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PARTISAN REVIEW
were a question of time or exaltation! Camus himself appears to be
unconvinced by his argument, for he concludes by maintaining that in
The Possessed,
where the problem of suicide is posed, Dostoevsky failed
to recognize the essential absurdity of existence because he raised the
problem of immortality: "ce qui contredit l'absurde dans cette oeuvre,
ce n'est pas son caractere chretien, c'est l'annonce qu'elle fait de la
vie future." The dissociation of Christianity and immortality is inter–
esting, original, and false; and the reader will remember that one
remarkable character in
The Possessed,
Kirillov, finds the problems of
God, immortality, and suicide inseparable; he decides to commit suicide
because he had
previously
decided that God and immortality are merely
the "pain of the fear of death."
Dostoevsky wrote in Czarist Russia. Camus has lived through the
German occupation of France. That is why the problem of suicide--of
resisting the Gestapo, or collaborating with the Germans, or joining the
underground-seems to be the only serious problem. And when, at the
end of his essay, he singles out the myth of Sisyphus (let us remember
that the Greeks esteemed quite different myths) and salutes Sisyphus
as the absurd hero, the man who endlessly rolls a rock up a hill only
to have it roll down endlessly, he is saluting the heroes of the French
underground who struggled against the Germans when it seemed that the
struggle was endless, hopeless, and absurd, absurd in Camus' new sense
that it was a matter of human pride to resist the Germans, god-like in
power, even though the struggle seemed to have no chance of success.
But the struggle, as it turns out, was not hopeless; and if God exists
and there is a future life, then human life, since it does not terminate
with death, may not be absurd. There are also other reasons for main–
taining that it is not without meaning. In any case, it should be clear
that one fundamental question, the question which Camus begs, is the
problem: Is existence absurd or is it meaningful? Does God exist or is
he an illusion? Camus has merely formulated a modern version of
Stoicism, inspired by his age just as the Stoics were inspired by the
conditions of their own period. Camus' ideas are valuable not as a
description of existence, but as a description of certain states of existence;
and they are valuable above all as a means necessary to the interpreta–
tion of an extremely gifted playwright's experience.
This is not the first nor the last time that the truth or falsity of
an author's ideas are less important than the fact that his ideas make
possible a grasp of experience and the composition of first-rate literary
works.
DELMORE SCHWARTZ
