In the 1958 preface to his republished The Wrong Side and the Right Side, Albert Camus artfully disclosed the situation which inspired and thus unites the individual essays, that of a young man out of place, struggling to find his way in a world within which he did not feel at home, with nothing to direct him except for what, without interpretive aid, he could decipher from the world around him or find within himself. Yet with this new revelation, Camus does not merely emphasize the experiences which inspired these his first published writings; rather, he contends that these ‘original’ experiences likewise contain a key constitutive element around which all of his work, as a whole, centers. In this light, the essays comprised in The Wrong Side and the Right Side may be seen not only as Camus’ starting point but also as the foundation upon which each subsequent work stands:

If, in spite of so many efforts to create a language and bring myths to life, I never manage to rewrite The Wrong Side and the Right Side, I shall have achieved nothing. …In the very hour of exile…at least I know this…: a man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.[i]

With this declaration, Camus explicitly places his own personal experience of exile and the longing for home at the heart of all of his writing. Camus’ choice to so depict the condition of exile and possible manners of transcending the condition may thus be regarded as a deliberate and intentional attempt to engage the condition of his own experience of exile. Through the construction of stories and his concentrated attempts to “bring myths to life” as a way of engaging his own ontological situation, Camus implicitly posits the ‘act of literature’—story telling and myth making—as a legitimate manner of taking account of, and responsibility for, the meaning of the ontological situation. Further, the literature that Camus produced to both depict and stand as such an engagement likewise both depicts and stands as the act of faith through which the ontological situation is fully resolved. With the formulation and articulation of his ‘myth’ of exile and [re-]union, Camus ultimately embarked upon a unified effort, through literature and in faith, toward the transcendence of existential exile.

Creating Meaning

Art and Reconciliation

Hans-Georg Gadamer contends that ‘Truth’ is the flowing together of subjective and objective into one unified and unifying experience. In Gadamer’s terms, the experience of art holds the possibility of being an experience of truth precisely because the relation that is sparked between the individual and the work of art can (in fact, ought to) achieve such a unity between individual and artwork, thereby reaching a unification (and thus a transcendence) of the subjective and objective stances. The two are one; in encountering the work as object, one similarly encounters oneself in (and therefore as) the object. Both the individual and the artwork are subjectified and objectified; one becomes wholly identified with the other, and the two are thus inseparable. The truth of the work of art is the union produced in the relation. This point is suggested both by the ‘character’ of truth itself toward which Gadamer’s hermeneutic points, and by his specific consideration of art. Yet perhaps the most conclusive analysis to reveal the truth of the work of art is to be found in the notion of ‘beauty’ itself.

Gadamer’s treatment of beauty is largely informed by that of the Greeks; as Gadamer notes in his examination of beauty in art, “for the Greeks it was the heavenly order of the cosmos that presented the true vision of the beautiful.”[ii] According to the account which Plato gives in the Phaedrus, the soul, when it is most perfect, is winged and thereby able to traverse the realm where the gods dwell and thus experience the divine nature and the Absolute forms of all things. In this realm alone is the full measure of Being realized, and all that exists on earth in mortal existence is a dim imitation of that which the unfettered soul experiences in the realm of the Absolutes.[iii] Although the soul’s experience of the Absolute is what illuminates all knowledge which the individual possesses, this experience does not last and the soul is returned to the mortal world of imitation. Of those condemned in this manner, Plato concludes:

These souls who, so to speak, have lost their wings, are weighted down by earthly cares, unable to scale the heights of the truth. There is one experience that causes their wings to grow once again and that allows them to ascend once more. This is the experience of love and the beautiful, the love of the beautiful.[iv]

The connection which Plato makes here between the recognition of the knowledge of the Absolute and the experience of the beautiful is fundamental to Gadamer’s ultimate conclusions regarding truth and art. The underlying harmony which is the character of the truth of art, whereby the distinctions between individual and artwork, subject and object, are transcended in the mutual self-recognition and the play of dialectic and dialogue which constitutes the relatedness and thereby calls into being each object in relation, is realized through the experience of the beautiful. As Gadamer concludes, “It is by virtue of the beautiful that we are able to acquire a lasting remembrance of the true world. … In the beautiful presented in nature and art, we experience this convincing illumination of truth and harmony, which compels the admission: ‘This is true.’”[v] In Gadamer’s view, the experience of beauty teaches that, despite the seeming separation between ‘absolute’ and ‘subjectivity,’ between ‘whole’ and ‘particular,’ each element-in-relation is what it is precisely because of its presence in the other. Plato contends that the experience of particular beauty, more than the experience of any other particular, most nearly approaches the experience of absolute beauty, in that in order for any particular entity to be beautiful it must possess some degree of absolute beauty; the beauty of any particular object is illuminated by the radiance of absolute beauty which it possesses. There is thus no distinction between the two; that which is beautiful possesses and is possessed by absolute beauty, and the experience of beauty in art is the ultimate symbol, for Gadamer, of the realization of the necessary harmony which is the underlying character of truth.[vi] Only through the experience of beauty is one able to most fully catch a glimpse of that realm with which one had once been united; it is thus through beauty that one most fully experiences the ‘good’ and the ‘true’ as they are to be found in a reunion with the ‘whole.’ Beauty is therefore the symbol (the character) of truth and of the possibility of reconciliation. In his essay The Rebel, Camus reached a similar conclusion:

But perhaps there is a living transcendence, of which beauty carries the promise, which can make this mortal and limited world preferable to and more appealing than any other. Art thus leads us back to the origins of rebellion, to the extent that it tries to give its form to an elusive value which the future perpetually promises, but of which the artist has a presentiment and wishes to snatch from the grasp of history.[vii]

The truth to be found in the beauty of art, in accord with both Gadamer’s and Camus’ conception, is revelatory of the possibility of reconciliation and transcendence.

Yet whereas Gadamer’s conception of the ‘truth’ of art seems to depend upon the presumption that a harmony between the ideal and real must be possible, Camus’ account rests on the declaration that even if such a harmony is presented as a fabrication, the meaning of that account is not thereby undermined. For Camus, art thus acknowledges the meaning that is absent in the world, while depicting the world in a new way which, though not necessarily a present or future reality, still stands as a real and meaningful possibility. Thus the unity that art is intended to portray, while not presented as a Truth, is no less meaningful by being ‘merely’ a possibility. As Camus explains, art must hold at its center a recognition of the world as it is and as it is experienced, without illusion. Yet at the same time, art must likewise propose aspects of existence which, though not necessary or inevitable are also not necessarily precluded from being so. In The Rebel, Camus contends that art is a “revolt against everything fleeting and unfinished in the world,” the primary aim of which is to “give another form to a reality that it is nevertheless forced to preserve as the source of its emotion.” Camus further suggests that, when art is at its “loftiest,” a clear balance will be achieved between the hard reality at the center of the work and the rejection of that reality that propels the work outward and upward. The end potential, Camus concludes, is that “a new world appears, different from the everyday world and yet the same, particular but universal, full of innocent insecurity—called forth for a few hours by the power and longing of genius.”[viii] Ultimately, that which the world is not, but which art tries to depict its capacity to be, is a place where one can be at home.

For Camus, the novel stands as the art form most appropriate and most capable of realizing the potential of art as pointing the way toward meaningful reconciliation between the individual and the world in its “ability to show at the same time a harmonious sense of fatality and an art that springs wholly from individual liberty—to present, in short, the perfect domain in which the forces of destiny collide with human decisions.”[ix] Yet nearly forty years before Camus was to venture this contention, Georg Lukács, in terms that could have paved the way for Camus’ eventual conception of the novel, suggested that “the form of the novel is, like no other one, an expression of transcendental homelessness.”[x] John Neubauer explains that Lukács’ contention was, at least in part, informed by Hegel’s conception of the novel as “the epic of a prosaic and bourgeois world.”[xi] In Hegel’s view, precisely because human history is headed inexorably toward a final and total reconciliation and reunion with the Divine,* the novel would eventually cease to be necessary as a means of depicting or effecting such a reconciliation. Lukács, however, as Neubauer explains, did not share Hegel’s optimism regarding the inevitable course of human history; instead, for Lukács the “crisis of the arts became an index of the spirit’s general alienation,” and “homelessness in the novel came to indicate the world itself was out of joint.”[xii]

Without reference to Lukács, Camus reaches a similar conclusion regarding the place of the novel in the absence, if not impossibility, of a total Hegelian reconciliation. According to Camus’ understanding of Hegel’s conception of the fate of art (particularly the novel), because art is exclusively intended to depict the reconciliation with spirit, once that reconciliation becomes a reality there will no longer be a place, or need, for art: “According to the revolutionary interpreters of Hegel’s Phenomenology, there will be no art in reconciled society. Beauty will be lived and no longer only imagined. Reality, become entirely rational, will satisfy, completely by itself, every appetite.”[xiii] Yet Camus himself refused to accept the Hegelian reconciliation as necessary and inevitable, and for Camus it remains the task of art, of literature in particular, to depict such a reconciliation as a meaningful human possibility; rather than depict an essential reality (Truth) of human existence, literature is meant to present a search for meaning and a possible path toward reunion and redemption.

Camus’ conception of art as a corrective force imposed upon human reality is consistent with, and ultimately an extension of, his theory of revolt as the only appropriate response to the absurdity of existence. Just as the position in revolt may allow the individual to accept and abide an absurd existence, art likewise creates an interpretation of the world that is more hospitable to and acceptable for the individual:

In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe. Rebellion, from this point of view, is a fabricator of universes. This also defines art. The demands of rebellion are really, in part, aesthetic demands. All rebel thought…illustrates, after [its] own fashion, the same need for coherence and unity. In these sealed worlds, man can reign and have knowledge at last.[xiv]

Literature thus becomes, for Camus, more than merely an account of the world as it is experienced and understood  in human existence. Rather, literature offers a narrative that allows for a re-engagement with the world, generating possibilities and meanings that might not otherwise present themselves to immediate human experience. In this way, literature assumes the power and the responsibility of myth, as the human mind, through its capacity to create art, becomes “a great shape-maker impelled forever to find order in [itself] and to give it to the universe,” committed to “an attempt at explaining something about human nature and the human condition.”[xv] For Camus, the specific and ultimate reality of the human condition which the myth is intended to explain is the experience of existential exile. Mythic literature, for Camus, must therefore portray, and ultimately must realize, a particular unity in-exile; it must reveal “an imaginary world…which is created by the rectification of the actual world.”[xvi] More precisely, according to Camus, “The most definite challenge that a work of this kind can give to creation is to present itself as an entirety, as a closed and unified world.”[xvii]

In his essay What Is Literature?, Jean-Paul Sartre seems to suggest that any human interaction with the world, whether undertaken explicitly toward the creation of art or not, contains some sense of the kind of ‘corrective’ interpretation of the world that Camus suggests literature should entail. Following from Edmund Husserl’s contention that ‘constitution,’ the generation of meaning in human reality, is ultimately a product of the manner in which that reality is experienced by consciousness and ultimately revealed to and structured for consciousness,* Sartre acknowledges that all human experience of the world is shaped to some degree by the particular consciousness which experiences a relation to the world. However, Sartre likewise acknowledges that art, and literature in particular, seeks not only to present such a relation between human consciousness and the world but also to emphasize the relation as an essential quality of existence:

Each of our perceptions is accompanied by the consciousness that human reality is a ‘revealer,’ that is, to put it differently, that man is the means by which things are manifested. It is our presence in the world which multiplies relations. … [At the same time,] to our inner certainty of being ‘revealers’ is added that of being inessential in relation to the thing revealed. One of the chief motives of artistic creation is certainly the need of feeling that we are essential in relationship to the world.[xviii]

In Sartre’s view as it is expressed here, the artist, longing for a meaningful connection with the world, attempts to both experience and portray the world in such a manner that makes this kind of relation both evident and essential.

For the exile, whether the experience of exile is literal or metaphoric, this view of literature has a particular relevance as a possible manner of transcendence. As was suggested in Chapter Two, there is a persistent and prevalent tendency to equate the position of the writer with that of exile, whether the specific writer does or does not truly and immediately find oneself literally in exile. In a recent essay on the exile experience, Roberto Bolaño, himself an exile, chose to focus on the exile inherent in the vocation of writing rather than on the conditions which precipitated or defined his own literal exile from Chili. In Bolaño’s view, implicit in all literature is an aspect of exile: “All literature carries exile within it, whether the writer has had to pick up and go at the age of twenty or has never left home.”[xix] To this contention Bolaño adds that, whether truly an exile or not, by choosing to write one is simultaneously choosing an existence in exile:  “every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature.”[xx]

Yet if the choice to write truly does foster a state of exile, it may likewise be said that it makes a transcendence of exile possible. To begin, simply in the act of writing, it may be possible to bridge the gap that is perceived to exist between the individual in exile and the world. This point, alluded to in Sartre’s contention that artistic creation is in part intended to present an essential human relation with the world, is more explicitly articulated by Judith Melton, who contends that the “writing process itself creates a transformation for the exile, helping him or her to overcome the psychological trauma of the experience.”[xxi] For Melton, the act itself of writing, independent of the actual content of that writing, may help the exile to establish the connection needed to transform and transcend the experience. At the same time, however, the content of the writing ought not be ignored; as has been suggested throughout the previous discussion, there is an immense importance in the manner in which the writer, the exile, chooses to portray human reality in created literature, as it is precisely this portrayal which is intended to foster a deeper understanding of the reality as well as its meaning. For the exile in particular, this meaning must address explicitly the condition of exile and its transcendence. The writer, from a position alone, in exile, seeks to transcend this condition through the creation of a unifying myth, creating a world united in relation while simultaneously creating and entering into a new relation between oneself (as writer) and a reader who takes up the necessary position opposite the writer in a reciprocal dialogue; though placed at opposite poles in this newly created relationship, both writer and reader are wholly co-dependent on each other, and thus on the relation itself, for their existence. The mythic literature that is created in this fashion therefore engages the challenge of exile on two fronts: first by fashioning a story to account for the ontological situation in exile and the possibility for meaning within that situation, and second by establishing a relationship within which both poles, writer and reader, may transcend their respective positions in exile in relation to each other.

It was noted above that, for Camus, literature is intended as a corrective interpretation of human reality, as the creation of “an imaginary world…which is created by the rectification of the actual world.”[xxii] Though Camus does not explicitly refer to the condition of exile here, because the condition of exile is a fundamental constitutive element of both Camus’ conception of literature as well as the literature that he himself created, it may be concluded that the imaginary world that is created is one in which the meaning of the condition of exile, as well as its possible transcendence, are given over to human understanding. Writing more explicitly of the literal condition of exile, Edward Said notes, in similar fashion, that “much of the exile’s life is taken up with compensating for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule.”[xxiii] What is consistent with both views is the exile’s/artist’s need to create a new world within which the condition of exile is transcended and some manner of reconciliation is possible. What is not explicitly stated, but which is consistently implied by each, is the inherently religious nature of the need for and attempt to create such a ‘new world’; this longing for ‘home,’ constituted as a quest for meaning in relation within the finitude and existential exile which constitute the ontological situation, is ultimately a religious quest for reconciliation and salvation. In this sense, the act of literary creation which attempts to effect a transcendence of existential exile, specifically as Camus understands and undertakes such an act, must be seen as religious in nature, thus the body of art which Camus erects to account for and respond to the condition of exile may be recognized as a unified religious myth of the human condition.

The Religious Myth

A persistent questioning of the meaning of human existence is an essential component of such existence itself; that is, to exist fully is to question the meaning of the existence in which one participates. ‘Religion,’ broadly characterized as the organization of stories and symbols intended to explain the ‘whole’ of the reality of human existence, past, present, and future, individually and collectively, likewise stands as an ever-present and effective manner of following, of living, such questioning. Religion, in this account, stands for the attempt, however the attempt is constituted, to engage and preserve the mystery of human existence in an effort to achieve the possible identification of meaning.

In the discussion of the ancient Greek account of mystery and meaning offered in Chapter One, ‘myth’ was more explicitly presented as a religious endeavor, the specific purpose of which was to disclose a possible meaning of human existence within the limits imposed by the fundamental condition of mystery. It was acknowledged that myth, constituted as a plausible account of a particular aspect of human reality, is not intended as a statement of truth; rather, myth stands as a metaphoric account of the search for meaning from which the first steps of a progressive commitment toward self-identification are taken. Precisely because it fosters such committed identification in the search for meaning, myth represents an engagement in faith. Within this conception, the purpose of myth is twofold: it must first account for why some aspect of human existence is as it is, and it must then reveal how one may, and ultimately compel one to, live more fully if the account given by the myth is accepted as such. In accord with this characterization, a transformative power of myth may be suggested in that the myth, by superimposing a cohesive story and order onto the incomplete reality of human existence, provides both an acceptable account of what is and has been as well as a plausible direction toward what may be. Here, perhaps, may be seen the first signs of an unmistakable parallel between this conception of myth and the particular conception of literature discussed above; in each case, what is offered is an attempt to tell a complete story of some aspect of human existence that cannot possibly be completely known, thus the aspects which are doomed to remain a mystery to human knowledge are elucidated through the application of human imagination and desire. The world that exists for human knowledge and human experience is reconciled with the world which the individual longs to inhabit, in such a manner that this reconciled world becomes a meaningful possibility; this is the implicit purpose of myth as discussed above, and it is likewise the ultimate goal of literary creation according to Camus.

However, it must be emphasized that the explanatory capacity of either myth or literature is only one aspect of the religious nature of both; in addition to providing a plausible account in response to a particular question of meaning in human existence, the myth/‘story’ must also compel one to act in a particular manner. Further, by acting in a way that is consonant with the account that is conveyed by the myth, it is possible that the meaning suggested by the myth may be more fully realized as a human reality. By participating in the myth, which entails not just an acceptance of its ‘story’ but also a determined consent to live the story oneself, one thereby attains a heightened state of being toward meaning that is inaccessible in ordinary human experience and thus realizes the religious experience of the myth. As Mircea Eliade concludes, “‘Living’ a myth, then, implies a genuinely ‘religious’ experience, …[whereby] one re-enacts fabulous, exalting, significant events, one again witnesses the creative deeds of the Supernaturals; one ceases to exist in the everyday world and enters a transfigured, auroral world impregnated with the Supernaturals’ presence.”[xxiv]

Yet this transformative, religious quality of myth is not exclusive to myth; just as the capacity to portray a ‘reconciled’ world is a quality shared with literature, so too does literature possess the potential to inspire an acute identification with the content of the story, to compel one to respond in a particular manner, and thus to provoke a profound transcendence of ordinary experience toward a religious experience. Karen Armstrong, in the concluding pages of her A Short History of Myth, articulates this fundamental similarity between myth and literature: “A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest.”[xxv] George Steiner, writing before Armstrong’s account of myth, had suggested a similar contention regarding the compelling transformative quality of literature. In Real Presences, a text which to an extent informed Armstrong’s conclusions, Steiner argues that “the encounter with the aesthetic is, together with certain modes of religious and of metaphysical experience, the most ‘ingressive,’ transformative summons available to human experiencing.”[xxvi] In both Steiner’s and Armstrong’s account, in terms alluding to the religious quality of myth, literature is presented as an equally compelling account of meaning in human reality and as an equally compelling transformative force upon human existence. Camus, for his part, anticipated these same connections:

This passion which lifts the mind above the commonplaces of a dispersed world, from which it nevertheless cannot free itself, is the passion for unity. It does not result in mediocre efforts to escape, however, but in the most obstinate demands. Religion or crime, every human endeavor in fact, finally obeys this unreasonable desire and claims to give life a form it does not have. The same impulse, which can lead to the adoration of the heavens or the destruction of man, also leads to creative literature, which derives its serious content from this source.[xxvii]

Here Camus emphasizes the manner in which a primary aim of literature is to create a world which reconciles an ideal with a human reality; however, what Camus adds here is an explicit acknowledgement of the similarity between the impulse to create a literary account of the world and the impulse to follow the religious desire. In each case, according to Camus’ account, the individual attempts to assign an order and a meaning to a human reality which does not appear to have either. Further, on a more implicit level, the purpose and spirit which drive Camus’ conception of literature as well as the literature itself that he creates is clearly a product of a similar religious desire; the engagement that he consistently portrays in his works, as well as the engagement that he himself commits himself to through the very act of creating such literature, which emerges and is realized against the mysterious quality of human existence in the world toward both meaning and the ultimate declaration and definition of one’s place in the world is, at its heart, a religious engagement. The profoundly religious nature of this engagement, and the approach that it offers toward transcendence, is elegantly articulated by Emmanuel Levinas:

That the proximity of the infinite and the sociality it initiates and commands may be better than coincidence and oneness, that, through its very plurality, sociality has its own irreducible excellence which cannot be said in terms of richness without it reverting to a statement of poverty…, this is certainly also what is meant by the idea of the infinite in us or the humanness of man understood as theology. But perhaps it is already indicated in the very awakening to the insomnia of the psyche before the finitude of being, wounded by the infinite, is moved to withdraw into a  hegemonic and atheistic I.[xxviii]

In the vision of reconciliation which Camus imagines, and attempts to realize, between the human desire for union and relation and the human reality of silence and mystery, lies the only salvation which stands as a meaningful human possibility—the [re-]turn home. Further, as was proposed at the conclusion of the previous chapter and may now be more fully explored here, Camus’ religious literature of the transcendence of existential exile toward a possible home in [re-]union both depicts and stands as itself a commitment in faith.

Regardless of the manner in which the question is raised and answers are attempted, the course toward meaning must follow the path marked out by religious faith; the religious desire to discover one’s place, and thus meaning, in mystery and exile is a matter which can only be resolved through a particular engagement in faith. In The Case for God, Karen Armstrong suggests that, prior to the transformation of the perceived meaning of ‘faith’ that began around the time of the European Enlightenment, ‘faith’ was meant to name a manner of practice and commitment which was actively undertaken both individually and collectively. Rather than being centered around a set of doctrines of Truths, religion instead consisted in ritual practices which were meant to not only express but also to strengthen the religious commitment of the individual and the community; as Armstrong explains, “religion…was not primarily something that people thought but something that they did.”[xxix] Armstrong contends that religion arises in the confrontation with mystery, against questions that can only be answered with silence, in recognition of the impossibility of completeness or perfection in thought or in action. Further, in Armstrong’s terms, religion is realized in a particular way of living which accepts these conditions while constantly engaging oneself in practical and perpetual commitment to action, individually and collectively, toward a way of believing and living that is more whole. Religious faith is thus the primary human capacity which may allow one to confront the finitude within which human existence is circumscribed.

Yet over the course of her comprehensive survey of the development of religious faith, Armstrong does note that the particular aim noted above as the primary intention of religion is not exclusive to religion alone. In terms that evoke Camus’ position, Armstrong similarly notes the manner in which art may intend, and perhaps even achieve, the identical goals of religion. As she explains, “Like art, religion is an attempt to construct meaning in the face of the relentless pain and injustice of life. As meaning-seeking creatures, men and women fall very easily into despair. They have created religions and works of art to help them find value in their lives, despite all the dispiriting evidence to the contrary.”[xxx] In this sense, it may be suggested that the human tendency to create and to engage oneself with literature is motivated by the same drives and desires that motivate religious commitment. Or, perhaps more accurately, it may be suggested that the human tendency to create and to engage oneself with literature is itself the desire for religious commitment. In each case, what is desired is a story which expands in all directions, accounting for the meaning of both the past and present while also making meaning possible in the future; in either literature or religion, a new human reality is both desired and created. In this manner, according to Armstrong, both religion and literature converge toward a realization of such a reality: “Religious language was essentially symbolic; it was ‘disgusting’ if interpreted literally, but symbolically it had the power to manifest a transcendent reality in the same way as the short stories of Tolstoy. Such works of art did not argue their case or produce evidence but somehow called into being the ineffable reality they evoked.”[xxxi]

Here Armstrong presents this congruence, if not explicit identity, between literature and religion in terms that recall Camus’ characterizations as discussed above, such as his claim that the primary aim of art is to “give another form to a reality” in hope that “a new world [may appear], different from the everyday world and yet the same, particular but universal, full of innocent insecurity—called forth for a few hours by the power and longing of genius.”[xxxii] The “ineffable reality” and “new world” to which Armstrong and Camus respectively refer is not intended to imply, nor can it ultimately effect, an overcoming of the ontological condition of human finitude. However, what can be evoked is an experience of reality whereby a particular manifestation of the ontological fact of finitude, such as existential exile, may be transcended in a finite manner and a harmony, home, realized in finitude. Both Armstrong and Camus emphasize not just the capacity of both art and literature to offer a plausible account of some facet of human reality, but also the attendant and subsequent contention that both, with sufficient commitment, can ultimately effect, if only in a finite manner, a realization of the reality that each presents. While Armstrong’s text offers a number of compelling examples of how a committed and lived faith was able to engender a new and desired human reality, perhaps the most relevant for the present investigation may be her account of the Israelites in exile, who “would create a sense of the divine presence by living as if they were priests serving in the Jerusalem temple.”[xxxiii] The Israelites, longing to end their period of exile from home and from God, were able to realize a transcendence of their exile through engagement, commitment, and practice, which Armstrong suggests are the primary and primordial components of religious faith. By living as if they were at all times at home in their original temple with God, they were thus able to realize their holiness and God’s presence. Neither reason nor direct experience can achieve such a transformation of human reality, and where art is able to do so it is because it is buoyed by a religious desire and a religious commitment in faith.

Faith is a primordial human religious category in the human confrontation with the ontological situation. Mythic literature, which seeks to both account for and directly engage the aspects of human reality which foster and necessitate faith of this kind, is thus the performance of such faith. It has been suggested throughout the present investigation that the literature that Camus created may be characterized as ‘mythic,’ and that within his works, as well as within his intention in creating such works, Camus exemplifies the notion of faith that has been proposed herein; with his literature, Camus has provided not a Truth intended to rectify the ontological situation but rather an account which allows for, individually and collectively, an acceptance of mystery, limits, and existential exile while suggesting meaningful possibilities toward home. In the individual works that he created, as well as with the whole of his oeuvre considered as a unified totality, Albert Camus generated an imaginary re-enactment and recasting of the human condition, an unceremonious liturgy of exile and [re-]union.

The First Man

In his book The Symbolism of Evil, Paul Ricoeur analyzed the Adamic myth in order to account for the fundamental presence of evil in humanity. In his account, Ricoeur presents Adam as both the ‘first’ (i.e., ‘original’) man as well as the first man to commit sin; in this way, Adam represents the original manifestation of the human capacity for evil. Ricoeur concludes that Adam is a representation not just of what happened originally to humanity but also what will continue to happen as a continuous and essential part of human existence; as such, Adam is not just the first human but also the archetypal human. As Ricoeur argues, “If Adam is not the first man, in the naïvely temporal sense of the word, but the typical man, he can symbolize both the experience of the ‘beginning’ of humanity with each individual and the experience of the ‘succession’ of men.”[xxxiv] With this account, Ricoeur concludes that the human capacity to commit sin, which he names ‘evil,’ is an essential component of human character. Further, if evil truly is a fundamental human capacity, then the consequence of that capacity must likewise be an equally fundamental component of human character. The Adamic myth, therefore, by Ricoeur’s account, reconciles not just Adam’s being as an individual but likewise points the way toward a deeper understanding, and similar reconciliation, for humanity as a whole; all of this is accomplished, Ricoeur concludes, through the creation and perpetuation of a story:

[T]he myth tries to get at the enigma of human existence, namely, the discordance between the fundamental reality…and the actual modality of man…. The myth accounts for this transition by means of a narration. But it is a narration precisely because there is no deduction, no logical transition, between the fundamental reality of man and his present existence, between his ontological status as a being created and good and destined for happiness and his existential or historical status, experienced under the sign of alienation. Thus the myth has an ontological bearing: it points to the relation—that is to say, both the leap and the passage, the cut and the suture—between essential being of man and his historical existence.[xxxv]

In this way, Ricoeur concludes, the myth depicts and creates a unified whole, a world with a reconciliation of human reality at its center. While Ricoeur’s explicit primary concern is with the human reality of evil, there is likewise within Ricoeur’s account an implicit place for the human reality of exile. Adam, as both the first human as well as the paradigmatic human, realizes his humanness precisely through his act of evil and his subsequent exile from the Garden; therefore, to be human is to be in exile.

The explication of existential exile offered in Chapter Two of the present study concluded with the contention that exile is experienced as a discontinuity, disconnection, or disorientation. As a result of the condition of existential exile and the ontological situation of human existence that is encountered as exile, a comprehensive myth such as that with which Ricoeur is concerned may be an appropriate, and perhaps necessary, response. As Karen Armstrong suggested in A Case for God, the historical transformation of the meaning of ‘faith’ has begun to return back to its original conception (as practice and commitment), as it was intended in such formulations as that of the ancient Greeks. In parallel, the underlying purpose which guided the construction and perpetuation of myth to account for meaning is no less present and relevant in the contemporary concern than it was in that of the ancient Greeks; without presuming to declare the human need for meaning as a necessary Truth of existence, such need may perhaps rightfully be characterized as a necessary constitutive step in the realization of the highest human capacity and possibility. It is in this context that the need for a myth of exile and [re-]union emerges, a need which is ultimately fulfilled in the works of Albert Camus.

It may perhaps be appropriate to begin an account of Camus’ ‘myth’ by returning to The Myth of Sisyphus. The explicit treatment of Sisyphus with which the text concludes presents a compelling myth of the ontological situation and the appropriate manner of living in response. Condemned to ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of a mountain, only to watch it roll back to the bottom each time and have to begin again, Camus’ Sisyphus is the epitome of the individual who lives, and recognizes, the absurd: he knows that there is no underlying purpose to his labor, and thus there is no ground for hope that he will eventually succeed in his task. Yet Sisyphus also recognizes that his rock, and thus his fate, is always in his hands, and through this understanding he is able to accept and live his fate, with happiness: “All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing.”[xxxvi] From the example of Sisyphus, Camus concludes that anyone who finds oneself similarly situated in the absurdity of existence may equally respond with acceptance and happiness: “Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. … The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days” (123). Equipped with the lucidity which allows one to recognize and accept the absurdity of existence, along with the conviction that, despite its absurdity human existence may still be lived meaningfully, Camus’ mythic hero of the absurd can endure all aspects of the ontological situation, including the crushing weight of a rock that will always fall: “convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling” (123). Despite the unintelligibility and limits which characterize human existence, despite the struggle, turmoil, and despair which will inevitably result, Sisyphus is given as Camus’ mythic evidence that one can not only endure but live meaningfully and happily; thus Camus concludes his myth of Sisyphus by suggesting that, despite the absurdity which ultimately defines the ontological situation, “[t]he struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (123).

With this myth, Camus offers one possible example of a particular manner of recognizing, accepting, and living within the absurdity of human existence. However, given the preceding discussion of mythic literature, it may perhaps be contended that this particular myth does not offer a complete enough story, while also perhaps not fully addressing the condition of exile or the possibility of reconciliation in relation and a [re-]union in home. Yet Camus’ ‘myth’ of Sisyphus is but one component of the complete myth that Camus created; there is an unmistakable common thread among Camus’ individual works, uniting them together as a single account. Throughout, the experience of exile, which Camus both experienced personally throughout his life and also recognized at the heart of the absurd, weaves the discrete stories together into a cohesive, intentional account of exile and [re-]union. As this overarching and unifying myth unfolds in Camus’ literary works, what began in the experience of exile and the absurd begins to find resolution, particularly in later works such as The Plague, The Fall, and Exile and the Kingdom, in the realization of relation as the possibility of transcending exile toward meaning, reconciliation, and, ultimately, salvation. This body of work that constitutes Camus’ myth of exile and [re-]union, from A Happy Death to Exile and the Kingdom, fully explores and sufficiently answers the challenge inherent in the ontological situation; further, given what Camus offers in his nonfictional essays, whether such essays are of a more personal nature (such as those which constitute The Wrong Side and the Right Side and Nuptials) or a more objective and philosophical nature (such as The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel), there is enough evidence to legitimately see in Camus’ literary accounts a profound connection between the ontological struggle at the center of his art and his own personal experience. Yet it is not until Camus’ final work is considered that the full intentionality of Camus’ work precisely as a myth becomes fully clear.

In his treatment of writers in exile, Andrew Gurr contends that exile is in many ways a universal condition of all writers.[xxxvii] To this Gurr adds that the instinctual response of the writer in exile, whether the exile is literal or metaphoric, is to attempt to find, through the act of literature, a compelling and fortifying conception of home:

The basic response to [deracination, exile, and alienation] is a search for identity, the quest for a home, through self-discovery or self-realization. … The orderly and exact record of home is all such an exile can or will allow himself. The freedom of exile works paradoxically as a constraint, a commitment to create a fresh sense of identity through the record of home.[xxxviii]

This characterization applies perfectly to The First Man, the novel on which Camus was working at the time of his death in January of 1960. Because the novel was unfinished and largely unedited by Camus, any conclusions drawn from the draft that survives must be undertaken with caution. However, what seems strikingly clear is that this work, which was more overtly autobiographical than any other of Camus’ fictional works, may be characterized as an essential part of Camus’ myth of exile and [re-]union, if not itself a comprehensive single re-articulation of the individual components of the myth to this point. With The First Man, Camus details the origins and the development of the individual in exile, while clearly intending to present in full a development in exile which would culminate in an account of the individual realization of identity and home within exile. Just as Adam stands in Ricoeur’s account as both the original and the paradigmatic human being, Camus’ ‘first man’ is given to represent in mythic fashion the condition of exile, as an essential component of human existence, and the human possibility and capacity for meaning and transcendence within the condition of exile.[xxxix] The First Man is intended to portray the exile in full, one “struggling against the wall that separated him from the secret of all life, wanting to go farther, to go beyond, and to discover, discover before dying, discover at last in order to be, just once to be, for a single second, but forever.”[xl]

   In the notes that accompany the published version of the draft of The First Man, Camus succinctly declares that, with this novel, “I am going to tell the story of an alien” (304). The novel begins with Jacques Cormery exploring his childhood, where the first seeds of exile may be seen to sprout. In remembering his family from his earliest days, Cormery notes that, despite the seemingly odd manner in which his family understood and engaged life, it was he himself, and not them, who was different: “they were set in their ways, and they looked on life with a resigned suspicion; they loved it as animals do, but they knew from experience that it would regularly give birth to disaster without even showing any sign it was carrying it. [But were they after all aliens? No, he was the a.]” (133). This early recognition of his not belonging, of being an exile, only intensified when Cormery left the poverty of his family and his immediate neighborhood to attend school. Although the young Cormery had earned a place at the school on the strength of his work and his intelligence and thus truly ‘belonged’ there, his sense of himself as an outsider and alien only intensified; in the stillness and strangeness of an ending day, as night and solitude crept in, “the child felt a limitless despair rising in him and in silence he cried for the destitute home of his entire childhood” (146). Yet this exploration of childhood is primarily driven by, and ultimately interwoven with, the attempt to find the father, the absence of whom is the primary focus of Cormery’s position in exile and the characterization of himself as ‘the first man.’ As Camus explains in his notes to the text, during the trip to Mondovi he finds “childhood and not the father. He learns he is the first man” (308).

In the third and final volume of Camus’ published Notebooks, there is an account given of Camus’ visit to the grave of his father which begins to reveal the meaning, for Camus, of ‘the first man.’ As Camus explains in the notebook entry, “At age 35 the son goes to the grave of his father and finds out that he died at the age of 30. He has become the elder.”[xli] This experience is central to the story of The First Man, in which, without having known his father nor enjoyed the influential authority of having a father, Camus portrays his ‘first man’ as tossed into the country that would be his home, “as if he were the first inhabitant, or the first conqueror,”[xlii] and “born in a land without forefathers and without memory” (284). Ironically, Camus presents this position as ‘first man,’ without a father, without an origin that he could know and understand, and without direction, as a sort of shared origin, in that despite his recognition of himself as ‘first’ he is likewise aware of the many ‘first’ who came before him, who likewise longed for a settlement and a home where they could belong and cultivate roots:

And the sons and the grandsons found themselves on this land as he himself had, with no past, without ethics, without guidance, without religion, but glad to be so and to be in the light, fearful in the face of night and death. All those generations, all those men come from so many nations, under this magnificent sky where the first portent of twilight was already rising, had disappeared without a trace, locked within themselves. … Yes, how they died! How they were still dying! In silence and away from everything (193–194).

Ultimately, it is this condition as ‘first man,’ thrown into a world that was not, and perhaps never would be, home, which characterized Camus conception of himself. His own experience of exile, which began in the recognition that he was somehow different from, and thus separated from, those in his immediate family and his community, which was exacerbated in his removal from that community to pursue his studies in an environment where he felt even less that he belonged, arose primarily as an echo of his original condition of abandonment in the world without a father, without a God, without some absolute to which he could affix himself for guidance, for identity, and for Truth. This is the curse of the absolute freedom afforded the ‘first man’:

[W]andering through the night of the years in the land of oblivion where each one is the first man, where he had to bring himself up, without a father, having never known those moments when a father would call his son, after waiting for him to reach the age of listening, to tell him the family’s secret, or a sorrow of long ago, or the experience of his life, those moments when even the ridiculous and hateful Polonius all of a sudden becomes great when he is speaking to Laertes; and he was sixteen, then he was twenty, and no one had spoken to him, and he had to learn by himself, to grow alone, in fortitude, in strength, find his own morality and truth, at last to be born as a man and then to be born in a harder childbirth, which consists of being born in relation to others, to women, like all the men born in this country who, one by one, try to learn to live without roots (195–196).

With this account, Camus is attempting to come to terms with the past and present reality of his own exile, toward a realization of a possible future reconciliation and determination of meaning within the condition of exile. This is the purpose which directed Camus’ myth of the ‘first man’ and, similarly, the overarching myth of exile and [re-]union depicted in his work as a whole. By both portraying and living the myth, an image of reconciliation is intended to emerge which, while proposing such transcendence as a plausible possibility for all of humanity, more immediately effects a state of transcendence for the individual exile at the origin of the myth.

Earlier in the discussion it was suggested that the truth to be found in the beauty of art, in accord with both Gadamer’s and Camus’ conception, is revelatory of the possibility of reconciliation and transcendence. At the same time, it must be noted explicitly that the beauty which allows for such a revelation is conveyed in the language in which the work is presented and through which the work is engaged. It should not be forgotten that, according to the conception laid out by Gadamer, what constitutes the relation through which all elements-in-relation gain their being is language; as Gadamer concludes in Truth and Method, all being which can be expressed (essentially, all being) is language. Thus, as a final step in the realization of the character of truth in the work of art, for truth to be such it must be effectively brought into language; the ‘truth’ of art can only be realized in an explicit engagement through language with the work of art. Perhaps the most appropriate manner of engaging art in language is through contemplation.

Contemplation is at the heart of the Greek notion of theoria, whereby one attempts to construct a responsible account of that which one contemplates; a theory, such as Socrates’ theory of the immortality of the soul or Plato’s theory of ‘two worlds,’ is a conceptual system of interrelated ideas formulated and engaged as a witnessing of (and thereby participation in) the Divine mystery of human existence. Contemplation of a theory entails a witnessing of the liturgical spectacle that the theory presents, thereby placing the spectator in closer proximity to the Divine. Contemplation requires that one decide for oneself whether the meaning offered by the theory is plausible, and if so, one further decides how to proceed with the insight provided by the theory. Through contemplation, one takes responsibility for what is explained by accepting the explanation and deciding on its application to one’s own existence.

The distance proper to theoria is that of proximity and affinity. The primitive meaning of theoria is participation in the delegation sent to a festival for the sake of honoring the gods. The viewing of the divine proceedings is no participationless establishing of some neutral state of affairs or observation of some splendid demonstration or show. Rather it is a genuine sharing in an event, a real being present.[xliii]

Gadamer’s description of theoria with respect to responsibility and participation completes the unity between ‘individual’ and ‘world’ which has been suggested throughout; contemplation is the play in language which arises between one who contemplates and that which is contemplated. While truth can only be realized in the unity and relation-in-play articulated in Gadamer’s hermeneutic conception, and while art manifests the precise manner of relating and reconciling which allows such a realization of truth, this truth itself can only be fully realized in its explicit expression through language. What’s more, the manner of that expression, to fully allow the truth to be what it is, both in relation to the specific elements-in-relation contemplated and in relation to the virtual ‘whole’ of reality called into being, must take the form of contemplation, whereby what is true (meaning) is finally revealed for its own sake and in its own terms. For his part, through his attempt to render in his art a myth of exile and reconciliation, Camus proposes a theory of existential exile and the possibility of transcendence toward [re-]union through relation. Further, while emphasizing in his particular myth the aspect of relation in the possible realization of transcendence, a parallel relation is established between Camus the artist (myth-maker) and the reader who contemplates, and thus participates in, the theory that has been proposed. Here, finally, the full achievement of Camus’ myth of exile is revealed: first, in the language of his literature, Camus has created a comprehensive story of exile and the manner in which, through the realization of a particular kind of relation, reconciliation may be attained; second, in the act of formulating and articulating this myth, as well as in its performance, Camus himself participates existentially in the myth, assuming for himself responsibility for the myth and its meaning (truth); and finally, in the dialogue that is implicitly constructed between Camus as myth-maker and the reader, through the medium of the myth, a relation-in-contemplation is realized whereby the content, meaning, and truth of the myth is evaluated from without, and every individual is thereby compelled to evaluate the validity of the myth and determine its relevance for one’s own ontological situation. At the heart of this threefold account of existential exile, Camus’ both depicts and exemplifies a theory of relation as the means toward a finite transcendence, a witnessing of (and thereby participation in) the mystery of the ontological situation toward the revelation and realization of home.

In the 1958 preface to his republished collection of essays The Wrong Side and the Right Side, Camus suggests that the spirit which inspired and which characterized those essays, his earliest published work, may be found at the heart of all of his subsequent writing, as all that he had produced since was essentially an attempt to re-imagine and re-express his own personal experience of exile and longing for home. It is perhaps appropriate, then, to allow a statement from one those essays, written by  the young Camus but endorsed and reaffirmed near the end of his writing career, to stand as a final word and closing assessment of Camus’ myth of exile and [re-]union. In the title essay of the collection, “The Wrong Side and the Right Side,” Camus attempts to express the fleeting moments of connection and reconciliation which enable him to realize a sacred relation between himself and the world and which thus equip him to engage and embrace the existential exile which characterizes for him the ontological situation. Yet as he concludes the essay, Camus acknowledges the necessary, and ultimately irremediable, incompleteness of his own account:

The great courage is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death. Besides, how can I define the link that leads from this all-consuming love of life to this secret despair? If I listen to the voice of irony, crouching underneath things, slowly it reveals itself. Winking its small, clear eye, it says: ‘Live as if….’ In spite of much searching, this is all I know.[xliv]

Camus’ contention here to “Live as if…” recalls the words which Karen Armstrong used to depict the faith of the Israelites who, by living as if they were at home in their temple in the presence of God, were able through a mythic faith to affect a transcendence of their own exile. Perhaps it is within this “Live as if…” that the myth grows and resides, the living liturgy of and in faith whereby a finite transcendence of existential exile if possible and home may be realized, finally. The ultimate accomplishment of Camus’ myth lies in its demonstration of a possible manner in which the individual human condition can be recast as part of an irreducible relation within which existential exile can be transcended and [re-]union achieved. Further, implicit in Camus’ myth is the place for religious faith in the formulation and ultimate realization of the possibility of accomplishing the relation ([re-]union) that is necessary both for a finite transcendence of existential exile and the attainment of existential ‘meaning.’ In the closing words of The Case for God, Karen Armstrong sums up her notion of religious faith by contending that the fundamental aspiration of religion has always been to “live intensely and richly here and now.”[xlv] Further, Armstrong contends that, by attempting to achieve rich and intense living and ultimately to realize a greater significance to human existence, ‘religious’ people “tried to honor the ineffable mystery they sensed in each human being and create societies that protected and welcomed the stranger, the alien, the poor, and the oppressed,” concluding that such religious people “who applied themselves most assiduously showed that it was possible for mortal men and women to live on a higher, divine, or godlike plane and thus wake up to their true selves.”[xlvi] Written fifty years after his death, this could have been composed as a eulogy to Camus’ religious commitment, his faith, and to his mythic literature as a pious and sacred endeavor. As Armstrong suggests, one of the main intentions of religious faith is to reveal, and to commit oneself to, a way of living which makes meaning and happiness a real human possibility, despite the presence of mystery and limits which cannot be evaded. At the beginning of the formulation of his own myth of exile and [re-]union, Camus recognized, and explicitly stated, the same. In his initial investigation of death and the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus, after presenting his own theory of the meaning of the absurd and its possible acceptance through lucid, free, and passionate revolt, Camus then acknowledged the relative tenuousness of his contentions as ‘Truth.’ In concluding his theory of the absurd and the individual human reaction in revolt, Camus says “On this score, everything resumes its place and the absurd world is reborn in all its splendor and diversity. But it is bad to stop, hard to be satisfied with a single way of seeing, to go without contradiction, perhaps the most subtle of all spiritual forces. The preceding merely defines a way of thinking. But the point is to live.”[xlvii] This caveat applies with equal legitimacy to Camus’ myth as a whole; in the end, regardless of the terms within which the tension of the ontological situation is described and resolved, Camus emphasizes that what is most critical is the manner of living which is fostered by that account, and the depth to which the possibility to live, in exile, meaningfully, is realized.

Transcending Exile

Simone Weil, to whom Camus once referred as “the only great spirit of our time,” in a statement perhaps more definitive and succinct than any other in the present study, anticipated the condition described here as existential exile by noting that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”[xlviii] The individual human being needs to feel connected with existence and the world within which existence is taken up, to feel that, as an individual, one belongs in the world and that such belonging entails a specified purpose. Yet human existence is mysterious and ambiguous, and existential exile thus arises as a fundamental expression and experience of the ambiguity and undecidability of the question of the ultimate meaning of Being. Perhaps the question of Being could be settled if one could renounce the need for meaning or ignore the unavailability of a definitive meaning in-answer, but such settling would be provisional and, ultimately, would accomplish nothing against the experience of mystery, limits, and existential exile. Human existence is lived and must remain, until death, in-question. Existential exile is thus the position between birth and death from which some sense of meaning and reconciliation must be attempted; it emerges as a sense of groundlessness, or as Weil characterizes it, rootlessness, which in its most realized form is experienced as not being-at-home in the world. Without roots, without a ground for Being, the exile is at odds with the world while longing for a place within it.

However, there is an implied relation between individual and world, as neither the individual (as part) nor the whole with which the individual is related could exist independently of their relatedness; that is, both individual and world have their being and meaning (their ‘being-meaningful’) in relation with the other. Yet this condition of existence does not necessarily guarantee that the recognition of, and responsible commitment to, that relatedness is either explicit or inherent. Existential exile is thus not merely a misunderstanding of the relatedness between individual and ground but rather a failure to realize that relatedness. The path toward transcending the condition of existential exile thus lies in a new manner of recognizing and realizing the unification of diametrically opposed poles already in relation, newly related in a manner that goes beyond their initial relation, which existed ontologically as a potentiality that was unacknowledged. This union, termed [re-]union here, conveys the appropriate sense of the reappraisal of one’s ontological situation that allows one to recognize, in the place where exile had been manifest, a sense of home. This reappraisal is ultimately the product of a distinctly religious longing and desire to disclose meaning in mystery, which can only be fulfilled in the perpetual commitment to the realization of relation in faith.

The meaning that is sought, however, can only emerge in the identification of and commitment to fulfill one’s role in relation to the whole of being, which is itself a manner of living faith. Such faith is a commitment to and affirmation of belongingness and the bonds of relation, despite the absence of a definitive and absolute escape from the finitude which constitutes the ontological situation. Faith is thus an existential commitment to relation as the structural character of reality; it is a mode of being-in-the-world, in relation, toward meaning. The fundamental expression of faith of this kind is the acknowledgment of and commitment to both the relatedness (as necessary) and the revelation of meaning within that relation, which together constitute the declaration of home. The religious desire, the attempt to uncover meaning while living with and in mystery, is thus the quest for home, constituted as meaning with and in mystery and exile, and the only possible manner of transcending the condition of existential exile.

Judith Melton has suggested that the “experience of exile is surmounted with the sustaining meaning of a present, individually interpreted myth.”[xlix] The purpose of this study has been to substantiate this contention by elucidating in full the experience and condition of existential exile and the precise character of myth that is required to depict, and ultimately to affect, its transcendence. It has been suggested here, and interpreted throughout Albert Camus’ myth of exile and [re-]union, that true revolt against existential exile requires a perpetual, constantly renewed commitment in faith, which aspires to a particular salvation constituted in and as ‘home.’ While such salvation may not stand as a permanent and perfect state attainable within finite human existence, what is permanent, despite the inescapable condition of human finitude, is the human capacity to realize and engage in the meaningful relation that stands as the structural character of reality and of existential meaning. Thus, while finitude may be experienced as a fundamental and thus irreducible condition of human existence, the transcendence of exile, which is itself a particular manifestation of the finitude of human existence, through faith—that is, through a commitment to and realization of meaningful relation—will remain, in equal measure fundamental and irreducible, as a human possibility. Thus the path that begins with exile may ever lead to home. Colin Wilson, in his own comprehensive account of the artist as outsider, suggests a similar possibility:

[T]he problem for the individual always will be the…conscious striving not to limit the amount of experience seen and touched; the intolerable struggle to expose the sensitive areas of being to what may possibly hurt them; the attempt to see as a whole, although the instinct of self-preservation fights against the pain of the internal widening, and all the impulses of spiritual laziness build into waves of sleep with every new effort. The individual begins that long effort as an Outsider; he may finish it as a saint.[l]

This possible outcome, to transcend the position of exile and attain a level of ‘sainthood,’ is a remarkably fitting characterization that accords with Camus’ own, if implicit, intention. As Karen Armstrong contended, one of the main intentions of religious faith is reveal, and to commit oneself to, a way of living which makes meaning and happiness a real human possibility. Further, it has been suggested here that this characterization of religious faith appropriately characterizes Camus’ religious commitment and his mythic literature as a pious and sacred endeavor. Yet this connection is not merely implicit; during a visit to a Franciscan monastery in 1937, Camus noted the value of the piety and deprivation, embodied by the monks who lived there, and originally advocated by St. Francis of Assisi:

If they strip themselves bare, it is for a greater life (and not for another life). As least, that is the only valid meaning of such expressions as “deprivation” and “stripping oneself bare.” Being naked always carries a sense of physical liberty and of the harmony between hand and flowers—the loving understanding between the earth and a man delivered from the human—ah! I would be a convert if this were not already my religion.[li]

For Camus, the attainable and meaningful consequence of such piety lies in the happiness which may result, thus Camus’ characterization of St. Francis as he who “justifies those who have a taste for happiness.”[lii] Ultimately, such happiness entails, is in fact dependent upon, the realization of a particular harmony in and with the world,[liii] and in his pronunciation of Franciscan piety as his “new religion” Camus commits himself to a manner of religious devotion as a legitimate path toward happiness, harmony, and, ultimately, home.

* For a discussion of Hegel’s anticipation of this reconciliation, see Chapter Two.

* For a discussion of Husserl’s phenomenological conception of ‘constitution,’ see Chapter One.

[i]. Albert Camus, “Preface,” The Wrong Side and the Right Side, in Lyrical and Critical Essays, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 16–17.

[ii]. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, second edition, translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989, 2004), 19.

[iii]. Plato, Phaedrus, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 247c.

[iv]. Ibid., 250d.

[v]. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). This is a translation of the 1977 essay Die Aktualität des Schönen, which itself was a revised version of a lecture entitled “Art as Play, Symbol, and Festival” (delivered 1974, published 1975), 15.

[vi]. Gadamer, “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” 35.

[vii]. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), 258.

[viii]. Albert Camus, from “Create Dangerously,” a lecture originally delivered at the University of Uppsala in December 1957; published in Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 265.

[ix]. Camus, “Intelligence and the Scaffold,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays, 218.

[x]. Georg Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans, translated and quoted by John Neubauer, “Bakhtin versus Lukács: Inscriptions of Homelessness in Theories of the Novel,” in Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 263.

[xi]. John Neubauer, “Bakhtin versus Lukács: Inscriptions of Homelessness in Theories of the Novel,” in Suleiman, Exile and Creativity, 265.

[xii]. Neubauer, “Bakhtin versus Lukács: Inscriptions of Homelessness in Theories of the Novel,” 265.

[xiii]. Camus, The Rebel, 254.

[xiv]. Ibid., 255; emphasis added.

[xv]. James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 17, 18.

[xvi]. Camus, The Rebel, 264.

[xvii]. Ibid., 265.

[xviii]. Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), 38–39.

[xix]. Roberto Bolaño, “Exiles,” in Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches (1998–2003), trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: New Directions, 2011), 49.

[xx]. Bolaño, “Exiles,” 51.

[xxi]. Judith Melton, The Face of Exile: Autobiographical Journeys (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), xviii.

[xxii]. Camus, The Rebel, 264.

[xxiii]. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 181.

[xxiv]. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 19.

[xxv]. Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth (New York: Canongate, 2005), 147–149; emphasis added.

[xxvi]. George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 143.

[xxvii]. Camus, The Rebel, 262–263.

[xxviii]. Emmanuel Levinas, “The Idea of the Infinite in Us,” in entre nous: On Thinking of the Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 222.

[xxix]. Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), xii.

[xxx]. Ibid., 8.

[xxxi]. Ibid., 279.

[xxxii]. Albert Camus, “Create Dangerously,” 265.

[xxxiii]. Armstrong, The Case for God, 41.

[xxxiv]. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 257–258.

[xxxv]. Ibid., 163; emphasis added.

[xxxvi]. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), 123.

[xxxvii]. This is, of course, not a new or unique assertion; for discussion, see above.

[xxxviii]. Andrew Gurr, Writers in Exile: The Identity of Home in Modern Literature (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Harvester Press, 1981), 14–15.

[xxxix]. It is perhaps worth noting here that a hint of this possible interpretation of ‘first man’ as archetype is given in the title of the novella which preceded, Camus’ The Fall. In this sense, perhaps The First Man is intended to pick up where The Fall was forced to conclude; as has been shown, Clamence of The Fall recognizes fully his own fall and exile, yet he is unable to move beyond this recognition and realize his own human capacity to transcend and ‘rise again.’ In contrast, Camus’ ‘first man’ begins in a similar position of exile yet is able to commit himself to the struggle in faith toward relation and reconciliation.

[xl]. Albert Camus, The First Man, trans. David Hapgood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 26–27.

[xli]. Albert Camus, Notebooks: 1951–1959, trans. Ryan Bloom (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008), 17.

[xlii]. Camus, The First Man, 279.

[xliii]. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “On the Philosophic Element in the Sciences and the Scientific Character of Philosophy,” in Reason in the Age of Science (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1981), 17–18.

[xliv]. Albert Camus, “The Wrong Side and the Right Side,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays, 60–61.

[xlv]. Armstrong, The Case for God, 329.

[xlvi]. Ibid., 329–330.

[xlvii]. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 65; emphasis added.

[xlviii]. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, trans. A.F. Wills (New York: Routledge, 2002), 40.

[xlix]. Melton, The Face of Exile, 157.

[l]. Colin Wilson, The Outsider (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), 281.

[li]. Albert Camus, “The Desert,” Nuptials, in Lyrical and Critical Essays, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 100.

[lii]. Ibid. See also Albert Camus, Notebooks: 1935–1942, trans. Philip Thody (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 53.

[liii]. “But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?” Camus, “The Desert,” 101.