The Poets’ Rebellion, Albert Camus
If metaphysical rebellion refuses to assent and restricts itself to absolute negation, it condemns itself to passive acceptance. If it prostrates itself in adoration of what exists and renounces its right to dispute any part of reality, it is sooner or later compelled to act. Ivan Kara-mazov— who represents non-interference, but in a dolorous aspect—stands halfway between the two positions.
Rebel poetry, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, constantly oscillated between these two extremes: between literature and the will to power, between the irrational and the rational, the desperate dream and ruthless action. The rebel poets—above all, the surrealists—light the way that leads from passive acceptance to action, along a spectacular shortcut.
Hawthorne was able to say of Melville that, as an unbeliever, he was extremely uneasy in his unbelief. It can equally well be said of the poets who rushed to assault the heavens, with the intent of turning everything upside down, that by so doing they affirmed their desperate nostalgia for order. As an ultimate contradiction, they wanted to extract reason from unreason and to systematize the irrational. These heirs of romanticism claimed to make poetry exemplary and to find, in its most harrowing aspects, the real way of life.
They deified blasphemy and transformed poetry into experience and into a means of action. Until their time those who claimed to influence men and events, at least in the Occident, did so in the name of rational rules. On the contrary, surrealism, after Rimbaud, wanted to find constructive rules in insanity and destruction. Rimbaud, through his work and only through his work, pointed out the path, but with the blinding, momentary illumination of a flash of lightning.
Surrealism excavated this path and codified its discoveries. By its excesses as well as by its retreats, it gave the last and most magnificent expression to a practical theory of irrational rebellion at the very same time when, on another path, rebellious thought was founding the cult of absolute reason. Lautreamont and Rimbaud—its sources of inspiration—demonstrate by what stages the irrational desire to accept appearances can lead the rebel to adopt courses of action completely destructive to freedom.
Lautreamont and Banality
Lautreamont demonstrates that the rebel dissimulates the desire to accept appearance behind the desire for banality. In either case, whether he abases or vaunts himself, the rebel wants to be other than he is, even when he is prepared to be recognized for what he really is. The blasphemies and the conformity of Lautreamont illustrate this unfortunate contradiction, which is resolved in his case in the desire to be nothing at all. Far from being a recantation, as is generally supposed, the same passion for annihilation explains Maldoror’s invocation of the primeval night and the laborious banalities of the Poesies.
Lautreamont makes us understand that rebellion is adolescent. Our most effective terrorists, whether they are armed with bombs or with poetry, hardly escape from infancy. The Songs of Maldoror are the works of a highly talented schoolboy; their pathos lies precisely in the contradictions of a child’s mind ranged against creation and against itself. Like the Rimbaud of the Illuminations, beating against the confines of the world, the poet chooses the apocalypse and destruction rather than accept the impossible principles that make him what he is in a world such as it is.
«I offer myself to defend mankind,» says Lautreamont, without wishing to be ingenuous. Is Maldoror, then, the angel of pity? In a certain sense he is, in that he pities himself. Why? That remains to be seen. But pity deceived, outraged, inadmissible, and unadmitted will lead him to strange extremities. Maldoror, in his own words, received life like a wound and forbade suicide to heal the scar (sic). Like Rimbaud he is the one who suffers and who rebelled; each, being strangely reluctant to say that he is rebelling against what he is, gives the rebel’s eternal alibi: love of mankind.
The man who offers himself to defend mankind at the same time writes: «Show me one man who is good.» This perpetual vacillation is part of nihilist rebellion. We rebel against the injustice done to ourselves and to mankind. But in the moment of lucidity, when we simultaneously perceive the legitimacy of this rebellion and its futility, the frenzy of negation is extended to the very thing that we claimed to be defending.
Not being able to atone for injustice by the elevation of justice, we choose to submerge it in an even greater injustice, which is finally confounded with annihilation. «The evil you have done me is too great, too great the evil I have done you, for it to be involuntary.» In order not to be overcome with self-hatred, one’s innocence must be proclaimed, an impossibly bold step for one man alone, for self-knowledge will prevent him. But at least one can declare that everyone is innocent, though they may be treated as guilty. God is then the criminal.
From the romantics to Lautreamont, there is, therefore, no real progress, except in style. Lautreamont resuscitates, once again, with a few improvements, the figure of the God of Abraham and the image of the Luciferian rebel. He places God «on a throne built of excrement, human and golden,» on which sits, «with imbecile pride, his body covered with a shroud made of unwashed sheets, he who styles himself the Creator.»
«The horrible Eternal One with the features of a viper,» «the crafty bandit» who can be seen «stoking the fires in which young and old perish,» rolls drunkenly in the gutter, or seeks base pleasures in the brothel. God is not dead, he has fallen. Face to face with the fallen deity, Maldoror appears as a conventional cavalier in a black cloak. He is the Accursed. «Eyes must not witness the hideous aspect which the Supreme Being, with a smile of intense hatred, has granted me.»
He has forsworn everything— «father, mother, Providence, love, ideals—so as to think no longer of anything else but himself.» Racked with pride, this hero has all the illusions of the metaphysical dandy: «A face that is more than human, sad with the sadness of the universe, beautiful as an act of suicide.» Like the romantic rebel, Maldoror, despairing of divine justice, will take the side of evil. To cause suffering and, in causing it, to suffer, that is his lot. The Songs are veritable litanies of evil.
At this point mankind is no longer even defended. On the contrary, «to attack that wild beast, man, with every possible weapon, and to attack the creator . . .» that is the intention announced by the Songs. Overwhelmed at the thought of having God as an enemy, intoxicated with the solitude experienced by great criminals («I alone against humanity»), Maldoror goes to war against creation and its author. The Songs exalt «the sanctity of crime,» announce an increasing series of «glorious crimes,» and stanza 20 of Song II even inaugurates a veritable pedagogy of crime and violence.
Such a burning ardor is, at this period, merely conventional. It costs nothing. Lautreamont’s real originality lies elsewhere.1 The romantics maintained with the greatest care the fatal opposition between human solitude and divine indifference the literary expressions of this solitude being the isolated castle and the dandy. But Lautreamont’s work deals with a more profound drama. It is quite apparent that he found this solitude insupportable and that, ranged against creation, he wished to destroy its limits.
1 It accounts for the difference between Song I, published separately, which is Byronic in a rather banal way, and the other Songs, which resound with a monstrous rhetoric.
Far from wanting to fortify the reign of humanity with crenelated towers, he wishes to merge it with all other reigns. He brought back creation to the shores of the primeval seas where morality, as well as every other problem, loses all meaning—including the problem, which he considers so terrifying, of the immortality of the soul.
He had no desire to create a spectacular image of the rebel, or of the dandy, opposed to creation, but to mingle mankind and the world together in the same general destruction. He attacked the very frontier that separates mankind from the universe.
Total freedom, the freedom of crime in particular, supposes the destruction of human frontiers. It is not enough to condemn oneself and all mankind to execration. The reign of mankind must still be brought back to the level of the reign of the instinct. We find in Lautreamont this refusal to recognize rational consciousness, this return to the elementary which is one of the marks of a civilization in revolt against itself. It is no longer a question of recognizing appearances, by making a determined and conscious effort, but of no longer existing at all on the conscious level.
All the creatures that appear in the Songs are amphibious, because Maldoror rejects the earth and its limitations. The flora is composed of algae and seaweed. Mal-doror’s castle is built on the waters. His native land is the timeless sea. The sea—a double symbol—is simultaneously the place of annihilation and of reconciliation.
It quenches, in its own way, the thirst of souls condemned to scorn themselves and others, and the thirst for oblivion. Thus the Songs replace the Metamorphoses, and the timeless smile is replaced by the laughter of a mouth slashed with a razor, by the image of a gnashing, frantic, travesty of humor.
This bestiary cannot contain all the meanings that have been given to it, but undoubtedly it discloses a desire for annihilation which has its origins in the very darkest places of rebellion. The «stultify yourselves» of
