VARIETY
Albert Camus
AWRITER AND HIS TIME
I.
As an artist have you chosen
the role of witness?
This would take considerable
presumption or a vocation I lack.
Personally I don't ask for any role
and I have but one real vocation.
As a man, I have a preference for
happiness; as an artist, it seems
to me that I still have characters
to bring to life without the help
of wars or of law-courts. But I
have been sought out as each in–
dividual has been sought out. Ar–
tists of the past could at least keep
silent in the face of tyranny. The
tyrannies of today are improved;
they no longer admit of silence or
neutrality. One has to take a stand,
to be either for or against. Well,
in that case I am against.
But this does not amount to
choosing the comfortable role of
witness.
It
is merely accepting the
time as it is, minding one's own
business, in short. Moreover you
are forgetting that today judges,
accused and witnesses exchange
positions with exemplary rapidity.
My choice, if you think I am
mak-
*
This text, which first appeared in
Actuelles
11, answers questions that
had been asked of Albert Camus on
the radio and in foreign newspapers.
It forms a part of
The Myth of Sisy–
phus and Other Essays
to be published
by Alfred A. Knopf (copyright
1955) .
429
ing one, would at least be never to
sit on a judge's bench, or beneath
it, like so many of our philosophers.
Aside from that, there is no dearth
of opportunities for action, in the
relative. Trade-unionism is today
the first, and the most fruitful
among them.
II. Is not the quixotism that has
been criticized in your recent works
an idealistic and romantic defini–
tion of the artist's role?
However words are perverted,
they provisionally keep their mean–
ing. And it is clear to me that the
romantic is the one who chooses
the perpetual motion of history,
the grandiose epic, and the an–
nouncement of a miraculous event
at the end of time.
If
I have tried
to define something, it
is,
on the
contrary, simply the common exist–
ence of history and of man, every–
day life with the most possible light
thrown upon it, the dogged strug–
gle against one's own degradation
and that of others.
I t is likewise idealism, and of
the worse kind, to end up by hang–
ing all action and all truth on a
meaning of history that is not im–
plicit
in
events and that" in any
case, implies a mythical
aim.
Would it therefore be realism to
take as the laws of history the
future-in other words, just what
is not yet history, something of
whose nature we know nothing?
It
seems to me on the contrary
that I am arguing in favor of a
true realism against a mythology
