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Removing the Masks |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / FEATURED BOOK: Commentary on Albert Camus' The First Man |
| Author: R.H.W. Dillard |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 2/1/1996 |
| Size: 2,834 Words, 16,187 Characters |
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With him in the automobile in which he was killed in 1960 at the age of forty-six, Albert Camus had the unfinished manuscript of what he spoke of as his first novel. He had, of course, already published The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall, novels that were in great part responsible for his receiving the Nobel Prize in literature in 1957, but he insisted upon calling them récits, or tales, rather than novels. At the time, he was thought merely to be following the example of André Gide in his nomenclature, but now, thirty-five years later, the publication of his final manuscript reveals that he was actually quite precise in the distinction. The First Man was to have been a work of a completely different kind and magnitude from his earlier fictions.
The First Man as we have it, translated from the French by David Hapgood and carefully edited from the original handwritten manuscript as well as Francine Camus' first typescript, is not really a novel either. It is the first draft of the opening of the projected novel, along with the notes Camus had scribbled in the margins, sheets he had interleaved in the manuscript, and the contents of the small spiral notebook in which he kept notes and sketches for the larger work. Like the portico of a vast, destroyed temple discovered intact by archaeologists, this text is valuable in its own right as a work of originality and genuine power, but it offers only a frustrating glimpse of what might have been, of what in this case might well have been a major work of twentieth-century fiction. And yet, in its finished pages and the fragmented notes and remi...
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...anguage amid the dozens of scrawled notes in its margins, it allows us to participate in its creation and teaches us how to read the rest of his work with new insight. To read those books in the light and warmth of The First Man is almost to read them, too, for the first time. What more could we ask of a book, finished or unfinished, but that it give us the life's work of a major artist anew?
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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