1.

Albert Camus had an ambivalent relationship with journalism and the press. Circumstances led him, almost by accident, into the profession in the first place – his tuberculosis – and circumstances – tuberculosis and war – led him to very quickly be given more responsibility within the newspapers he worked for in Algeria (as we noted previously). But there was another variable at play, and that was Camus’ friendship with Pascal Pia, a figure ten years his senior. It was Pia who hired Camus for Alger Républicain in 1938, within days of Camus being rejected for certification to become a school teacher. And it was Pia who promoted Camus to editor-in-chief of Le Soir Républicain in 1939, when many of the staff were conscripted into the war. Pia also arranged for Camus the job as layout editor for Paris-Soir when he was blacklisted in Algeria after the shuttering of Le Soir Républicain. Then, in 1943, it was Pia once more who brought Camus to Paris and put him to work at Combat. Without Pia’s intervention at each of these moments of personal need, it is unlikely that Camus would have pursued a career in journalism. But Camus did want to be a writer. He had his first collection of lyrical essays published by the time he started work at Alger Républicain, as well as having worked as theatre director. He had even started drafting his first attempt at a novel.

Camus also wanted to be an intellectual, and it is this, perhaps more than anything, that accounts for much of Camus’ ambivalence toward journalism. At one level, Camus carried into journalism standards that he also applied to his understanding of the role of intellectual, and he tried to make journalism fit these requirements. In 1936, two years before he first turned to journalism, he wrote in his notebooks: ‘An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.’ This was a discipline he later applied also to journalism, defining a journalist as a mind that judges itself daily. ‘A journalist who does not judge himself daily,’ Camus wrote in Combat, ‘is not worthy of this profession.’ Like an intellectual, a journalist should also have the capacity to develop and evaluate ideas. ‘What is a journalist?’ Camus wrote: ‘He is first of all a person who is supposed to have ideas.’

Camus also used the standards of journalism to help clarify his own role as an intellectual and writer. He was drawn to certain aspects of journalism as a craft of writing: the daily discipline, the preference for concrete over abstract language, the need to hew closely to factual reality. This also encouraged him, in his thinking, to begin with daily political realities and to develop from this ideas regarding politics generally, rather than starting with a preconceived political philosophy and, in the course of trying to account for daily political realities, to slip into omission, distortion, and misinterpretation, otherwise characteristic of partisan political discourse. Although Camus was already predisposed toward thinking critically in this way, it was these aspects of the job of journalist that, in practice, arguably made Camus a better writer and intellectual.

2.

Camus would use his daily editorials to test ideas which he would later develop into more non-journalistic pieces of writing. For example, in 1939 (or early 1940) Camus drafted a literary piece, in the form of a letter, regarding the onset of the war, articulating an individual response and attitude toward the situation. “A letter to a man in despair” – which, in many respects, is the model for his later series of “Letters to a German Friend”, written and published clandestinely during his period of exile in France – pulls together and reworks several ideas which he first developed in editorials over the previous two years, from both Alger Républicain and Le Soir Républicain, including the censored editorial already referred to at length already, where he outlined he ideas pertaining to clarity, refusal, irony, and obstinacy.

In that editorial, for example, Camus argued against despair. In this literary epistle he explains why and how one should overcome despair. In the editorial he argued against submitting oneself to any notion of inevitability. Then, in this letter, he writes:

But, first of all, you must ask yourself if you really did do everything necessary to prevent this war. If you did, then you could look on it as inevitable, and you could consider that there is nothing more to be done. But I am not convinced that you yourself, any more than anyone of us did, did do all you should have done.

In the editorial, the flipside of this is that everything made by human beings can be undone by human beings, including war. ‘In the world of our experience, everything can be avoided,’ Camus wrote. ‘War itself, which is a human phenomenon, can be avoided or stopped at any moment by human means.’ This idea is developed further in his letter:

It is individuals who are killing us today. Why should not individuals manage to give the world peace? We must simply begin without thinking of such grandiose aims. You must realize that men make war as much with the enthusiasm of those who want it as with the despair of those who reject it with all their soul. 

In the editorial, he writes:

If only every Frenchman would maintain, in his own sphere, all that he believes to be true and just, if only he would do his feeble part to aid in  the maintenance of freedom, resist surrender, and make his will known, then and then alone will this war be well and truly won, in the deepest sense.

While in the literary letter, this ‘sphere’ is developed into a ‘zone of influence’, from which an individual can carve out a field of possible action:

There is something for you to do, have no doubt about it. Every man has at his disposal a certain zone of influence, which he owes as much to his defects as to his qualities. But whichever is the case, this zone is there, and can be immediately used. Push no one to rebel. We must be sparing of other’s people’s blood and liberty. But you can convince ten, twenty, or thirty men that this war is not and was not inevitable, that there are ways of preventing it that have not yet been tried, and that we must say this, writing it when we can and shouting it if we must.

It is this ‘sphere’, this ‘zone of influence’, that after the war, while working on The Plague and The Rebel, became the ‘circle of flesh’ within which Camus argued that one must think and act, and beyond which one stumbles into abstraction and nihilism. The Plague, in particular, described not some universal framework or movement of History, but particular individuals thinking and acting within a particular circle of flesh, within their own zone of influence.

3.

For Camus, particularly through the mid-1940s when he worked at Combat, he advocated for a hybrid form of intellectual journalism that brought together ideas and the everyday, morality and politics. The press, he argued, was responsible for creating a moral and political community, one in which ‘politics and morality are interdependent.’ This ideal was perhaps doomed from the start, even in the late 1930s in Algeria, when he first started developing these ideas, but it became more obvious to Camus himself in France in the mid-1940s that the vagaries of journalism were unable to fit the requirements of an intellectual. In practice, the constraints on journalism – the limited time, the lack of critical distance, the paucity of documents to compare and analyse – far outweighed any ethical corrective a journalist may provide their readers, from which a critical reception could be encouraged. ‘The conditions under which journalists operate do not always lend themselves to deep thought,’ Camus wrote in Combat in September 1945. ‘Journalists do what they can, and if they inevitably fail, at least they can toss a few ideas into the air for others to develop into more efficient instruments.’ The difficulty for Camus came from when these ‘more efficient instruments’, which writers and intellectuals may have developed more fully elsewhere, become, in the hands of journalists reporting on them, or reviewing them, or interviewing them, once more reverted into blunt tools.

Camus learned this soon after having his own books published in 1942, when he first became the object of journalism, rather than its agent. He made it a general rule not to respond publicly to the specific reactions of others to his published books. This is a rule which he stuck to – with only a couple of notable exceptions – for the rest of his career. He did, however, vent in his notebooks. For example, regarding a review of The Stranger, he wrote: ‘Concerning criticism. Three years to make a book, five lines to ridicule it, and the quotations wrong.’ What justifies this, beyond the usual response from a disgruntled writer at receiving a poor review, is the final clause: ‘...and the quotations wrong... and it consequently serves as a basis for illegitimate deductions.’ The bare minimum required for reading a work – is to actually read the work. Misquoting a work, and then basing deductions upon the misquotation, is an indication that the reader has not only probably not read the work, but worse, has imported into it their own preconceived notions, making of the work a Procrustean bed upon which the reader has lost consciousness during the very act in which they should otherwise have remained attentive.

Camus tried to voice these concerns publicly in 1950, in his essay “The Enigma”, albeit trying to soften the criticism through the use of irony. ‘A writer writes to a great extent to be read,’ he stated, adding in parenthesis: ‘(let’s admire those who say they don’t, but not believe them).’ And then:

Yet more and more, in France, he writes in order to obtain that final consecration which consists of not being read. In fact, from the moment he can provide the material for a feature article in the popular press, there is every possibility that he will be known to a fairly large number of people who will never read his works because they will be content to know his name and to read what other people write about him. From that point on he will be known (and forgotten) not for what he is, but according to the image a hurried journalist has given of him. To make a name in literature, therefore, it is no longer indispensable to write books. It is enough to be thought of as having written one which the evening papers will have mentioned and which one can fall back on for the rest of one’s life.

4.

One of the images that Camus is probably referring to here is of himself as ‘an existentialist’, something which can only be applied to him by those have not read his works with any degree of attention.

He did, however, in an editorial in Combat, in early November 1945 attempt to push back on this assumption, which had already been gaining some traction in the press. ‘I do not much relish the all too celebrated existential philosophy,’ he wrote, ‘and, to be blunt, I find its conclusions false.’ In an interview, published only a few weeks later, he repeated this claim: ‘No, I am not an existentialist,’ he said, later adding, in the same interview: ‘the only book of ideas that I have published, The Myth of Sisyphus, was directed against the so-called existentialist philosophers.’

This is, of course, true. One of the central arguments in that work was against what he referred to as ‘philosophical suicide’. It was a criticism he levelled explicitly against existential philosophy. ‘I am taking the liberty at this point of calling the existential attitude philosophical suicide,’ he wrote there. This criticism was aimed at what he called ‘the leap’, which attempted to evade the consequences of the absurd experience by retreating into conceptual illusion. In Sisyphus he variously referred to this intellectual manoeuvre as the ‘existential leap’, or ‘that leap that characterizes all existential thought’, while the acceptance and perpetuation of such illusion was described as the ‘existential consent’.

This argument and criticism was associated with the other main theme of Sisyphus, which developed into a criticism of hope. ‘As I see once more,’ Camus wrote there, ‘existential thought in this regard (and contrary to current opinion) is steeped in a vast hope.’ And yet, Camus’ position in that work was for rebellion instead of consent, to resist the leap, to live without illusion, and to not seek escape via some philosophical doctrine, preferring instead the possibilities of literary discourse. ‘Now, to limit myself to existential philosophies,’ he wrote in Sisyphus, ‘I see that all of them without exception suggest escape.’ He chose otherwise. But many preferred, and still prefer, ‘the image a hurried journalist has given of him’, as he wrote in “The Enigma”, which has ensured that he has received ‘that final consecration which consists of not being read.’

Camus’ criticism of existential philosophy also formed the basis of his underlying argument in The Rebel. His position there, against historicism – ‘Analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks believed’ – runs counter to what was at that time being put forth by the modern variant of existentialism. As Camus stated in his notebooks, in 1946, during his trip to America, soon after presenting his lecture, “The Human Crisis”: ‘The idea of messianism at the base of all fanaticism. Messianism against man. Greek thought is not historical. The values are pre-existant. Against modern existentialism’ (emphasis in original).  

At the same time, as news of his work was belatedly appearing in the English language press, in the United States and Britain, it was under the growing shadow of ‘existentialism’, the latest fashion coming out of France. John Brown, reporting from Paris for The New York Times, wrote an article about Camus in April 1946, a few days before the publication of The Stranger in English translation. He understood the argument from Sisyphus which distinguished Camus from the existentialists, wondering only if Camus could resist forever the temptation toward intellectual suicide: ‘Will he end in finding a faith, in taking what is for him the unjustified “leap” into some form of hope, mystical or rational, for which he reproaches the Existentialists?’ Charles Poore, reviewing the novel a few days later (“Books of the Times: A Story of Pre-War Algiers”, The New York Times, Apr 11, 1946), cites Brown’s article, and also manages to read the novel without reference to existentialism. Likewise, a review from The Washington Post, published a few days after that (B.W. Rogers, “Ignoring Fate Won’t Make It Pass You By: The Stranger, by Albert Camus”, Apr 14, 1946).

But a reviewer from The Tribune in England, a couple of months later, marks the turning tide in reception of the novel in English. ‘Were it not that existentialism, and the new French literary movement influenced by it, are now in the height of intellectual fashion,’ wrote Roy Fuller on June 28, ‘I am not sure that one would consider The Outsider as more than a very readable and unusual novelette with a sharp and individual flavour.’ He then makes a rhetorical move that was to become commonplace, which is to acknowledge Camus’ stated refusal to be classified as an existentialist, to ignore completely his reasons for doing so – which would require actually reading his books – and then to suggest that it doesn’t really matter and, for all that, he can be classified as an existentialist after all. ‘Whether its author is or is not of the existentialists proper can be left for nice discussion in those highbrow periodicals of this country and America suffering from existentialists...’

One Quixotic soul, in one of those highbrow periodicals in the United States, did try to resolve the issue later that same year. ‘Albert Camus has been nominated by a great many critics to the position of major disciple of the existentialist doctrine of despair,’ wrote Albert J. George, from Syracuse University, in the journal, Symposium, on November 1, ‘but, despite their efforts to lump him in with the faithful, he has several times loudly denied any adherence to this philosophy.’ George then cites these various denials, already quoted previously, which he not only accepts, but he follows up with by finding corroboration in Camus own works. ‘Le Mythe de Sisyphe not only contains an attack on existentialism,’ he writes, ‘but it holds the key to Camus’s other work, particularly L’Etranger.’ After showing how Camus references existential philosophers in Sisyphus only in order to show how they have committed intellectual suicide, George shows that he fully understands the sharp implications of Camus’ arguments in that work:

His conclusions, however, immediately separate him from the Christian existentialists, Gabriel Marcel and his followers, who have taken a “leap” with Kierkegaard from terrestrial absurdity into the sheltering arms of Christian security. Furthermore, Camus mocks at the hair-splitting and the mental gymnastics of the “assassins of God,” (the disciples of Husserl and Heidegger), who completed the work of Kant and the French 19th century by making God superfluous in modern philosophy. He charges that, by singular reasoning process, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir immolate reason and the existence of others to lock themselves in a tightly closed universe, then find hope in the surrounding desolation. They grovel in worship before the god of negation.

But it was too late. ‘Buy The Stranger by Albert Camus – the first of a series of Existentialist books to be published by Knopf,’ touted Eric Bentley in an article in Books Abroad, in Summer 1946. ‘You are safe too in ignoring Camus’ assertion that he is not an Existentialist,’ Bentley states. ‘After all, Karl Marx said he was not a Marxist.’

To be fair, for the majority of English readers, Camus’ own ideas were not directly available. The Myth of Sisyphus would not be published in an English translation until 1955, nearly a decade after Camus’ visit to the United States. So readers were overly dependent on ‘the image a hurried journalist has given of him’ during this initial period, coupled now with the inviolable force of a book marketing category; but at the same time, commentators were often dependent on each other, the same formulas and phrases and inaccuracies often being carried over from one article to another, one review to the next, amplified in the process, and becoming settled convention.       

A final rescue attempt was made, in June 1947, in a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, when Marcel Aubrey, a representative of Gallimard in the United States, wrote to clarify a few points in a recent article about France and existentialism. One of the points being: ‘Albert Camus repeatedly and formally emphasized that he did not adhere to “existentialism”.’ But it was in vain. So enduring has this media image of Camus as an existentialist and a philosopher been that not only did it dog him for the remainder of his short life, but in the decades since his death it has only proliferated, along with other false images of his work, infiltrating beyond the journalistic and becoming canonised in academic courses and monographs.

In this way, blunt tools have become polished, but remain blunt.

5.

And this is largely why Camus had an ambivalent relationship with journalism and the press. This ambivalence made its way into The Plague. In terms of communications technology, the newspapers are singled out in the novel as being actively associated with the spread of disinformation. When the narrator sought to describe the general mood of the township, he did so by showing their growing dependence on the press and the corrupting effect this had upon them.

They lost the look of critical thinking, while gaining the appearance of composure. You could see, for example, the most intelligent among them pretending, like everyone else, to look through the papers or listen to the radio broadcasts for reasons to believe that the plague would end quickly, and to develop elusive hopes from them, or to test unfounded fears while reading the opinions a journalist had written quite by chance, stifling boredom.

As one exchange shows:

“So, Doctor, is it cholera?”

“Where did you hear that?”

“In the paper, and the radio said it too.”

“No, it’s not cholera.”

It is here that the narrator showed how the township, giving in to their fears, sought escape in prophecies of old and the works of soothsayers. Many of these were serialised in the newspapers, whose justification, presumably, was that they were simply giving the public what it wants. ‘When history itself ran short of prophecies, they commissioned them from journalists, who, on this point at least, proved to be just as competent as their counterparts from previous centuries.’ The narrator added: ‘The other similarity between all these prophecies was that they were, in the end, reassuring. Except the plague was not.’

Elsewhere, the narrator used the disjunction between the press images of the situation with accounts given by figures such as Tarrou, in order to provide a point and counterpoint, between abstraction and concrete forces, in the narrative.

The newspapers naturally obeyed the order they’d received to be optimistic by any means possible. According to them, what characterized the situation was “the moving example of calmness and bravery” the population embodied. But in a city shut in on itself, where nothing could stay secret, no one was fooled about the “example” the community was setting. And to get a real idea of the so-called calmness and bravery, all you had to do was enter a quarantine or one of the isolation camps established by the administration.

These ‘orders’ were given to the press from the administration, which, along with the first sermon of Father Paneloux, is structured within the narrative as being once more an enactment of the forces of abstraction which work to keep people from facing the reality of their given situation.

The movement from abstraction to concrete rebellion in the novel is shown, in part, by the development of the character of Rambert, the journalist. We first meet this figure when he introduces himself to Rieux, telling the doctor that he initially came to Oran from Paris in order to report on the sanitary conditions afforded the Arab population.

Rieux told him that these conditions were poor. But he wanted to know, before going any further, if the journalist could tell the truth.

“Of course,” the man said.

“I mean: Can you totally condemn the situation?”

“Totally, no—I must admit. But I imagine that total condemnation would be baseless.”

Softly, Rieux said that in fact, such condemnation would be baseless, but in asking the question, he was simply trying to learn whether or not Rambert’s report could be frank, without holding back.

“I won’t accept anything less than complete, unvarnished accounts. Which is why I won’t lend my information to yours.”

“You sound like Saint-Just,” said the journalist, smiling.

Without raising his voice, Rieux said that he wouldn’t know anything about that, but his language was that of a man with a fondness for his fellow humans, weary of the world he was living in, and determined, for his part, to refuse injustice and concessions.

Later, however, Rambert abandons hope of escaping from the town, and, after joining the public health squad led by Tarrou, he gives himself fully to the struggle against the plague.

Throughout the novel, Rambert is contrasted to Rieux. The purpose of this becomes clear when we discover at the end that Riuex is also the narrator, for at the beginning of the chronicle he makes a few observations – ‘the commentary and precautions of language’ – regarding the nature of his written chronicle. This establishes the standards by which the chronicle is composed, but it is also by these standards that within the narrative, the role of journalism and the press is often criticised as falling short. First, the narrator states the limits of his role as chronicler: ‘His [the narrator’s] task is simply to say, “This happened,” once he knows that this did, in fact, happen, that it mattered to the lives of a whole population, and that there are, as a result, thousands of witnesses who will assess, in their hearts, the truth of what he says.’ Second, he claims, for purposes which he later elaborates, that he will keep his identity hidden through the course of his chronicle. And third, he describes the three kinds of sources which he draws upon in the composition of his work: ‘first of all what he witnessed, then what others witnessed, since, through his role, he ended up collecting the secrets of everyone involved in this chronicle, and last, the texts which finally fell into his hands. He plans to draw on them when the time seems right and to use them as he likes.’ Here he is referring to the fictional archive of materials which Camus originally intended to be inserted into the novel: newspaper reports, government papers and orders, private letters, diary entries, and telegrams.

In many respects, in the figure of the chronicler Camus resolves the tensions he noticed elsewhere between the role of the intellectual and the role of the journalist. In 1939, in his suppressed editorial for Le Soir Républicain, Camus wrote, on the topic of refusal: ‘A free newspaper can be assessed by what it says but also equally by what it doesn’t say.’ It was one of those rules that Camus applied also to his literary fiction, in the form of restraint. Throughout The Plague, whenever Rambert made an appearance, before he submitted to the task before him, and joined the public health squads, the narrator always referred to him as ‘the journalist’; that is, up until the point that he finally chose to stay in the town and fight the plague. From that point on, the appellation of ‘the journalist’ is conspicuously dropped by the narrator, and, for the remainder of the novel, Rambert is only ever referred to by his name.

Coincidentally, in June 1947, Camus himself committed an exemplary act of refusal by resigning from Combat entirely, because of an encroachment of moneyed and party interests, which threatened the independence of the newspaper, and, in turn, his own intellectual independence.

That same month, The Plague was published.

Next week we will outline Camus’ thinking regarding literary discourse, during the period of writing The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, in preparation for how this influenced his writing of The Plague.

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