Tribute to Albert Camus
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Six months ago, even yesterday, people wondered: "What is he going to do?" Temporarily, torn by contradictions that must be respected, he had chosen silence. But he was one of those rare men we can well afford to wait for, because they are slow to choose and remain faithful to their choice. Some day he would speak out. We could not even have dared hazard a guess as to what he might say. But we thought that he had changed with the world as we all do; that was enough for us to be aware of his presence.
He and I had quarreled. A quarrel doesn't matter-even if those who quarrel never see each other again-just another way of living together without losing sight of one another in the narrow little world that is allotted us. It didn't keep me from thinking of him, from feeling that his eyes were on the book or newspaper I was reading and wondering: "What does he think of it? What does he think of it at this moment?"
His silence, which according to events and my mood I considered sometimes too cautious and sometimes painful, was a quality of every day like heat or light, but it was human. We lived with or against his thought as it was revealed to us in his books-especially The Fall, perhaps the finest and least understood-but always in relation to it. It was an exceptional adventure of our culture, a movement of which we tried to guess the phases and the final outcome.
He represented in our time the latest example of that long line of moralistes whose works constitute perhaps the most original element in French letters. His obstinate humanism, narrow and pure, austere and sensual, waged an uncertain war against the massive and formless events of the time. But on the other hand through his dogged rejections he reaffirmed, at the heart of our epoch, against the Machiavellians and against the Idol of realism, the existence of the moral issue.
In a way, he was that resolute affirmation. Anyone who read or reflected encountered the human values he held in his fist; he questioned the political act. One had to avoid him or fight him-he was indispensable to that tension which makes intellectual life what it is. His very silence, these last few years, had something positive about it: This Descartes of the Absurd refused to leave the safe ground of morality and venture on the uncertain paths of practicality. We sensed this and we also sensed the conflicts he kept hidden, for ethics, taken alone, both requires and condemns revolt.
We were waiting; we had to wait; we had to know. Whatever he did or decided subsequently, Camus would never have ceased to be one of the chief forces of our cultural activity or to represent in his way the history of France and of this century. But we should probably have known and understood his itinerary. He said so himself: "My work lies ahead." Now it is over. The particular scandal of his death is the aboliition of the human order by the inhuman.
The human order is still but a disorder: it is unjust and precarious; it involves killing, and dying of hunger; but at least it is founded, maintained, or resisted by men. In that order Camus had to live. That man on the move questioned us, was himself a question seeking its reply; he lived in the middle of a long life; for us, for him, for the men who maintain order and for those who reject it, it was important for him to break his silence, for him to decide, for him to conclude. Some die in old age while others, forever on reprieve, may die at any minute without the meaning of their life, of life itself, being changed. But for us, uncertain without a compass, our best men had to reach the end of the tunnel. Rarely have the nature of a man's work and the conditions of the historical moment so clearly demanded that a writer go on living.
I call the accident that killed Camus a scandal because it suddenly projects into the center of our human world the absurdity of our most fundamental needs. At the age of twenty, Camus, suddenly afflicted with a malady that upset his whole life, discovered the Absurd-the senseless negation of man. He became accustomed to it, he thought out his unbearable condition, he came through. And yet one is tempted to think that only his first works tell the truth about his life, since that invalid once cured is annihilated by an unexpected death from the outside.
The Absurd might be that question that no one will ask him now, that he will ask no one, that silence that is not even a silence now that is absolutely nothing now.
I don't think so. The moment it appears, the inhuman becomes a part of the human. Every life that is cut off-even the life of so young a man -is at one and the same time a phonograph record that is broken and a complete life. For all those who loved him, there is an unbearable absurdity in that death. But we shall have to learn to see that mutilated work as a total work. Insofar as Camus's humanism contains a human attitude toward the death that was to take him by surprise, insofar as his proud and pure quest for happiness implied and called for the in· human necessity of dying, we shall recognize in that work and in the life that is inseparable from it the pure and victorious attempt of one man to snatch every instant of his existence from his future death.

"Tribute to Albert Camus:' From The Reporter Magazine, February 4, 1960, p. 34.
Copyright 1960 by The Reporter Magazine Company. Translated by Justin O'Brien. Reprinted by permission of the author and The Reporter Magazine.
Camus: A Collection of Critical Essays
Edited by Germaine Brée
20^th Century Views

Albert Camus: In Memoriam
by Nicola Chiaromonte

[Note: Đây là bài tuyệt nhất trong tập Camus: Những tiểu luận có tính phê bình [Camus: A Collection of Critical Essays, do Germaine Brée biên tập, nhà xb 20^th Century Views, 1962]. Tin Văn sẽ có bản chuyển ngữ, sau.]

    A man is dead: you think of his living face, of his gestures, his actions, and of moments you shared, trying to recapture an image that is dissolved forever. A writer is dead: you reflect upon his work, upon each book, upon the thread that ran through them all, upon their vital movement toward a deeper meaning; and you seek to form a judgment which takes account of the secret source from which they sprang, and which is now stilled. But the picture of the man is not made up of the sum of your memories; nor the figure of the writer of the sum of his works. And one cannot discover the man through the writer, or the writer through the man. Everything is fragmentary, everything is incomplete, everything is prey to mortality even when destiny seems to have granted both man and writer the gift of living to the limit of his forces, and of giving everything humanly possible, as in the case of Tolstoy. The story of a man is always incomplete; it is sufficient to think of what could have been different-almost everything-to know that his story can never contain the meaning of a human life, but only what that existence was permitted to be and to give. The truth was the living presence, and nothing can replace it. Immortality is an illusion for thought and art, as for man. They are nothing but relics mutely surviving time's erosion and history's disasters, like monuments of stone. But it is in this very fragility-that equates the humblest existence with one we falsely call "great," and is simply one that had the luck to express itself-that there lies the meaning and value of human life. And that value is eternal.
    Albert Camus appeared in my life in April, 1941, in Algiers, where I had come as a refugee from France. I met him soon after my arrival, for in Algeria he was famous: the leader of a group of young journalists, aspiring writers, students, friends of the Arabs, enemies of the local bourgeoisie and Pétain. They lived together, passed the days on the seashore or hillside, and the evening playing records and dancing, hoping for the victory of England and giving vent to their disgust with what had happened to France and to Europe. They also put on plays, and in that period were preparing a production of Hamlet in which Camus, in addition to directing, played the leading role opposite the Ophelia of his wife, Francine.
    He had published a volume of prose poems entitled Noces (Nuptials), they told me. I did not read it, because in those days I was not in the mood for prose poems, but chiefly because the company of him and his friends was enough. In their midst I found the France I loved and the pure clear warmth of French friendship. I attended the rehearsals of Hamlet) went to the beach with them, took walks with them, talking about what was happening in the world. Hitler had just occupied Greece, and the swastika waved over the Acropolis. I suffered continual nausea and solitude in the face of these events. But solitary and shut off as I was, I was the guest of those young people. To know the value of hospitality one must have been alone and homeless.
    I try to recall details, as if through them I could relive those days and learn something more about the young writer with whom I actually spoke little, since he felt no more like talking than I. I remember being totally obsessed by a single thought: we had arrived at humanity's zero hour and history was senseless; the only thing that made sense was that part of man which remained outside of history, alien and impervious to the whirlwind of events. If, indeed, such a part existed. This thought I considered my exclusive privilege. I felt that no one else could be so possessed by it; yet I yearned for someone to share it with. But there was no one. It was not an idea compatible with normal life, let alone with literature-or so it seemed to me.
    However, I did have something in common with this twenty-year old writer-love of the sea, joy of the sea, ecstatic admiration of the sea. I discovered this one day when I was his guest at Oran and we went by bicycle beyond Mers-el-Kebir to a deserted beach. We spoke little even then, but we praised the sea, which does not have to be understood, which is inexhaustible and which never palls. All other beauty does, we agreed. This agreement sealed our friendship. Camus told me then that he was writing a tragedy about Caligula, and I tried to understand what could attract a modern writer to such a subject. Unfettered tyranny? But contemporary tyranny did not seem to me to have much in common with Caligula's.
    From Oran I continued my journey to Casablanca from where I had been told I could embark for New York. I said good-bye to Camus and his wife, knowing that we had exchanged the gift of friendship. At the core of this friendship was something very precious, something unspoken and impersonal that made itself felt in the way they received me and in our way of being together. We had recognized in each other the mark of fate - which was, I believe, the ancient meaning of the encounter between stranger and host. I was being chased from Europe; they remained, exposed to the violence that had driven me out. I carried away with me the impression of a man who could be almost tenderly warm one moment and coolly reserved the next, and yet was constantly longing for friendship.
I saw him again in New York in 1946 on the pier where I had gone to meet his ship. In my eyes he seemed to me like a man coming straight from the battlefield bearing its marks, pride and sorrow. By that time I had read The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Caligula. In those black years the young man from Algeria had fought and conquered. He had become, together with Jean-Paul Sartre, the symbol of a defeated France, which because of them had imposed itself victoriously in its chosen domain-intelligence. He had won his position on the stage of the world; he was famous; his books were brilliant. But to me he had conquered in a more important sense. He had faced the question which I considered crucial and which had so absorbed me during the days that I first met him. He had mastered it and carried it to extreme and lucid conclusions. He had succeeded in saying, in his fevered way and in an argument as taut as a bow, why, despite the fury and horror of history, man is an absolute; and he had indicated precisely where, according to him, this absolute lay: in the conscience, even if mute and stilled; in remaining true to one's self even when condemned by the gods to repeat over and over the same vain task. In this lay the value of The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus for me.
    With an almost monstrous richness of ideas and vigor of reasoning Sartre had said something similar. But when he arrived at the question of the connection between man and history today; between man and the choices which impose themselves today, Sartre seemed to have lost the thread of his reasoning, to have turned backward to realism, to categorical obligations imposed on man from the outside, and worse, to notions of the politically opportune. Camus held firm, at the risk of exposing himself, defenseless, to the criticism of the dialecticians, and of seeming to pass brusquely from logic to emotive affirmation. It is certain that what induced him to remain firm was not an ideological system, but the sentiment, so vehemently expressed in The Stranger and in some pages of The Myth of Sisyphus, of the inviolable secret which is enclosed in every man's heart simply because he is "condemned to die." That is man's transcendence. That is man's transcendence in respect to history; that is the truth which no social imperative can erase. Desperate transcendence and truth, because they are challenged in the very heart of man, who knows that he is mortal and eternally guilty, with no recourse against destiny. Absurd such transcendence and truth-but absurd as they were, they were reborn every time that Sisyphus descended "with heavy, but equal, steps, toward the torment whose end he would never approach .... " This secret, like the "eternal jewel" of Macbeth can never be compromised or violated without sacrilege.
    Albert Camus had known how to give form to this feeling and to remain true to it. Because of this, his presence added to everybody's world, making it more real and less insensate. And because of this, not of his fame, the young writer from Algeria has "grown" in my eyes, worthy not only of friendship but admiration. It was no longer a matter of literature, but of directly confronting the world. Literary space, that trompe l'oeil that had been invented in the nineteenth century to defend the individual artist's right to be indifferent, was broken. Camus (and, in his very different way, Sartre) by the simple act of raising the question of the value of existence, asserted the will to participate actively, in the first person, in the world; that is, to challenge directly the actual situation of contemporary man in the name of the exigence of a conscience whose rigor was not attenuated by pragmatic considerations. With this, one might say, he returned to the raison d'être of writing. Putting the world in question means putting one's self in question and abandoning the artist's traditional right to remain separate from his work-a pure creator. In the language of Camus, this signifies that if the world is absurd, the artist must live immersed in the absurd, must carry the burden of it, and must seek to prove it for others.
    This was the real and the only valid meaning of engagement. Such a choice carried within itself the threat of the cancerous negation that Camus called nihilism. One had to go through the experience of nihilism and fight it. The simplest act of life is an act of affirmation; it is the acceptance of one's own and others' lives as the starting point of all thinking. But living by nihilism is living on bad faith, as a bourgeois lives on his income.
    In 1946 Camus was invited to speak to the students of Columbia University in New York. I have kept notes of his talk, and am sure I can reconstruct it without betraying his meaning. The gist of the speech was as follows:
    We were born at the beginning of the First World War. As adolescents we had the crisis of 1929; at twenty, Hitler. Then came the Ethiopian War, the Civil War in Spain, and Munich. These were the foundations of our education. Next came the Second World War, the defeat, and Hitler in our homes and cities. Born and bred in such a world, what did we believe in? Nothing. Nothing except the obstinate negation in which we were forced to close ourselves from the very beginning. The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge. The world of culture was beautiful, but it was not real. And when we found ourselves face to face with Hitler's terror, in what values could we take comfort, what values could we oppose to negation? In none. If the problem had been the bankruptcy of a political ideology, or a system of government, it would have been simple enough. But what had happened came from the very root of man and society. There was no doubt about this, and it was confirmed day after day not so much by the behavior of the criminals but by that of the average man. The facts showed that men deserved what was happening to them. Their way of life had so little value; and the violence of the Hitlerian negation was in itself logical. But it was unbearable and we fought it.
    Now that Hitler has gone, we know a certain number of things. The first is that the poison which impregnated Hitlerism has not been eliminated; it is present in each of us. Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and "historical tasks" spreads it. He is an actual or potential assassin. For if the problem of man is reduced to any kind of "historical task," he is nothing but the raw material of history, and one can do anything one pleases with him. Another thing we have learned is that we cannot accept any optimistic conception of existence, any happy ending whatsoever. But if we believe that optimism is silly, we also know that pessimism about the action of man among his fellows is cowardly.
    We oppose terror because it forces us to choose between murdering and being murdered; and it makes communication impossible. This is why we reject any ideology that claims control over all of human life.

    It seems to me today that in this speech, which was a sort of autobiography, there were all the themes of Camus's later work, from The Plague to The Just Assassins to The Rebel. But in it there remained, discreetly in shadow, the other Camus, the one that I can call neither truer nor artistically superior, for he is simply "the other," jealously hidden in his secret being-the anguished, dark, misanthropic Camus whose yearning for human communication was perhaps even greater than that of the author of The Plague; the man who, in questioning the world, questioned himself, and by this testified to his own vocation. This is the Camus of the last pages of The Stranger and especially the Camus of The Fall in which we hear his deepest being, the self-tormenting tormentor speak, resisting all forms of complacency and moral self-satisfaction. He wrote, "I was persecuted by a ridiculous apprehension: one cannot die without having confessed all one's own lies ... otherwise, be there one hidden untruth in a life, death would render it definitive ... this absolute assassination of the truth gave me vertigo. . . ."     With these words, it seems to me, the dialogue of Albert Camus with his contemporaries, truncated as it is by death, is nonetheless complete.

"Albert Camus: In Memoriam." From Dissent, VII, No. 3 (Summer, 1960), 266-270.
Translated by Miriam Chiaromonte. Copyright 1960 by Dissent. Reprinted by permission of the author and Dissent.

Albert Camus

CAMUS said that the only true function of man, born into an absurd world, is to live, be aware of one's life, one's revolt, one's freedom. He said that if the only solution to the human dilemma is death, then we are on the wrong road. The right track is the one that leads to life, to the sunlight. One cannot unceasingly suffer from the cold.
So he did revolt. He did refuse to suffer from the unceasing cold. He did refuse to follow a track which led only to death. The track he followed was the only possible one which could not lead only to death. The track he followed led into the sunlight in being that one devoted to making with our frail powers and our absurd material, something which had not existed in life until we made it.
He said, 'I do not like to believe that death opens upon another life. To me, it is a door that shuts.' That is, he tried to believe that. But he failed. Despite himself, as all artists are, he spent that life searching himself and demanding of himself answers which only God could know; when he became the Nobel laureate of his year, I wired him 'On salut l'âme qui constamment se cherche et se demande'; why did he not quit then, if he did not want to believe in God?
At the very instant he struck the tree, he was still searching and demanding of himself; I do not believe that in that bright instant he found them. I do not believe they are to be found. I believe they are only to be searched for, constantly, always by some fragile member of the human absurdity. Of which there are never many, but always somewhere at least one, and one will always be enough.
People will say He was too young; he did not have time to finish. But it is not How long, it is not How much; it is, simply What. When the door shut for him, he had already written on this side of it that which every artist who also carries through life with him that one same foreknowledge and hatred of death, is hoping to do: I was here. He was doing that, and perhaps in that bright second he even knew he had succeeded. What more could he want?
William Faulkner
[Transatlantic Review, Spring 1961; the text printed here has been taken from Faulkner's typescript. This previously appeared in Nouvelle Revue Française, March 1960, in French.]

Bài học về Camus, trong cuốn sách của cô học trò
trong trại tị nạn Sikew, Thái Lan

"Hình như cái số của em là cứ bị mấy ông thầy thương.
Anh H. cũng là thầy dậy em học đờn. Em đã chọn anh H., chính em chọn".

Bụi

Albert Camus, 50 năm sau khi mất

Le 4 janvier 1960, Albert Camus disparaissait brutalement dans un accident de voiture. Deux ans après avoir reçu le Prix Nobel de littérature. Huit ans après s'être irrémédiablement brouillé avec Sartre. Cette mort précoce - il n'avait que quarante-six ans - n'y changera rien : une bonne partie de l'intelligentsia parisienne ne lui pardonnera jamais d'avoir, dans L'Homme révolté, osé comparer le stalinisme au nazisme. Dès lors, Camus, adulé par le grand public, admiré et étudié à l'étranger, va être boudé par le monde universitaire français. La sortie, en 1994, du Premier Homme, son dernier roman - inachevé - dans lequel il explorait des pistes littéraires inédites, redore son blason d'écrivain. Aujourd'hui le penseur est également en passe d'être réhabilité. Dans son numéro 8, Books se faisait l'écho des travaux de l'universitaire américain David Sherman. Pour ce dernier, l'effondrement des certitudes idéologiques et l'émergence de valeurs « éthico-politiques cosmopolites telles que le dialogue entre les cultures et les droits de l'homme » ont fait de Camus « un philosophe de notre temps ».
A noter enfin qu'à l'occasion de ce cinquantenaire, la bibliothèque du Centre Pompidou, à Paris, organise une journée d'hommage, le samedi 30 janvier. Une série de personnalités - le philosophe Raphaël Enthoven, les écrivains Yasmina Khadra, Laurence Tardieu, Charles Juliet, Virgil Tanase, le metteur en scène Stanislas Nordey, le comédien Charles Berling et David Camus, petit-fils de l'écrivain, y liront et commenteront un texte de leur choix.

Le retour de Camus

Alors que s’approche le cinquantième anniversaire de la mort d’Albert Camus, en janvier 1960, deux livres américains rendent hommage à l’écrivain et moraliste français. Le premier, par David Caroll, professeur à l’université de Californie, est consacré à « Camus l’Algérien ». S’appuyant notamment sur son autobiographie inachevée, Le Premier Homme, publiée en 1994, il rend compte du rôle du problème algérien dans l’élaboration de la philosophie morale de l’ancien Algérois. Camus, on le sait, refusa de prendre parti dans la guerre d’Algérie. Il avait défendu les droits des « musulmans » à la veille de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, mais quand le conflit éclata, en 1954, il fit valoir que l’on n’était pas obligé de choisir entre la justice et le massacre des innocents.
Le second ouvrage, par David Sherman, qui enseigne la philosophie à l’université du Montana, revient en profondeur sur les accusations d’inconsistance philosophique dont a été victime l’ancien résistant de la part du camp sartrien, dans les années 1950, avant et après le début de la guerre d’Algérie. Dans un compte rendu de ce livre publié dans les Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, publication en ligne de l’université catholique de Notre Dame (Indiana), le philosophe sénégalais Souleymane Bachir Diagne approuve le travail de réhabilitation mené par Sherman.
Normalien, Bachir Diagne, actuellement professeur à l’université Columbia de New York, a été l’élève d’Althusser et de Derrida, et connaît bien les arcanes de l’intelligentsia française. Tout en s’emmêlant un peu dans les dates, il rappelle la méchante querelle qui éclata en 1952 du fait de Francis Jeanson, un fidèle de Sartre. Jeanson publia dans la revue de ce dernier, Les Temps modernes, un article critiquant L’Homme révolté, paru l’année précédente. L’article était intitulé « Albert Camus ou l’âme révoltée », titre ironique évoquant la « belle âme » selon Hegel, figure de l’homme, écrit Diagne, « incapable d’agir, étant prisonnier de sa posture éthique, pris entre deux options qu’il juge également répréhensibles ». Ignorant Jeanson, qu’il ne connaissait pas, Camus adressa sa réponse directement à Sartre (« Monsieur le directeur »), affirmant n’avoir pas de leçon à recevoir de ceux qui « n’ont jamais placé que leur fauteuil dans le sens de l’histoire ». Allusion cinglante à l’absence d’engagement de Sartre dans la Résistance, alors que Camus, lui, avait risqué sa vie, en animant le mouvement Combat. Sartre répondit avec brutalité, l’accusant de surcroît d’incompétence philosophique. La rupture entre les deux hommes était consommée.
En jeu, le point de vue développé par Camus dans L’Homme révolté, selon lequel ni le capitalisme ni le communisme ne méritaient d’être soutenus. Avant cela, Camus s’était attiré une critique du même ordre de la part de Roland Barthes, après la parution de La Peste, fin 1947. Barthes lui reprochait de refuser un véritable « engagement » et de préférer la morale à la politique.
Sherman considère que nous assistons aujourd’hui à une « renaissance » de Camus, et Diagne souscrit à ce point de vue. « L’effondrement des certitudes idéologiques fait que Camus n’est plus persona non grata et mérite d’être redécouvert comme “un philosophe de notre temps”, selon les mots qui clôturent le livre de Sherman. » Depuis la chute du mur de Berlin, l’heure est en effet, écrit Sherman, à l’engagement au profit de valeurs « éthico-politiques cosmopolites telles que le dialogue entre les cultures et les droits de l’homme », état d’esprit qui rencontre exactement l’attitude de Camus. Sherman souligne aussi un autre aspect très actuel de la position de l’écrivain français, son refus de l’esprit de système au profit d’une observation attentive du monde réel. Autre forme d’opposition à l’auteur de L’Être et le Néant et de la Critique de la raison dialectique.

Dimanche 3 janvier 2010
Le succès du Premier Homme vu d'Amérique

Le lundi 4 janvier sera placé sous le signe d’Albert Camus, décédé le 4 janvier 1960. En guise de préambule, nous vous proposons de redécouvrir Le Premier Homme, son dernier roman, laissé inachevé par sa disparition brutale. Le manuscrit se trouvait dans la voiture à bord de laquelle l’écrivain eut son accident mortel. Il ne fut publié qu’en 1994. Tony Judt en fit la recension dans la New York Review of Books. Il y expliquait notamment pourquoi cette sortie tardive avait permis à l’ouvrage de rencontrer un grand succès.
Selon Judt, la France est alors mûre pour entendre ce que Camus a à lui dire : « Il est certain que ce renouveau d’intérêt est tout sauf inattendu. Dans l’atmosphère délétère de corruption qui caractérise la fin de l’ère mitterrandienne, une voix morale audible manque cruellement. » Camus vient combler cette lacune. Autre raison de son succès, d’après Judt : « les Français ont pris conscience qu’ils négligeaient et laissaient se délabrer leur héritage littéraire ; Albert Camus est l’un des derniers représentants d’un âge d’or de la littérature française, il fait le lien avec Roger Martin du Gard, Jules Romains, Gide, Mauriac et Malraux. »
Enfin, poursuit le critique, « le traumatisme de la Guerre d’Algérie est dernière nous ». C’est là une condition nécessaire pour que Le Premier Homme, où Camus, renouant avec la veine autobiographique, se penche sur son enfance algérienne et sur la figure de son père, bénéficie d’une réception sereine : « Le monde perdu de l’Algérie française est au cœur de ce dernier roman. C’est un sujet auquel les lecteurs français sont ouverts désormais, d’une façon qui n'aurait pas été envisageable en 1960 ».
*
Ui chao, cái bài viết về Camus, trong phụ trang văn học của tờ Le Monde [Dossiers & Documents Littéraires, Juillet, 2002, “Đứa trẻ & Nhà văn”, L’enfant et l’écrivain], về cuốn Le Premier Homme, cuốn sách viết dở dang của Camus, mới tuyệt làm sao. Bài viết được đưa vô chuyên mục “Tuổi thơ trong tự thuật”, với Camus, Sartre, Perec, Yourcenar. Độc giả Mít có thể kể thêm Nguyên Hồng, với Những ngày thơ ấu, hay Nguyễn Đức Quỳnh, với Thằng Kình, thí dụ.
Tìm lại đứa bé, những kỷ niệm thời ấu thơ, là tìm lại những cái mầm của tác phẩm sẽ có, và điều quyết định sự hiện hữu của kẻ được gọi là người lớn trong cuộc đời. Đó là điều mà bằng tài năng, họ đã làm được, trong số “họ” đó, có những nhà văn như Camus, Perec, Sartre và Yourcenar.

Cái quá khứ không làm sao chữa cho lành lặn được của Camus
Người thứ nhất, Le Premier Homme, là phác thảo của một cuốn đại tiểu thuyết tự thuật mà nhà văn đang loay hoay, hì hục, thì bị cái chết đánh gục.
Tin Văn sẽ post và dịch trong kỳ tới!
Cùng trong số báo, còn có một bài thật tuyệt về bà trùm lưu vong, và tuổi thơ Nga của bà, bị chôm mất!
Un exil fondateur
Dans toute l’oeuvre de Nathalie Sarraute résonne sa jeunesse russe qui lui fut volée
Ui chao, giá mà chôm được câu này, áp dụng vào trường hợp Gấu nhà văn, thì thích quá, hỉ!
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Cái phụ trang văn học Đứa bé & Nhà văn, gồm quá nhiều bài viết hách xì xằng. Có thể, đụng vô ‘đứa bé’, là đụng vô cái mầm văn chương tuyệt vời nhất, chăng?
Ui chao, lại nhớ BHD: Mi đâu có thương yêu gì ta, mi thương đứa con nít 11 tuổi, là ta từ đời thuở nào, và cái xứ Bắc Kít của mi, ở trong đứa con nít đó!
Làm sao mà em "biết" được, những sự thực khủng khiếp đến như thế?
Bạn đọc chắc còn nhớ đứa con nít, mà sau này, trở thành nhà văn lẫy lừng Virginia Woolf, khi mới đâu ba, bốn tuổi, bị một đứa bà con mò mẫm: Không phải chỉ một đứa con nít trong tôi, mà cả một nửa nhân loại, thét lên: NO!

«Le héros de Sartre n'a peut-être pas fourni le vrai sens de son angoisse lorsqu'il insiste sur ce qui lui répugne dans l'homme, au lieu de fonder sur certaines de ses grandeurs des raisons d'espérer.
Constater l'absurdité de la vie ne peut être une fin, mais seulement un commencement.. »
(Albert Camus, Sur La Nausée, Alger républicain, 20 octobre 1938)
[Le Monde. Dossiers & Documents Littéraires. Avril 2001]
Nhìn ra cái sự phi lý của kiếp người không phải tận cùng mà chỉ là khởi đầu...

L'émotion ne nous quitte guère au fil de la lecture. De cette enfance vécue dans un tel état d'innocence, de ferveur, se dégage une bouleversante impression de pureté, presque de grâce. Avec L'Envers et L'Endroit, Le Premier Homme est l'un des rares textes quasi autobiographiques d'un écrivain qui répugnait pourtant aux confidences. On sait qu'il devait prendre la forme d'un triptyque: une première partie consacrée à l'enfance, une deuxième à l'adolesscence et à la maturité (l'action politique, l'Algérie, la Résistance), et une troisième (“la mère”), abordant notamment « la question arabe, la civilisation créole et le destin de l'Occident ».
Nous n'aurons donc jamais que le premier tableau de cet ensemble, depuis la naissance à Mondovi, en 1913, jusqu'aux distributions des prix, au Grand Lycée d'Alger, vers 1928. Mais quel salut vibrant à ces années décisives, « à mi-distance de la misère et du soleil », à cette enfance dont Camus écrit ici qu'il n'a «jamais guéri»! Quel hommaage à l'Algérie des années 1920, à l'époque bénie où «bicots» et «francaouis» supportaient encore de vivre ensemble! Quelle tendressse pour ces atmosphères grouillanntes et colorées! Quel hymne au soleil, à la mer, à la lumière!
Certains accents lyriques rappelleront les ivresses de Noces. D'autres évoqueront plutôt l'Envers et l'Endroit, et l'idée qu'« il n'y a pas d'amour de vivre sans désespoir de vivre ». Ici, bien sûr, l'envers de la lumière, c'est la pauvreté, la petite maison de Belcourt, ce faubourg populaire d'Alger, où Camus grandit entre une grandmère autoritaire et une mère illetttrée, isolée dans une demi-surdité. Une existence rude et âpre où éclate pourtant la noblesse des vies humbles, obstinées, ainsi que la dette de Camus envers cette famille qui, «par son seul silence, sa réserve, sa fierté », lui donnera pour toujours «ses plus hautes leçons ».
Mais ce qui apparaît dans Le Premier Homme, avec plus de force qu'ailleurs, c'est « le vide affreux» causé par l'absence du père. La moitié du roman est consacrée à la « recherche» de cet homme parti un jour de 1914 dans son costume de zouave multicolore.  Parti se faire tuer à la bataille de la Marne, alors que son fils n'avait même pas un an. Malheureusement, «la mémoire des pauvres est moins nourrrie que celle des riches. Elle a moins de repères dans l'espace puisqu'ils quittent rarement le lieu où ils vivent, moins de repères aussi dans le temps d'une vie uniforme et grise ». Au bout du compte, pour Camus, il ne restera jamais de ce père que l'éclat d'obus qui lui a ouvert la tête, et que l'on conserve pieusement dans une boîte à biscuits, dans l'armoire, avec les cartes postales écrites du front. Entre les deux femmes qui l'entourent, et malgré l'infinie tendresse qu'il nourrit pour sa mère, Camus est le seul homme, le «premier hommme ».
Il lui faudra s'élever «au prix le plus cher », «trouver seul sa morale et sa vérité ». C'est ce parcours intérieur que retrace Le Premier Homme, de l'innocence première à la prise de conscience de ses origines et à l'acceptation de soi. Et, sur ce chemin semé d'embûches, un père de substitution surgira, providentiel : c'est Louis Germain, l'instituteur, qui, ayant remarqué ce garçon bouillant, exceptionnellement intelligent, bouleversera son destin en le présentant à la «bourse des lycées et collèges ».
Il faudrait pouvoir dire quelle reconnaissance affectueuse Camus gardera toute sa vie pour cet homme, et l'éloge de l'école laïque que constitue implicitement son texte. Il faudrait pouvoir rendre compte du luxe de détails, de la précision inouïe des souvenirs, des émotions, des sensations, qui font le prix de ce témoignage: les siestes obligées dans le même lit que la grand-mère, lorsqu'il sentait près de lui «l'odeur de chair âgée », la cave «puante et mouillée» où les enfants s'échangeaient les berlingots à la menthe, le gros fils du boucher surnommé Gigot, la cravache grossière qui lui cinglait les fessses lorsqu'il rentrait tard de la plage, les premières lectures, L'Intrépide, les Pardaillan (comme Sartre !) où il « s'exaltait à des histoires d'honneur et de courage ... »
Ce « dernier Camus» constitue un document exceptionnel sur la formation d'une des plus hautes consciences du siècle, sur son hisstoire, son caractère, les ferments de sa pensée. Tout Camus est là, en germe, dans l'enfant qui grandit sous nos yeux: la sensibilité, la loyauté, la générosité, la droiture, la responsabilité, la fierté, la soif d'absolu, l'exigence ... Et aussi une avidité de vivre qui coexiste touujours avec un chagrin sourd, inextinguible, comme la basse continue de son existence.
FLORENCE NOIVILLE (16 avril 1994)
Le Monde. Dossiers & Documents Littéraires

Albert Camus, 50 năm sau khi mất

Retrouver l'enfant, les souvenirs d'enfance, c'est retrouver les germes de l'œuvre à venir et ce qui a déterminé la présence de l'adulte au monde. C'est ce qu'ont fait avec talent, entre autres, Rousseau, Perec, Camus, Sartre et Yourcenar.
Tìm lại đứa bé, những kỷ niệm thời ấu thơ, là tìm lại những cái mầm của tác phẩm sẽ có, và điều quyết định sự hiện hữu của kẻ được gọi là người lớn trong cuộc đời. Đó là điều mà bằng tài năng, họ đã làm được, trong số “họ” đó, có những nhà văn như Camus, Perec, Sartre và Yourcenar.

Cảm xúc không rời chúng ta theo từng trang sách. Một tuổi thơ thật ngây thơ, thật hăm hở, từ đó toát ra một sự thuần khiết, gần như một ân sủng. Cùng với Mặt trái và Mặt phải, Người đàn ông thứ nhất là một trong bản văn hiếm, dưới dạng gần như tự thuật, của một nhà văn vốn tởm lợm cái trò tâm sự ỉ ôi. Người ta biết, nó phải gồm ba phần: phần thứ nhất dành cho tuổi thơ, thứ nhì thuở mới lớn và tuổi trưởng thành (hoạt động chính trị, xứ Algérie, Kháng chiến), và phần thứ ba (“mẹ”), đề cập đặc biệt tới “vấn đề Ả Rập, văn hóa da trắng ở xứ thuộc địa, và số phận của Tây phương”