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and philosophies have hitherto done; he even ends up by deriving a
kind of exaltation from this obstinate loyalty. The error Camus criticizes
in the traditional Existentialist philosophies from Kierkegaard to Hei–
degger is their having always in one way or another evaded the absurd
by thinking it. It is difficult to avoid this betrayal if one always keeps
on the level of abstract reflection.
Camus has also written a novel (as Marcel, a play) that without
doubt expresses better than his essay the particular quality of his vision
of the world, thanks to the "opacity" inseparable from the novel form.
What he wrote in
Le Mythe
about great novelists can with equal justice
be applied to himself: " ... the choice they made to write imaginatively
rather than by argument reveals an idea they held in common: that
they were persuaded of the uselessness of every principle of explanation
and convinced of the instructive message embodied in the world of
sensory appearance." Man is as a matter of fact involved in existence;
he is mixed up in it, together with its absurdity and its incoherence, and
he is unable to detach himself sufficiently to pass a tendentious intellec–
tual judgment upon it, even if this judgment were to consist simply in
abstractly recognizing this absurdity by saying: "The world is absurd."
We have no right to formulate such a proposition, because it would be
a means of evading the absurd. Here we recognize one of the funda–
mental principles of Existentialism. In an essay devoted to Kafka, I
protested in the name of a similar principle against the improperly intel–
lectual interpretations that have been given to his work and that have
falsified its real intentions. It is on the basis of this same principle that
Camus, Blanchot and Bataille criticize traditional Existentialism.
A few years ago Gabriel Marcel arrived at a similar position in
respect to the specific problem of evil. Evil is for him a question of
mystery, and not a problem. Evil is one of our fundamental situations.
We are involved in it and are consequently incapable of withdrawing
from it sufficiently to pass objective judgment on it. Each time we
attempt to do so (and thought cannot help over-reaching itself here)
we degrade to the status of a _problem that which ought to remain
ineffable mystery and, incidentally, lose every chance of reaching a
workable solution.
Camus nevertheless escapes from the circle and emerges from the
absurd by a moral decision: he becomes a normal man again who eats,
drinks, suffers and hopes. Blanchot voluntarily remains imprisoned in it,
but he occasionally gives us the impression of being shut up within tl1e
four walls of Sartre's "room," in a schizophrenic universe where "things
are never dark enough." We do not know, but his imprisonment may
be
just as much the result of his mythomania as of the workings of a
real and universal human fate. His work occasionally gives us a glance
into the unfathomable duplicities of metaphysical consciousness, in com-
