"Lyrical and Critical Essays" by Albert Camus

“Any philosophical system is, in the last analysis, a theory of language.  Every inquiry about being calls into question the power of words.”

Albert Camus in Lyrical and Critical Essays

We are familiar with Albert Camus’ novels, including The Stranger and The Plague.  Critics believe his novels to be his greatest work worthy of a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.  However, he was a formidable essayist as well, and this collection, Lyrical and Critical Essays (Vintage, 1970) demonstrates Camus’ range and use of language different from the spare prose of a novel like The Stranger.

Camus adopts the traditional definition of an essay as an attempt to evaluate ideas rooted in factual analysis and poetic imagery and experience.  In his introduction, Philip Thody writes that Camus explores, “within the context of his own immediate experience, the ideas of the absurdity of the world, the inevitability of death, and the importance of physical life…”

The strength of Camus’ work here is in the first half of the collection labeled as “Lyrical Essays.”  The pieces use memoir, reflection, and poetic language to convey meaning.  They are not aggressive thesis statements followed up with rigorous argument.  Many are simply meditations on a theme or images that coagulate together into impression.

We encounter on these pages a wiser writer, a man of experience in his native Algiers.  “There is no love of life without despair of life,” he writes.  “I had not yet been through years of real despair.  They came, and managed to destroy everything in me except an uncontrolled appetite for life.”  He goes on to say that “a time always comes in an artist’s life when he must take his bearings, draw closer to his own center, and then try to stay there.”

In these first essays, Camus gives us insight into his life experience, sometimes rendered in Zen-like koans:  “When one keeps quiet, the situation becomes clear.”  And, “I don’t know any longer whether I’m living or remembering.”  This shift between the real and the dreamed highlights the territory characters like Meursault inhabit in Camus’ novels.  Where Meursault is obtuse, insulated, unable to see his place in society until he commits murder and becomes hated and despised, in his essays, Camus is able to offer his own real life appreciation for the artist connected to human experience.

The second half of his essay collection includes criticism and literary essays.  In these pieces, Camus’ use of poetic language is often stunning.  When writing about Herman Melville, he characterizes the novel Moby Dick as “…this unwearying peregrination in the archipelago of dreams and bodies, on an ocean ‘whose every wave is a soul,’ this Odyssey beneath an empty sky, makes Melville the Homer of the Pacific.”  He breaks down the imagery, the symbolism, and offers potent adjectives to illuminate the ideas of the novel.  He comes to the conclusion that “Depths do indeed have their painful virtue, as did the unjust silence in which Melville lived and died, and the ancient ocean he unceasingly ploughed.  From their endless darkness he brought forth his works, those visages of foam and night, carved by waters, whose mysterious royalty has scarcely begun to shine upon us, though already they help us to emerge effortlessly from our continent of shadows to go down at last toward the sea, the light, and its secret.”  Through his poetic language, Camus brings the epic nature of Melville’s work to life, which of course is the job of any critic.  Camus excels at it.

He laces in cultural criticism reflecting the world in which he lives in his analysis of the literature.  He makes the statement that great periods of change in history often result in great art.  He writes that this flourishing of artistic culture comes “at moments when the lives of whole peoples are heavy both with glory and with menace, when the future is uncertain and the present dramatic.”  He could be talking here of COVID-19 America struggling with a pandemic and paroxysms of police brutality and racial hatred.  He offers philosophical insight in troubled times:  “Tragedy is born between light and darkness and rises from the struggle between them,”  he writes.  Camus anticipates the great art and wisdom inherent in the depths of tragedy and human experience.

Albert Camus is primarily a novelist.  His life intertwined with Jean-Paul Sartre, who was primarily a philosopher.  They are like mirror images of each other.  We read Camus to see philosophy in action—he states in several interviews attached at the end of this book that he believes in the importance of character and plot over espousing philosophical ideas.  However, those ideas are clearly present in his essays and his novels but never at the sacrifice of character or plot development.  His effort can be summed up with his own words:  “I have a sense of the sacred and I don’t believe in a future life, that’s all.”  Existentialist, nihilist, dreamer—Albert Camus is the mid-century poet of prose.