Journal of

Camus Studies

2012
www.camus-society.com

www.camus-us.com
Journal of Camus Studies

The purpose of the Journal of Camus Studies is to further understanding of

the work and thought of Albert Camus.

The material contained in this journal represents the opinions of the authors
and not necessarily those of the Albert Camus Society or anyone affiliated
with the Society.

Authors – paper submissions

In the first instance email an abstract of no more than 300 words to

secretary@camus-society.com

For more information on submissions we refer you to the guidelines printed

at the end of this journal.

Copyright

Copyright for all articles is retained with the author[s]. Single copies of
articles may be made for research and/or private study without permission.
Permission for multiple copies should be sought from the author[s]. Authors
can be contacted through the society.

ISBN: 978-1-291-37497-1
Table of Contents

Introduction ………………………........................................................ page 1

By Peter Francev

Paneloux’s Turn: An Analysis of the Sermons of The Plague …...… page 3

By Eric Berg

Death in Oran: The Plague as Counter to Thomas Mann's

Death in Venice …................................................................................... page 23
By Braden Cannon

Neoconservatism in the Political Thought of Albert Camus:

A Preliminary Inquiry…………………...…......................................... page 41
By Jackson Doughart

Of Dogs and Men: Empathy and Emotion in Camus’ The

Stranger ……………………………………………………….….…….. page 53
By Ingrid Fernandez

Homo-Social Eroticness in “The Guest”…………………………....... page 67

By Peter Francev

The Eternal Return of Sisyphus: Camus Interpreting Nietzsche ..... page 76

By Giovanni Gaetani

The World According to Meursault …......………………..…..….….. page 86

By George Heffernan

Selfishness in Albert Camus’ La Chute …………..……………….…. page 125

By Emily Holman

Absurdism and Lyricism: Stylistic Extremes in Camus’

Novels ……………………………………...…………………………... page 151
By Peadar Kearney

Camus’ Literary Criminal and the Law: Loathing the

Outsider …………………….…………………………….….………… page 172
By Stefan Lancy
Albert Camus: The Politics of Poverty and the Misery of
Kabylie…..……………….…………………………………………..… page 203
By Jerry Larson

Meursault: Mad, Bad or Messiah? ……………..……………….…… page 220

By Simon Lea

Camus’ Les Justes: A Rebuff to Sartre’s Les Mains Sales …...…… page 244
By Benedict O’Donohoe

Form and feeling in the Making of Camus’ L’Envers et

l’Endroit ……………………………………………………………….. page 259
By Nicholas Padfield

Aestheticizing a Bacillus: Disease and Destiny in Albert

Camus’ The Plague .............................................................................. page 296
By Patrick Reilly

‘Némesis veille…’: An Attempt to Understand Camus’

Unfinished Essay ................................................................................... page 311
By Luke Richardson

Camus’ Sense of the Sacred ................................................................. page 324

By Ron Srigley

Journal of Camus Studies – Manuscript Submission

Guidelines .............................................................................................. page 342
 THE ETERNAL RETURN OF SISYPHUS: CAMUS INTERPRETING NIETZSCHE

‘The Eternal Return of Sisyphus’:

Camus Interpreting Nietzsche
By Giovanni Gaetani

Si l'on prend soin de définir le nietzschéen non pas comme celui qui
fait de Nietzsche un fin à dupliquer mais un commencement à
dépasser, alors Albert Camus fut l'un des grands philosophes
nietzschéens du XXe siècle – peut-être même le plus grand.

— Michel Onfray, L’ordre libertaire.

Es hilft Nichts: Jeder Meister hat nur Einen Schüler – und der wird
ihm untreu, – denn er ist zur Meisterschaft auch bestimmt.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches II

Every careful reader of Albert Camus' works should be aware of the

fundamental relationship that exists between him and the German
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, not only for a pure philological reason.

Indeed, if we look both to the biographical facts and the texts, we can easily
recognize that Camus has been engaged with Nietzsche in a constant, deep
dialogue: from the high school, when he quoted Nietzsche ‘at every
opportunity, even inopportunely’1, to the fatal car accident where he died,
when in his bag has been found a copy of The Gay Science, Nietzsche's
presence has traced a long red line in Camus' life2. But that does not mean
that Camus has always looked in the same way at his old philosophical

1
The French expression ‘à tout propos et meme hors de propos’ is taken from the witness of
Camus' professor Paul Mathieu. Cf. Dictionnaire Albert Camus, Jeanyves Guérin (editor),
Editions Robert Laffont, Paris 2009, p. 604.
2
Cf. Roger Grenier, ‘Le fil rouge nietzschéen’, in Le Magazine Littéraire, n° 298, April 1992.
76
 GIOVANNI GAETANI

master: being a good pupil, he has surpassed his teacher, following to the
letter Zarathustra's advice: ‘One repays a teacher badly if one always remains
a pupil only’3.

In the following pages we are going to retrace the history of this relationship,
dividing it in three different stages: first, the early passionate agreement to
Nietzsche's aesthetic philosophy; second, the critique of his fatalism in The
Rebel; third, the late presumed re-evaluation.

Nothing but Nietzsche I: the first essay ‘On Music’

The young nineteen years old student of Algeri is looking both for a literal
style and a philosophical inspiration. Under the advice of his philosophy
professor Jean Grenier he reads plenty of authors: among all Gide, de
Richaud, Bergson, Proust, Schopenhauer and, of course, Nietzsche. In the
journal Sud, directed by Grenier himself, Camus writes six articles in two
years (1931-1932), through which he exercises his literal and philosophical
attitude. In one of them, named Sur la musique, he exposes his personal
conception of Music and Art, starting from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche's
positions. Because it is the first real appearance of Nietzsche's name in
Camus' works, it is worth to stop a little on it.

In spite of his young age, or maybe just because of it, Camus seems to have a
clear head, even too clear, on what Art really is – or, at least, on what it
should be: he refuses at the same time the realist conception of Art, for which
the artist should merely give a neutral portrait of reality, and the idealist one,
for which instead the artist should correct reality imperfection through his art
work4.

What is, then, Camus' conception of Art? According to his words, Art is
‘creation of a world of Dream, seductive enough to hide the world where we

3
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin,
Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 59.
4
In Camus' words, the first point of view ‘not only dishonours Art, but it destroys it’, while
the second one ‘too often becomes moral theory, that produces dull, false and annoying
works’. Cf. Albert Camus, Sur la musique, in Œuvres complètes, 4 tomes, Éditions Gallimard,
2008, pp. 522-540 of the first tome. My translation.
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 THE ETERNAL RETURN OF SISYPHUS: CAMUS INTERPRETING NIETZSCHE

live with all its atrocities’5. In few words, for the young Camus Art has a
consolatory function. Music is, in this perspective, the most consolatory of
all the different disciplines, because it creates a world with no relations to the
real one where Beauty can be contemplated without any support of Reason.

Here Camus is totally in line with Nietzsche's first conception of Art and
Music, defined by a critic as ‘aesthetic cosmodicy’6. This conception is
exposed for the most in Nietzsche's first published text The Birth of Tragedy.
Indeed, arguing in favour of his perspective Camus will relate just to this
text, considered by himself as ‘the most important and characteristic work’ of
Nietzsche.

Here is the main problem: not only the Nietzschian critics will later belittle
The Birth of Tragedy as a minor and overpassed work, but already Nietzsche
himself in Ecce homo will say that ‘in order to be fair to [this book] it is
necessary to forget a few things’, because ’it created a sensation and even
fascination as a consequence of its flaws’. One thing more: Camus in his
essay on music affirms that ‘the thought of Nietzsche is directly derived from
Schopenhauer’, although with some divergences; but we all know what has
been the last judgement of Nietzsche on Schopenhauer; still in Ecce Homo,
he brutally affirms that ‘Schopenhauer blundered in everything’.

The situation is then clear: for what we have seen the nineteen years old
Albert Camus has for the most an anachronistic and reductive position on
Nietzsche, being attracted more from ‘the strange personality of this poet-
philosopher’ than from his thoughts. Here we agree with Michel Onfray, who
affirms in his last work that ‘Camus has approached the metaphysics of Art
as a Romantic seduced by the Dionysian‘7.

5
We underline that in the original French text the following terms are all written with the
capital letter, in a rhetorical way: Dream, Art, Reason, Music, Life, Will, Genius, Nature and
others.
6
Alexander Nehamas, Life as Literature, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1985.
7
Michel Onfray, L’ordre libertaire. La vie philosophique d’Albert Camus, Paris, Flammarion,
2012, p. 71.
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 GIOVANNI GAETANI

Nothing but Nietzsche II: the first novel ‘A Happy Death’

Approximatively between 1936 and 1938 Camus writes his first novel La
mort heureuse, which will be published just later in 1971. This novel is full
of explicit references to Nietzsche's philosophy and, above all, it has clearly a
Nietzschian structure: the two Nietzschian concepts of ‘natural death’ and
‘conscious death’, exposed by Nietzsche in an aphorism that Camus reported
in his Notebooks8, give the title to the two parts of the novel; the protagonist
Patrice Mersault follows with lucidity his ‘will to happiness’, that is nothing
but a variation of the well-known Nietzschian ‘will to power’; in the second
part of the novel, the protagonist finally ‘becomes what he is’, namely he
becomes one thing with his destiny, declaring ‘'if I had my life to live over
again' -- well I would live it over again just the way it has been’; lastly, the
same conception of the body as a prerequisite for happiness is clearly taken
from Nietzsche.

We do not have to stop too much on the analysis of this work because, in my
opinion, such an interpretation is not a particular problematic point. In any
case, if someone wants to investigate it thoroughly I will suggest in note
some useful articles9.

However, in short, the novel La mort heureuse is proof of a new awareness

regarding Nietzsche's philosophy. Camus seems to understand the real
importance of its contents in a deeper way, becoming gradually more
interested in Nietzsche's thought than to his personality.

Nothing but Nietzsche III: ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’

Nietzsche's presence in The Myth of Sisyphus is something different from the

former ones: while in the essay On Music he was with Schopenhauer the
main point of reference and still in the novel A Happy Death he was the main

8
In the first Notebook, exactly in August 1938, Camus records: ‘Sur la mort consciente, cf.
Nietzsche. Crépuscule des Idoles, p. 203’.
9
Mainly cf. Maurice Weyembergh, Une lecture nietschéenne de La mort heureuse, in Albert
Camus ou la mémoire des origines, De Boeck, Paris-Bruxelles, 1998, pp. 75-84. Also cf.
Michel Onfray, L’ordre libertaire, cit., the chapter Mourir heureux, pp. 89-91. At last cf.
Roger Grenier, ‘Le fil rouge nietzschéen’, cit.
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 THE ETERNAL RETURN OF SISYPHUS: CAMUS INTERPRETING NIETZSCHE

hidden inspirer, in The Myth instead his philosophical predominance seems

to vanish, giving way to a Camus' more autonomous meditation.

Indeed, the twelve mentions of Nietzsche, whereof just five are textual
quotations, are for the most methodological indications rather than
substantial references to his philosophy: for example, in order to justify the
philosophical relevance of the suicide problem, Camus refers to what he calls
the ‘Nietzschian criterion‘10, that is the necessity for the philosopher to
‘preach by example’; farther, talking about the Actor, Camus paraphrases
Nietzsche, who would have said that ‘what matters is not eternal life but
eternal vivacity’11; finally, in the appendix on Kafka he defines Nietzsche as
‘the only artist to have derived extreme consequences of an aesthetic of the
absurd, inasmuch as his final message lies in a sterile and conquering lucidity
and an obstinate negation of any supernatural consolation’12.

As we can see, the references to Nietzsche in the Myth are not essential nor
indispensable to Camus' reasoning, like it was before in the essay On Music
for example. It is not exaggerate to say that if we delete Nietzsche's name
from the book everything will remain at his own place: to use a metaphor, the
absurd building of Camus can stand upright without Nietzsche's support,
which is here a decoration rather than a bearing wall.

Nevertheless, it does not mean that Nietzsche's influence on Camus is over.

On the contrary, if we broach the text with a hermeneutic approach we can
clarify – of course with a certain prudence – the character of Sisyphus at the
light of the Nietzschian conception of the Eternal Return of the Same.

In order to understand this interpretation, one must firstly know what the
Eternal Return is in the eyes of Nietzsche. Far from being an ontological
affirmation on what things really are and far from being also a new original
physical theory on the universal time cyclicity, it is instead an ethical-
philosophical stratagem meant to permit the realization of the Übermensch,
term which is better to translate with ‘beyond-man’ or ‘over-man’, excluding

10
Albert Camus, The myth of Sisyphus, Penguin, London, 2000, p. 14.
11
Ivi., p. 78.
12
Ivi., p. 123.
80
 GIOVANNI GAETANI

‘superman’ for reason on which we will linger just in note13. How does this
stratagem work? It is a kind of existential experiment in which to a person is
asked the following questions: what will you do if you will have to live your
life eternally in the same way you now live it and have lived it, without
anything new nor different from the way you did? What if you are bound to
live over and over again your pain, your suffering, your sacrifices, without
any promise of redemption? Will you accept with joy to live this eternal
return or will this thought crush and choke you?

Let us pose the same questions to Sisyphus: will him undertake and keep on
his effort knowing not only that his rock will always fall, but also that at the
end of his days there will be no one to reward him for his eternal sacrifice?
Yes, he will. And he will with joy and pride.

On the contrary, if Sisyphus were not Sisyphus, we could imagine an

alternative ending, in which we see him kneeling at the feet of the mountain
near his rock, asking the gods to stop his torture. In this case, he would not
have passed the trial of the Eternal Return: tiredness, dejection and
cowardice would have prevailed on his pride and lucidity; the rock would
have won, crushing and chocking him.

But fortunately Sisyphus is Sisyphus: ‘negating the gods’ and accepting his
‘fatal and despicable’ destiny, he is always ‘the master of his days’. We do
not have to imagine Sisyphus happy, because he is already so. That is, in
conclusion, what I personally mean with the expression ‘the Eternal Return
of Sisyphus’.

13
The German preposition ‘Über’, which derives from the Latin super and the Greek hyper,
can express both a sense of ‘overstepping’ (beyond) and ‘superiority’ (above, at the top of).
For example, Heidegger and Jünger's dialogue ‘Über die Linie’ can be translated both with
‘Crossing the line’/’Over the line’ and ‘On the line’/’Regarding the line’. Anyway, it is just
analysing Nietzsche's philosophy that we can resolve the ambiguity. Indeed, far from being a
kind of superior and aristocratic man among the others, the Übermensch is a human future
condition beyond the present one, as Zarathustra's image suggests: ‘Mankind is a rope
fastened between animal and overman – a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a
dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still’.
Cf. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, cit., p. 7.
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 THE ETERNAL RETURN OF SISYPHUS: CAMUS INTERPRETING NIETZSCHE

‘Amor fati’ Vs. ‘Odium fati’: Camus' critique of Nietzsche's fatalism

After the Myth, Camus will have to reconsider his position because of the
dramatic events that took place in the '40s. Indeed, the Absurd cannot do
anything in front of the twenty century's atrocities: as Camus himself
remembers, ‘nothing remains in the absurdist attitude which can help us
answer the questions of our time. […] It leaves us in a blind alley‘14. Camus
will formulate his concept of Revolt just to come out from this blind alley.

However, the passage from Absurd to Revolt coincides also with a new
reconsideration of Nietzsche's philosophy. Indeed, as all the European
intellectuals of the after-war also Camus is forced to face the problem of the
so-called ‘Nazification of Nietzsche’. He will give his personal resolution of
this problem in 1951, in The Rebel, in the about fifteen pages of the chapter
‘Nietzsche and Nihilism’.

Let us analyse these pages. First of all, a bitter remark: in the first note of this
chapter, which incredibly does not appear in the Penguin Book edition
translated by Anthony Bower15, Camus underlines that he will broach just the
last part of Nietzsche's philosophy, from 1880 to madness. He adds also that
this chapter can be considered as a commentary of the Will to Power16. Now,
this is a big controversial philological matter, because this presumed
Nietzschian book never existed17. Camus, who uses a French translation of
1935 by Geneviève Bianquis, find himself in front of a false systematic
work, in which Nietzsche seems to expose with precision both his final

14
The Rebel, Penguin, London, 2000, p. 16
15
The Rebel, Penguin Books Edition, 2000. Personally I've never seen such a bad edition of a
philosophical book: wrong index, missing epigraph and dedication, missing pages (more than
30!), missing titles and even entire chapters, bad translations, etc., all of that makes Anthony
Bower's translation a useless tool for those who want to read L'Homme révolté in English. For
these reasons, I strongly advise a new English edition of The Rebel.
16
The original note was: ‘C'est évidemment la dernière philosophie de Nietzsche, de 1880 à
l'effondrement, qui nous occupera ici. Ce chapitre peut être considéré comme un commentaire
à la Volonté de Puissance’.
17
Cf. Mazzino Montinari, ‘La volonté de puissance’ n'existe pas, edited by P. D'Iorio, L'eclat,
Paris, 1997.
82
 GIOVANNI GAETANI

system of the Will to Power and his European political project. Nietzsche
clearly denied such a possibility in his last notebooks18.

In any case, leaving aside this question, in these pages Camus defends and
criticizes Nietzsche at the same time: on the one hand, he affirms that ‘we
can never confuse Nietzsche with Rosenberg’, ‘we must be the advocates for
the defence of Nietzsche’; on the other hand, he affirms that Nietzsche has an
‘involuntary responsibility’ to not have posed a limit to his rebellion logic.

In particular, Camus criticizes the Nietzschian conception of ‘amor fati’,

which is, in his words, ‘the individual's absolute submission to Becoming’ 19.
According to Camus, Nietzsche has tragically concluded his philosophy in a
‘deification of fate’, in which the individual has to accept everything that
happens, including evil. Even though I personally do not agree on this
interpretation of Nietzsche's fatalism for reasons that I will explain in note, I
instead agree with Camus on his correction of Nietzsche's excess: using his
notion of measure, he affirms that one must always counterbalance his Yes to
the positive aspects of reality with a No to the negative ones; every ‘amor
fati’ must always be balanced with an opposite ‘odium fati’.20

After all, in conclusion, Sisyphus' lesson was clear: the destiny that we are
forced to accept remains nonetheless despicable; far from renouncing to live,
we still have to refuse every oppressive aspect of this world ‘where children
are tortured with no reason’.

18
In 1888 Nietzsche substituted in his notes the 1885's title ‘Der Wille zur Macht’ with
‘Versuch einer Umwerthung aller Werthe’, changing – that is even more important – also the
order in which he wanted to pose the different aphorisms. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and
Peter Gast ignored this and other notes just because they wanted to create a ‘Nietzschian best-
seller’.
19
Antony Bower translates here the French term ‘devenir’ as ‘self-realization’, completely
missing the point. Indeed, talking about Nietzsche's ‘amor fati’ the French term cannot but be
the philosophical concept of ‘Becoming’ or, with a slightly different translation, ‘fate’,
‘destiny’ – anyway, the German original term is the noun ‘das Werden’, not the verb
‘werden’.
Michel Onfray defines this Camus' critique of Nietzsche's fatalism ‘the great No to the great
20

Yes’.
83
 THE ETERNAL RETURN OF SISYPHUS: CAMUS INTERPRETING NIETZSCHE

‘Retour à Nietzsche’: a presumed re-evaluation

Here we are at the last part of the paper, which is mainly a working
hypothesis. Indeed, as Maurice Weyembergh has suggested, we can
reasonably affirms that after The Rebel Camus has started a slow and silent
re-evaluation of Nietzsche's position. If we read carefully all the texts of the
50s we will find plenty of Nietzsche's name quotations: in a letter to Breton
and Patri, talking about Nietzsche, he affirms that ‘such a soul infinitely
overpasses us all’; elsewhere, he confesses ‘I owe to Nietzsche a part of what
I am’; as epigraph to Actuelles II he utilizes an aphorism of Nietzsche;
finally, in the speech for the Nobel prize, he quotes the German philosopher
more than one time. In particular, he quotes two of his main teachings. First,
an advice for the 20th century's artist: ‘to create today, is to create
dangerously’. Second, an advice for the 20th century's philosopher: ‘thoughts
that come with doves' footsteps guide the world’.

84
 GIOVANNI GAETANI

Essential bibliography on the subject

W. E. Duvall, Camus's Fall? From Nietzsche, Historical Reflections, Spring

1995, pp. 537-552

W. E. Duvall, , The Nietzsche Temptation in the Thought of Albert Camus,

Willamette Journal of Liberal Arts, Estate 1989, pp. 33-43

J.-F. Mattei, Le premier ou le dernier homme?, in La pensée de midi, 2010/1

N° 30, p. 99-106

B. Rosenthal, Die Idee des Absurden. F. Nietzsche und A. Camus, Bonn,

Bouvier, 1977

R. Siena, Nietzsche, Camus e il problema del superamento del nichilismo, in

"Sapienza", Vol. XXVIII, 1975

M. Weyembergh, Camus und Nietzsche, in Sinn und Form, 1993, pp. 654-
664

M. Weyembergh, Albert Camus, ou la mémoire des origines, De Boeck

universite, Paris-Bruxelles, 1998

M. Onfray, L’ordre libertaire. La vie philosophique d’Albert Camus, Paris,

Flammarion, 2012

Dictionnaire Albert Camus, Jeanyves Guérin (editor), Editions Robert

Laffont, Paris 2009

Roger Grenier, ‘Le fil rouge nietzschéen’, in Le Magazine Littéraire, n° 298,

April 1992

85