The Nobel Prize in Literature 1957
Albert Camus
Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy
French literature is no longer linked
geographically to the frontiers of France in Europe. In many
respects it reminds one of a garden plant, noble and
irreplaceable, which when cultivated outside its territory still
retains its distinctive character, although tradition and
variation alternately influence it. The Nobel Laureate for this
year, Albert Camus, is an example of this evolution. Born in a
small town in eastern Algeria, he has returned to this North
African milieu to find the source of all the determining
influences that have marked his childhood and youth. Even today,
the man Camus is aware of this great French overseas territory,
and the writer in him is often pleased to recall this fact.
From a quasi-proletarian origin, Camus found it necessary to get
ahead in life on his own; a poverty-stricken student, he worked
at all sorts of jobs to meet his needs. It was an arduous
schooling, but one which, in the diversity of its teaching, was
certainly not useless to the realist he was to become. In the
course of his years of study, which he spent at the University of
Algiers, he belonged to a circle of intellectuals who later came
to play an important role in the North African Resistance. His
first books were published by a local publishing house in
Algiers, but at the age of twenty-five he reached France as a
journalist and soon came to make his reputation in the metropolis
as a writer of the first rank, prematurely tempered by the harsh,
feverish atmosphere of the war years.
Even in his first writings Camus reveals a spiritual attitude
that was born of the sharp contradictions within him between the
awareness of earthly life and the gripping consciousness of the
reality of death. This is more than the typical Mediterranean
fatalism whose origin is the certainty that the sunny splendour
of the world is only a fugitive moment bound to be blotted out by
the shades. Camus represents also the philosophical movement
called Existentialism, which characterizes man's situation in the
universe by denying it all personal significance, seeing in it
only absurdity. The term "absurd" occurs often in Camus's
writings, so that one may call it a leitmotif in his work,
developed in all its logical moral consequences on the levels of
freedom, responsibility, and the anguish that derives from it.
The Greek myth of Sisyphus, who eternally rolls his rock to the
mountain top from which it perpetually rolls down again, becomes,
in one of Camus's essays, a laconic symbol of human life. But
Sisyphus, as Camus interprets him, is happy in the depth of his
soul, for the attempt alone satisfies him. For Camus, the
essential thing is no longer to know whether life is worth living
but how one must live it, with the share of sufferings it
entails.
This short presentation does not permit me to dwell longer on
Camus's always fascinating intellectual development. It is more
worthwhile to refer to the works in which, using an art with
complete classical purity of style and intense concentration, he
has embodied these problems in such fashion that characters and
action make his ideas live before us, without commentary by the
author. This is what makes L'Étranger (The Stranger),
1942, famous. The main character, an employee of a government
department, kills an Arab following a chain of absurd events;
then, indifferent to his fate, he hears himself condemned to
death. At the last moment, however, he pulls himself together and
emerges from a passivity bordering on torpor. In La Peste
(The Plague), 1947, a symbolic novel of greater scope, the main
characters are Doctor Rieux and his assistant, who heroically
combat the plague that has descended on a North African town. In
its calm and exact objectivity, this convincingly realistic
narrative reflects experiences of life during the Resistance, and
Camus extols the revolt which the conquering evil arouses in the
heart of the intensely resigned and disillusioned man.
Quite recently Camus has given us the very remarkable
story-monologue, La Chute (The Fall), 1956, a work
exhibiting the same mastery of the art of storytelling. A French
lawyer, who examines his conscience in a sailors' bar in
Amsterdam, draws his own portrait, a mirror in which his
contemporaries can equally recognize themselves. In these pages
one can see Tartuffe shake hands with the Misanthrope in the name
of that science of the human heart in which classical France
excelled. The mordant irony, employed by an aggressive author
obsessed with truth, becomes a weapon against universal
hypocrisy. One may wonder, of course, where Camus is heading by
his insistence on a Kierkegaardian sense of guilt whose
bottomless abyss is omnipresent, for one always has the feeling
that the author has reached a turning point in his
development.
Personally Camus has moved far beyond nihilism. His serious,
austere meditations on the duty of restoring without respite that
which has been ravaged, and of making justice possible in an
unjust world, rather make him a humanist who has not forgotten
the worship of Greek proportion and beauty as they were once
revealed to him in the dazzling summer light on the Mediterranean
shore at Tipasa.
Active and highly creative, Camus is in the centre of interest in
the literary world, even outside of France. Inspired by an
authentic moral engagement, he devotes himself with all his being
to the great fundamental questions of life, and certainly this
aspiration corresponds to the idealistic end for which the Nobel
Prize was established. Behind his incessant affirmation of the
absurdity of the human condition is no sterile negativism. This
view of things is supplemented in him by a powerful imperative, a
nevertheless, an appeal to the will which incites to revolt
against absurdity and which, for that reason, creates a
value.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1957
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