129. Camus and Charisma

 

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There's knowing a philosopher's position, the stands he (or she) takes on important questions. There's understanding how it fits into or opposes other philosophers' positions and appreciating what it took for him to take that position. There's wondering where you, and maybe the intellectual world, would be without him. And then there's reading him.

Here's Albert Camus, whom I know and understand and appreciate in all the above ways, presenting to me (in The Myth of Sisyphus) the heart of his philosophy:

I want everything explained to me or nothing. And the reason is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart. The mind aroused by this insistence seeks and finds nothing but contradictions and nonsense. What I fail to understand is nonsense. The world is peopled with such irrationals. The world itself, whose single meaning I do not understand, is but a vast irrational. If one could only say, just once: "This is clear," all would be saved.

He can't say that and, looking at his own condition, he forms his conception of the absurd:

At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

Reading that passage as my teachers taught me to read, testing against my own experiece, I find myself almost immediately lost. Nothing Camus talks about so urgently matches my experience. In the world I have known there are some contradictions and nonsense and some consistencies and sensible meanings. That's what fills the world's vastness. I don't see how Camus can call that world, the whole thing, "irrational."

I welcome help and here's Adam Gopnik (New Yorker, 4-9-12) supplying it: Camus meant "life is absurd" in "the sense of unjustified by certainty." I, seeing some uncertainty and some certainty, have the same problem reading Gopnik that I had reading Camus. Gopnik adds, "Life is absurd because Who Knows?" That's a mountaintop answer: "If you've climbed up this far you know what I mean." Gopnik takes no better care of me than Camus did.

And I think I see why, right there in his New Yorker piece. The old Camus charisma still has Gopnik in its spell. He knows it's charisma, his piece features it (in paragraphs on Camus' appearance, his role in the war, his weight in cafe conversations, a photo of him in a trenchcoat), and yet he lets it govern his reading, his response to words on a page.

I think that a charisma-free reader would take the statements I quoted the way an experienced composition teacher would take them: as all-or-nothing declarations of an immature mind. Like adolescent writers who ask the questions he asks, Camus is not really requesting knowledge about any world he shares with his reader, and would not be satisfied if he got it. It would keep him from making the big move, the move that in its grandeur distinguishes him from the writers composition teachers usually see, the move from "I" and "what I fail to understand," to "man" and "the unreasonable world."

That a clear-sighted writer like Adam Gopnik should have his eyes closed by the Camus charisma is testimony to its extraordinary power. Gopnik's own prose is a model of perceptive reader-care. Consider this, from the same piece:

Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they're arguing. It's a form of conducting, really, where the writer tries to strike a down-beat, a tonic note, for the whole of his section. Not "Say this!" but "Sound this way!" is what the great editorialists teach.

He's a hard hitter. When somebody like him goes soft, and writes soft sentences, you know that this thing that's working on him, this charisma, is pretty strong.

I think it's not just the Camus charisma. I think it's the whole Sartre-Camus-existentialist-postwar-Paris charisma. It's so strong that it holds those writers on their eminence year after year no matter what they have said. They seem to me as invulnerable in the intellectual world as Ronald Reagan was in the political world. I want to call them teflon intellectuals.