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Mick, Camus
I was a bit disappointed in the programme, which is not to say I didn't enjoy it. For reasons I don't fully understand critics and readers are typically a bit soft on Camus. Forty years ago Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote a small but brlliantly argued critique of Camus's work. In The Outsider, for example, amongst many things CCO'B notes that (contrary to Julius Hogben's comments below praising French justice) a European in Algeria would not face the death penalty for the murder of an Arab. More fundamentally CCO'B takes issue with the allegorical value of the plague in La Peste. It is of course generally accepted that the disease is a metaphor for the Nazi occupation of France (Western Europe), however the impact of this metaphor collapses when one considers that Oran itself was occupied by the French colonialists - an irony which Camus seems blissfully unaware. In passing there is not a named Arab who is the victim of the plague - it's as if these deaths are of little value compared to the French occupiers. The discussion in the studio implied that Camus occupied the centre ground between French Imperialists and those seeking Algerian independence. Just like partiality and impartiality, there really is no middle ground to occupy.
Richard Ashton about Camus
No, Julius, having gone through L'Etranger line by line with any number of A Level groups, I am convinced it is a great work, the only twentieth century novel which has the courage to describe modernism as it really is. What Nietzsche did for the nineteenth century, Meursault did for the twentieth: they really did try to tell and live the truth as they saw it. Meursault isn't a hero, he's just an ordinary bloke. He isn't even a victim: he shot the Arab in cold blood. He isn't condemned because he smoked a fag at his mother's funeral, but because he murdered someone. French justice should be applauded for showing no favour to the European who kills the Arab. Our canonisation of the man shows how good we are at seeing what we want to see. Meursault isn't a hero, he's a rat - a heartless, violent, racist murderer. For me the big question is, does Camus want us to admire Meursault? I don't admire the author or the character, but the work is an outstanding achievement.
Julius Hogben about CAMUS
When I was young, I read Camus' novels and short stories in English or French. I read commentaries on them. To my astonishment, these prove to be almost word-for-word the same as what the academics said on In Our Time. Over 40 years ago,I thought I must be Englishly insular or intellectually inadequate, because I failed to understand how these French texts with a fuzzy Algerian background were philosophically weighty. Only the mood and the writing style appealed to the student. Camus made sense to me for the first time when I read the chapter CAMUS AND THE FRENCH IMPERIAL TRADITION, pages 204to224 in the Vintage paperback edition of Edward Said's CULTURE & IMPERIALISM of 1993. I commend the sharp subtleties of Said's observations to anyone seriously interested in Camus : "Like Orwell's status in England, Camus's plain style and unadorned reporting of social situations conceal rivetingly complex contradictions, contradictions unresolvable by rendering, as critics have done, his feelings of loyalty to French Algeria as a parable of the human condition."
Camus
The discussion of L'Etranger let Meursault off the hook. We heard about the three deaths, but what about the three female characters: one, his mother, dies, and he is totally unmoved; another, Marie his girlfriend, he enjoys sniffing and making love to, but feels nothing for - today we would call that an abusive relationship; and the third is the Arab girl, and he arranges to have her beaten up by her pimp. I don't think the feminists are about to canonise Meursault. Whoops, nearly forgot the fourth - the robot woman he meets in the restaurant, and about whom he tells us much more than the others. So now we know - what Meursault (= Camus) really wants is a woman without a soul.L'Etranger is the great pagan novel. There is no God, we are told, and Meursault is the model for the new (hu)man. Une triste perspective.
John Collins. Albert Camus
It's probably too much to cram into a 45 min time slot, but I would have liked to hear more on the Myth of Sisyphus and absurdity. Perhaps for another programme?.All the best
Camus
This was a solid down to earth discussion about an important writer and didn't get lost in the mists of existentialism.Camus was an old fashioned scribe having a worked-out philosophy,he was sun-loving and physical and exuded a mediterranean equilibrium at the centre of all his work.I prefer Camus to Sartre as a writer and as a human being.Sartre pretended with his French gravitas to be a real philosopher,but he was closer to being a journalist with a bent for engage politics.Camus's 3 major novels are each worlds in their own right and he is always evolving.Camus is more trustworthy and he is more emotionally anchored than Sartre who squares the circle by uniting existentialism with communism.Camus wrote lyrically with a limpid classical style.
Paul Hutley Camus
Was not Camus a passenger in a Facel Vega? Which, by no stretch of the imagination, could be described as a small family car
Edward Knowles Camus
I am 69. I left school at 15 with no "O Levels". My education began later.I taught myself French after working for a French company in the oil business and have read number of Camus's books, starting with La Peste, the latest being La Chute. It was a great joy for me to listen to your programme, of which I am a regular follower.
Camus and Pascal
Not a mention of Blaise Pascal? I always felt, having removed faith from the equation, the writing of Pascal and Camus shared an awful lot. As for Celine for that matter. Celine/Camus/Pascal - a shared view on the human condition? Discuss!
rod,camus
was he any good as a goalkeeper.how many games,and what was his record?
Debbie Ait-Kaci Albert Camus and Algeria
A point of information: a large part of the population of Algeria is (and was at the time) NOT Arab but Berber. The Berbers were also fighting for independence!
Nicholas Hutton - Camus' political legacy
A most enjoyable programme, but I write to observe that some of us regard Camus' political legacy, as most fully expressed in The Rebel, as not merely alive and well, but in contemporary parlance positively kicking. In that book he began to elucidate a pragmatic application of Simone Weil's devestating development of a theory of Limits, and this seems to some the cardinal philosophic transformation which permits a lucid address of the problems now besetting the World, most obviously enviromentally. As, until recently, the Chair of The Campaign Against Climate Change (the demonstration organisers) I have found the reasoning and particular political passions of The Rebel, albeit not its terminology, profoundly effective in militating for popular political action to demand national and international measures truly commesurate with the peril we collectively face. He was a superb litterature, perhaps no philosopher, but then one might recall Wittgenstein's comments on that profession, yet his political hour is strangely yet to come. Thank you.
John Calton: Albert Camus
An excellent discussion for which thanks.Yes, small cars can be hazardous if driven into trees, of which there are (were?) many lining the Routes Nationales in Camus' France. I was surprised the discussion didn't make more of 'La Peste', a book whose resonance for both the boy Albert and we contemporary readers, reminded daily of the ravages of pandemics, puts this novel at the centre of his achievement. Indeed, in its pared-down evocation of provincial life, it does get somewhere close to Tolstoyan brilliance. À mon avis.
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