I had no idea, last week, when I was finishing Camus the Plague and posting a passage from his lecture at a monastery, that it was, that day, the 100th anniversary of his birth. Nov 7, 1913. Hmmm. I highly recommend Create Dangerously (his reflections, the year he won the Nobel Prize, on making art in the modern world). Although the modern world has changed and become whatever we, and its artists, have made it, I think he would be surprised that artists have, in general, retreated from serious thought (even divorcing art from intelligence) and become, once again, an inconsequential exercise and a mere entertainment (I mean generally, artists show people what they want, please the market, produce cheap sentimental inspiration, and act as if artists need not be responsible or engaged in human dialogue about flourishing and suffering). He thought then, in 1957, that we had moved beyond that but were being threatened with a new obstacle from the other side, Soviet Realism (the demand that art be always politically engaged in just the way an official political doctrine, divorced from lived reality, that is, outside of art, dictates). How strange it would be for him to discover that we overcame that but moved back towards the earlier bourgeois mercantile dont worry be happy lit (which is true even of dark or tragic literature which exists to scratch and massage merely). Again, I generalize. So long as a society and its artists do not accept this long and free effort, so long as they relax in the comfort of amusements or the comfort of comformism, in the games of art for arts sake or the preachings of realistic art [he meant Soviet Realism], its artists are lost in nihilism and sterility. Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and this is its whole secret. And thousands of concentration camps and barred cells are not enough to hide this staggering testimony of dignity. Joyeux anniversaire tardif, cher M. Camus.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Nov 2013 00:44:10 +0000
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