The Rebel

"Yes. This ties in quite well. This is the last book, but by no means the least. I am choosing The Rebel . It’s written that way. This is a decidedly philosophical text, in which he’s articulating this notion of rebellion, and how we’re to understand our place in the world and how to respond to that. This is Camus’ most academic book. It’s his attempt to make sense of the historical, political, and literary influences that have shaped our world, and how they inform our values in an attempt to figure out where we must go next. This is not as lyrical a book as any of the others, although there’s a chapter at the end where he talks about transcending nihilism that is quite powerful and he’s at his most eloquent. He says that “real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present and the task that before us is to transcend nihilism and to imbue meaning back into the world. But the challenge is that few of us know that that’s what we’re supposed to be doing.” Yes. That is a lot of what he’s writing about in The Rebel : that just to negate how the world is or just to reject it doesn’t accomplish anything; that negation itself serves no function. It’s sort-of cynical and it’s sort-of nihilistic in its own way and it doesn’t transcend the contradiction of our reality the way that the existentialists wanted to think that they do. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . For Camus, what was really important is that we have to create an alternative, we have to be able to move past the master-slave dialectical way of understanding the world and create a way of relating to one another that just hasn’t been achieved before, and not simply change places between oppressor and oppressed. I almost feel bad for how frequently I say this isn’t my favourite of Camus novels, though it’s certainly very good. I left it off because I think there’s so much more to Camus’ thought than the absurdity he’s most known for. In fact, in a footnote that accompanies the essay, ‘The Enigma’, in the Lyrical and Critical Essay s, Philip Thody writes that Camus himself was frustrated with the French critics and a public that could not see his thought had evolved beyond what was contained in The Outsider and The Myth of Sisyphus . As I mentioned earlier, the absurd for Camus was just a starting point. I’m much more interested in where we should go from there, how we respond to it rather than surrender to it, and what sort of alternative ways of living we could create. The Plague is like an extended universe of Camus’ novels because there seem to be references to all of the different characters in there. I don’t know how intentional that was, or how much of that is his subconscious, with themes and situations overlapping as he’s writing. That’s fair and I went back and forth about leaving The Myth of Sisyphus and The Outsider off the list for exactly this reason. But if the absurd is to be a point of departure as Camus intended, there are other works of his that deserve our attention. Yes. I would recommend the Oliver Todd biography . It’s by far the most comprehensive that I’ve encountered so far. But, as a small note on that, I’ve recently received the Germaine Brée biography, which was begun while he was still alive, and it has some very interesting interpretations of Camus’ life. The Germaine Brée book was begun while Camus was still alive and then had to be reformatted after his death and recontextualized. The book that you’re thinking about, La Mort de Camus , was written by an Italian scholar, Giovanni Catelli, arguing that Camus’ death was the result of a KGB plot. I’m not terribly persuaded by it. Right. The author of that book is arguing that the road that they were on was completely straight and there was no reason for the car to have swerved and that there are indications, based on analysis of the engine parts, that maybe it had been tampered with a little bit. But, if you know anything about Camus, it doesn’t strain credulity to think that, before he got into the car, he and his editor had had a few drinks and that they may have been goofing around while they were driving. It’s not surprising to me or not impossible, given what I know of him, that he might be a little reckless."