Albert Camus: Summer in Algiers Essay -- Literature Papers

Albert Camus': "Summer in Algiers" This early essay by Albert Camus presents an eloquent picture of his understanding of what it means to know. But in order for us to assimilate it, we must recognize that Camus is not celebrating a hedonic naturalism, nor engaging in an existential anti-intellectualism. Rather, his articulation of lucidity and the exemplification of it in the artistry of the essay itself presents us with a challenging concept of knowledge. I attempt to explicate this concept with the help of two images, one from the musical Hair and one from the movie The Pawnbroker, thus seeking to reinforce Camus' reliance upon image as the equivalent of idea. This is a paper about Albert Camus' understanding of what it means to know as he eloquently expressed it in the essay "Summer in Algiers." To begin it requires two images. First I summon a song from the musical Hair. One of the hippie freaks sings that he is "crazy for the red, white and blue." He castigates his bourgeois detractors for thinking him subversive just because he has long hair. He continues to express devotion to the red, white and blue until, at the end of the song, he adds "crazy for the red, white and blue . . . and yellow and green." Only then do we realize that he has been singing about his experience of color, not of the American flag. The second image is no joke. It is the image of Rod Steiger playing the lead part in The Pawnbroker, the excellent movie adaptation of Edward Wallant's novel. Near the end of the movie, when the old pawnbroker realizes that he has been wrong to isolate himself in bitterness from the human emotions of life by brooding on a past ruined by the Nazi Holocaust, he places his hand on the point of the receipt nail in hi... ...und, tightly mouthing a cigarette, waiting stoically for the next disappointment. Still, there is no contradiction. We need only remember that the nature Camus celebrated was always cruel. "Strange country that gives the man it nourishes both his splendor and his misery!" (p. 141) We need only remember that purity was an intellectual virtue for this shining exemplar of the life of the mind. The life of a man is fulfilled without the aid of his mind, with its backward and forward movements, at one and the same time its solitude and its presences. To see these men of Belcourt working, protecting their wives and children, and often without a reproach, I think one can feel a secret shame. To be sure, I have no illusions about it. There is not much love in the lives I am speaking of. I ought to say that not much remains. But at least they have evaded nothing. (p. 153)