead that the attitudes I have been
describing are lies only insofar as they have but
little relation to art. What, then, is art? Nothing
simple, that is certain. And it is even harder to
find out amid the shouts of so many people bent on
simplifying everything. On the one hand, genius is
expected to be splendid and solitary; on the other
hand, it is called upon to resemble all. Alas,
reality is more complex. And
Balzac
suggested this in a sentence: “The genius resembles
everyone and no one resembles him.” So it is with
art, which is nothing without reality and without
which reality is insignificant. How, indeed, could
art get along without the real and how could art be
subservient to it? The artist chooses his object as
much as he is chosen by it. Art, in a sense, is a
revolt against everything fleeting and unfinished in
the world.
Consequently,
its only aim is to give another form to a reality
that it is nevertheless forced to preserve as the
source of its emotion. In this regard, we are all
realistic and no one is. Art is neither complete
rejection nor complete acceptance of what is. It is
simultaneously rejection and acceptance, and this is
why it must be a perpetually renewed wrenching
apart. The artist constantly lives in such a state
of ambiguity, incapable of negating the real and yet
eternally bound to question it in its eternally
unfinished aspects. In order to paint a still life,
there must be confrontation and mutual adjustment
between a painter and an apple. And if forms are
nothing without the world’s lighting, they in turn
add to that lighting. The real universe, which, by
its radiance, calls forth bodies and statues
receives from them at the same time a second light
that determines the light from the sky.
Consequently,
great style lies midway between the artist and his
object. There is no need of determining whether art
must flee reality or defer to it, but rather what
precise dose of reality the work must take on as
ballast to keep from floating up among the clouds or
from dragging along the ground with weighted boots.
Each artist solves this problem according to his
lights and abilities. The greater an artist’s revolt
against the world’s reality, the greater can be the
weight of reality to balance that revolt. But the
weight can never stifle the artist’s solitary
exigency. The loftiest work will always be, as in
the
Greek tragedians,
Melville,
Tolstoy, or
Moliere, the work that maintains an equilibrium
between reality and man’s rejection of that reality,
each forcing the other upward in a ceaseless
overflowing, characteristic of life itself at its
most joyous and heart-rending extremes.
Then, every
once in a while, a new world appears, different from
the everyday world and yet the same, particular but
universal, full of innocent insecurity—called forth
for a few hours by the power and longing of genius.
That’s just it and yet that’s not it; the world is
nothing and the world is everything—this is the
contradictory and tireless cry of every true artist,
the cry that keeps him on his feet with eyes ever
open and that, every once in a while, awakens for
all in this world asleep the fleeting and insistent
image of a reality we recognize without ever having
known it. Likewise, the artist can neither turn away
from his time nor lose himself in it. If he turns
away from it, he speaks in a void. But, conversely,
insofar as he takes his time as his object, he
asserts his own existence as subject and cannot give
in to it altogether.
In other words,
at the very moment when the artist chooses to share
the fate of all, he asserts the individual he is.
And he cannot escape from this ambiguity. The artist
takes from history what he can see of it himself or
undergo himself, directly or indirectly—the
immediate event, in other words, and men who are
alive today, not the relationship of that immediate
event to a future that is invisible to the living
artist. Judging contemporary man in the name of a
man who does not yet exist is the function of
prophecy. But the artist can value the myths that
are offered him only in relation to their
repercussion on living people. The prophet, whether
religious or political, can judge absolutely and, as
is known, is not chary of doing so. But the artist
cannot. If he judged absolutely, he would
arbitrarily divide reality into good and evil and
thus indulge in melodrama. The aim of art, on the
contrary, is not to legislate or to reign supreme,
but rather to understand first of all.
Sometimes it
does reign supreme, as a result of understanding.
But no work of genius has ever been based on hatred
and contempt. This is why the artist, at the end of
his slow advance, absolves instead of condemning.
Instead of being a judge, he is a justifier. He is
the perpetual advocate of the living creature,
because it is alive. He truly argues for love of
one’s neighbor and not for that love of the remote
stranger which debases contemporary humanism until
it becomes the catechism of the law court. Instead,
the great work eventually confounds all judges. With
it the artist simultaneously pays homage to the
loftiest figure of mankind and bows down before the
worst of criminals. “There is not,” Wilde wrote in
prison, “a single wretched man in this wretched
place along with me who does not stand in symbolic
relation to the very secret of life.”Yes, and that
secret of life coincides with the secret of art.
For a hundred
and fifty years the writers belonging to a
mercantile society, with but few exceptions, thought
they could live in happy irresponsibility. They
lived, indeed, and then died alone, as they had
lived. But we writers of the twentieth century shall
never again be alone. Rather, we must know that we
can never escape the common misery and that our only
justification, if indeed there is a justification,
is to speak up, insofar as we can, for those who
cannot do so. But we must do so for all those who
are suffering at this moment, whatever may be the
glories, past or future, of the States and parties
oppressing them: for the artist there are no
privileged torturers. This is why beauty, even
today, especially today, cannot serve any party; it
cannot serve, in the long or short run, anything but
men’s suffering or their liberty. The only really
committed artist is he who, without refusing to take
part in the combat, at least refuses to join the
regular armies and remains a free-lance.
The lesson he
then finds in beauty, if he draws it fairly, is a
lesson not of selfishness but rather of hard
brotherhood. Looked upon thus, beauty has never
enslaved anyone. And for thousands of years, every
day, at every second, it has instead assuaged the
servitude of millions of men and, occasionally,
liberated some of them once and for all. After all,
perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual
tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and
the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the
exhausting crowd, rejection and consent. Art
advances between two chasms, which are frivolity and
propaganda. On the ridge where the great artist
moves forward, every step is an adventure, an
extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there,
lies the freedom of art.
A difficult
freedom that is more like an ascetic discipline?
What artist would deny this? What artist would dare
to claim that he was equal to such a ceaseless task?
Such freedom presupposes health of body and mind, a
style that reflects strength of soul, and a patient
defiance. Like all freedom, it is a perpetual risk,
an exhausting adventure, and this is why people
avoid the risk today, as they avoid liberty with its
exacting demands, in order to accept any kind of
bondage and achieve at least comfort of soul. But if
art is not an adventure, what is it and where is its
justification? No, the free artist is no more a man
of comfort than is the free man. The free artist is
the one who, with great effort, creates his own
order. The more undisciplined what he must put in
order, the stricter will be his rule and the more he
will assert his freedom. There is a remark of
Gide that I have always approved although it may
be easily misunderstood: “Art lives on constraint
and dies of freedom.” That is true.
But it must not
be interpreted as meaning that art can be
controlled. Art lives only on the constraints it
imposes on itself; it dies of all others.
Conversely, if it does not constrain itself, it
indulges in ravings and becomes a slave to mere
shadows. The freest art and the most rebellious will
therefore be the most classical; it will reward the
greatest effort. So long as a society and its
artists do not accept this long and free effort, so
long as they relax in the comfort of amusements or
the comfort of conformism, in the games of art for
art’s sake or the preachings of realistic art, its
artists are lost in nihilism and sterility. Saying
this amounts to saying that today the rebirth
depends on our courage and our will to be lucid.
Yes, the rebirth is in the hands of all of us. It is
up to us if the West is to bring forth any anti-Alexanders
to tie together the
Gordian Knot of civilization cut by the sword.
For this purpose, we must assume all the risks and
labors of freedom.
There is no
need of knowing whether, by pursuing justice, we
shall manage to preserve liberty. It is essential to
know that, without liberty, we shall achieve nothing
and that we shall lose both future justice and
ancient beauty. Liberty alone draws men from their
isolation; but slavery dominates a crowd of
solitudes. And art, by virtue of that free essence I
have tried to define, unites whereas tyranny
separates. It is not surprising, therefore, that art
should be the enemy marked out by every form of
oppression. It is not surprising that artists and
intellectuals should have been the first victims of
modern tyrannies, whether of the Right or of the
Left. Tyrants know there is in the work of art an
emancipatory force, which is mysterious only to
those who do not revere it. Every great work makes
the human face more admirable and richer, and this
is its whole secret. And thousands of concentration
camps and barred cells are not enough to hide this
staggering testimony of dignity.
This is why it
is not true that culture can be, even temporarily,
suspended in order to make way for a new culture.
Man’s unbroken testimony as to his suffering and his
nobility cannot be suspended; the act of breathing
cannot be suspended. There is no culture without
legacy, and we cannot and must not reject anything
of ours, the legacy of the West. Whatever the works
of the future may be, they will bear the same
secret, made up of courage and freedom, nourished by
the daring of thousands of artists of all times and
all nations. Yes, when modern tyranny shows us that,
even when confined to his calling, the artist is a
public enemy, it is right. But in this way tyranny
pays its respects, through the artist, to an image
of man that nothing has ever been able to crush. My
conclusion will be simple. It will consist of
saying, in the very midst of the sound and the fury
of our history: “Let us rejoice.”
Let us rejoice,
indeed, at having witnessed the death of a lying and
comfort-loving Europe and at being faced with cruel
truths. Let us rejoice as men because a prolonged
hoax has collapsed and we see clearly what threatens
us. And let us rejoice as artists, torn from our
sleep and our deafness, forced to keep our eyes on
destitution, prisons, and bloodshed. If, faced with
such a vision, we can preserve the memory of days
and of faces, and if, conversely, faced with the
world’s beauty, we manage not to forget the
humiliated, then Western art will gradually recover
its strength and its sovereignty. To be sure, there
are few examples in history of artists confronted
with such hard problems. But when even the simplest
words and phrases cost their weight in freedom and
blood, the artist must learn to handle them with
restraint. Danger makes men classical, and all
greatness, after all, is rooted in risk.
The time of
irresponsible artists is over. We shall regret it
for our little moments of bliss. But we shall be
able to admit that this ordeal contributes meanwhile
to our chances of authenticity, and we shall accept
the challenge. The freedom of art is not worth much
when the only purpose is to assure the artist’s
comfort. For a value or a virtue to take root in a
society, there must be no lying about it; in other
words, we must pay for it every time we can. If
liberty has become dangerous, then it may cease to
be prostituted. And I cannot agree, for example,
with those who complain today of the decline of
wisdom. Apparently they are right. Yet, to tell the
truth, wisdom has never declined so much as when it
involved no risks and belonged exclusively to a few
humanists buried in libraries. But today, when at
last it has to face real dangers, there is a chance
that it may again stand up and be respected.
It is said that
Nietzsche after the break with
Lou Salome, in a period of complete solitude,
crushed and uplifted at the same time by the
perspective of the huge work he had to carry on
without any help, used to walk at night on the
mountains overlooking the gulf of Genoa and light
great bonfires of leaves and branches which he would
watch as they burned. I have often dreamed of those
fires and have occasionally imagined certain men and
certain works in front of those fires, as a way of
testing men and works. Well, our era is one of those
fires whose unbearable heat will doubtless reduce
many a work to ashes! But as for those which remain,
their metal will be intact, and, looking at them, we
shall be able to indulge without restraint in the
supreme joy of the intelligence which we call
“admiration.”
One may long,
as I do, for a gentler flame, a respite, a pause for
musing. But perhaps there is no other peace for the
artist than what he finds in the heat of
combat. “Every wall is a door,” Emerson correctly
said. Let us not look for the door, and the way out,
anywhere but in the wall against which we are
living. Instead, let us seek the respite where it
is—in the very thick of the battle. For in my
opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is
there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the
world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen
attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of
empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the
gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that
this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I
believe rather that it is awakened, revived,
nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose
deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the
crudest implications of history. As a result, there
shines forth fleetingly the ever-threatened truth
that each and every man, on the foundation of his
own sufferings and joys, builds for all.
(Camus: 1988:
249-272).
Source:
OhioLink
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|
The First Man
By Albert Camus
This autobiographical novel was found in
the car wreckage that killed the author
34 years ago. Through it, today's teens
are given a glimpse of Camus's Algerian
childhood. In the story, the
protagonist, Jacques Cormery, lives in a
variety of concurrent worlds. His
much-loved, deaf-mute mother and
illiterate, tyrannical grandmother
provide him with a secure, though
poverty-stricken family life. The sea
and countryside provide him with a rich,
sensuous play life while the lycee
challenges him intellectually. Jacques's
thoughts and adventures are enriched by
the vividly drawn settings—the
oppressive gray heat of summer, the feel
of the sea and sun, the vision of
crowded bodies on the trolley. YAs will
find the story accessible and may be
surprised at the universality of
emotions expressed. Readers seeking a
quiet guide through the deepest reaches
of another spirit will gain further
understanding of the human condition.—Barbara
Hawkins, Oakton High School, Fairfax,
VA, From School Library Journal |
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Ammunition: Poetry and Other Raps
By Sam Greenlee
Sam Greenlee is also known
for such works as
Blues for an African Princess
(1971), a collection of poems. His novel
Baghdad Blues (1976) and
Ammunition: Poetry and Other Raps
(1975) both deal with African Americans’
pain, anger, and fear, particularly that of
those who are caught up in the racism and
oppression of government agencies.
Greenlee's contributions to the literary
tradition in African American literature
have caused his readers to examine closely
the racial awareness or unawareness within
agencies and institutions that are designed
to serve all Americans. His presentation of
African Americans’ duality and paradoxical
existence in a racist society is still
providing scholars with text to investigate
the themes of racism. Greenlee is masterful
in his presentation of characters and
community; his work is saturated with the
African American literary tradition.—Answers |
On YouTube
The Spook Who Sat
by the Door /
Part 2 of 11
/
Part 3 of 11 /
Part 4 of
11 /
Part 5 of 11 /
Part 6 of
11
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Travels in the Congo
By Andre Gide
From July 1926 to May 1927, Andre Gide
travelled for 11 months in the western
French African colonies, with his lover
Marc Allégret who shot a documentary
under the same title Voyage au Congo.
Gide was not an effete epicurean and he
shows his anger against the unspeakable
treatment of the Africans by the private
companies and against the colonial
administration who doesn't do anything.
He came from a rich family and we can't
expect from him a denunciation of
colonialism in its principle. It's only
a system to be improved by the French
government against the greed of the
colonial agents. But it was too much for
the press and the politicians, except
for the communists. (Nice Leon Blum did
nothing, as usual.) The question came
to the parliament but Gide soon was the
accused, not the system. The main part
of this thin book is not about
colonialism but nature amazed, charmed,
and frightened Gide, who writes with his
usual guilelesssness, without any
aesthetic pretentiousness. In 1928,
Gide published Return from Chad
(Retour du Tchad), a comparable book who
can seem to be the same thing.
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Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist
at Work
By Edwidge Danticat
Create Dangerously
is an eloquent and moving expression of
Danticat's belief that immigrant artists
are obliged to bear witness when their
countries of origin are suffering from
violence, oppression, poverty, and
tragedy.
In this deeply personal book, the
celebrated Haitian-American writer
Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and
exile, examining what it means to be an
immigrant artist from a country in
crisis. Inspired by Albert Camus'
lecture, "Create Dangerously," and
combining memoir and essay, Danticat
tells the stories of artists, including
herself, who create despite, or because
of, the horrors that drove them from
their homelands and that continue to
haunt them. Danticat eulogizes an aunt
who guarded her family's homestead in
the Haitian countryside, a cousin who
died of AIDS while living in Miami as an
undocumented alien, and a renowned
Haitian radio journalist whose political
assassination shocked the world. |
 |
Danticat writes about the Haitian novelists she
first read as a girl at the Brooklyn Public Library,
a woman mutilated in a machete attack who became a
public witness against torture, and the work of
Jean-Michel Basquiat and other artists of Haitian
descent. Danticat also suggests that the aftermaths
of natural disasters in Haiti and the United States
reveal that the countries are not as different as
many Americans might like to believe..— CaribbeanLiterarySalon
/
Review and Interview by Kam Williams
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Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
* *
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 30 October 2010 |
