Sun and shadow. If I use these two words, thinking of course of Camus's Spanish origins, and of his taste for Spain, which has never wavered, it is because they can also summarize his thoughts and his work, his way of understanding life, the meaning of his fight. In a bullring, the sun is the place of the poor. The author of Noces himself said that he spent his youth "halfway between poverty and the sun." The shadow is the side of the haves. There we can find power, injustice, everything that makes men unhappy. Camus never supported this perversion of human nature. He calls it nihilism.
Perhaps because he was of very humble origin and had to fight to win the right to culture, he could not be content with being an artist. He is not a dilettante, nor a skeptic, nor a cynic. He seeks to create a coherent vision of the world, from which a morality will flow, that is to say a rule of life. If his first analysis leads him to conclude that it is absurd, it is not to indulge in it, but to seek a way out, revolt, love.
As for literature, for him it is not only a way of expressing ideas, or an art to which he devotes himself. It is a world that he, a humble child from Belcourt, born into an illiterate family, dreamed of, believing it to be inaccessible. Speaking of Gide, he said that he seemed to him the “guardian of a garden where I would have liked to live”.
We find this respect in the desire to write well. Style knows neither negligence nor carelessness. On the contrary, a pronounced taste for words, sentences, a certain rhetoric.
Such is Camus' universe. That's the right word. He emphasized that the contemporary writer "have given up telling stories in order to create his universe".
This need to put order in the world, to establish his certainties on solid foundations, led him to constantly construct overall plans in which he tried to classify all his work, to assign a place to each title, as to a piece of a vast architectural edifice. He repeated it in Stockholm, when he received the Nobel Prize:
"I had a precise plan when I started my work; I wanted to first express the negation. In three forms. Novel: it was The Stranger. Drama: Caligula, The Misunderstanding. Ideological: The Myth of Sisyphus. I anticipated the positive in three more forms. Novel: The Plague. Drama: The State of Siege and The Righteous. Ideological: The Rebel. I already saw a third layer around the theme of love."
Without repeating all the texts where he tries to systematize the succession of his books, we can cite, in the Carnets, in 1947, an overall plan which goes even further. It is true that it bears a sort of title full of doubt: "Without sequel." Here is that plan:
1st series. Absurd: The Stranger - The Myth of Sisyphus - Caligula and The Misunderstanding.
2nd series. Revolt: The Plague (and annexes) - The Rebel - Kaliayev
Third Series. Judgment - The First Man.
Fourth Series. Love sundered: The Stake - On love - The Charmer
Fifth series. Creation corrected or The System: Big novel + great meditation + unplayable play.
Curiously, these plans, if they seem to announce more or less distant works, like The Fall (The Judgment) and even The First Man which was interrupted by death, begin with The Stranger, forgetting the books published in Algiers: L'Envers et l'Endroit and Noces. Do they fit poorly into the diagram? Camus was very slow to accept that they were made known in mainland France.
But, as we have said, Camus is not an aesthete manufacturing graceful literary objects. Each of his books expresses the commitment of his thought, is inseparable from the events of his life, where he never stayed, quite the contrary, away from the struggles, the sufferings, the convulsions of the world. This is why this study of his books often led me to refer to his biography, to say where he was in his life when he wrote this or that work. Taking sides for or against Sainte-Beuve is a somewhat naive approach. Nothing should be excluded from what is useful for understanding a work.
In the Stockholm speech on the occasion of the Nobel Prize, the laureate declared, quoting Emerson:
"The obedience of a man to his own genius is faith par excellence."
Camus was inhabited by this faith. He never strayed from his path. This is what gives his work such coherence.
Roger Grenier, Albert Camus, Sun and Shadow (1987)
