Camus on exile and nostalgia.

Hello everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

So if you’ve read these last three posts we’ve done recently on Albert Camus, you can hear some of the ideas he’s been throwing around and be on board with what he’s saying in theory.

But it’s quite another thing to be able to apply these things to your life in any sort of real way.

To Camus, someone doesn’t just think their way into a more lucid framing of their reality. And his terms like solidarity or revolt or rebellion are not often things you understand by just reading about them in a book. Camus knew much of his work was going to be something where a person had to arrive at an understanding of it through lived experience.

Much like in the work of others we’ve talked about on recent posts: Dostoevsky, the religious mystics, even certain lines of Zen Buddhism; we’re familiar with the idea that there are certain insights about what it is to be a human being that can only be arrived at by experiencing them directly.

And to Camus in particular, one of the important experiences a person can have in their life, but one that a lot of people spend most of their lives running away from, is what he’s gonna call the experience of exile.

Now just to understand what he’s talking about here I want to start with an example of exile that’s far too extreme, and then I’ll readjust from there.

Imagine being a member of a village, deep in the jungle somewhere, and say one day you do something that makes everyone in the village really mad at you.

They all decide they’ve had enough of your genius behavior for one lifetime, and they cast you out into the jungle and say to never come back.

Well when you’re out there in the jungle all by yourself…this is far from a good feeling you’re having. Constant anxiety, zero security. One way to put it is that this is a feeling of exile from the safety of the community you once lived in.

In fact, you could say this is a type of homelessness you’re experiencing there. That being in exile is being hit with the reality that this village you used to be a part of, in terms of it providing security for your life, it turns out it’s not as stable of a thing as you once thought it was.

There was a time where your place in that village felt like it was the absolute truth to you. But all it takes is for a few relatively small things to go wrong that feel largely outside of your control, and now you find yourself barely surviving out in the wilderness.

It starts to dawn on you that there are some real limitations to your situation that make the security that once felt like home start to seem like it was a set of illusions.

Well this is a perfect metaphor to understand what Camus means by the concept of exile in his work. For him, exile is going to be a state of metaphysical homelessness.

It’s going to be when we lose a sense of home usually against our will. Where then, once we’re in this new place without a home, we may long to go back to the way things once were, but exile is going to be a special type of experience where we find that it’s impossible to go back to the same set of illusions we once lived in.

And as you’re no doubt guessing by this point, for Camus this is going to apply to far more areas of our experience than just being physically exiled out in the jungle.

I mean, obviously. Camus would say that we aren’t merely physical creatures. And he’d want us to remember that one important thing about the environment that we always live in is that it also includes this existential tension of the absurd.

So what this means is at the level of the universe, you are not entitled to a permanent state of anything in this life.

Yes, when it comes to physical safety, but also when it comes to knowledge about the world, to love, meaning, beauty, belonging, whatever it is.

Any form of these things that you ever experience in your life, to Camus, is strictly provisional.

They are subject to change. They are things that need to be revised on an almost everyday basis by you. And to not do that work, to spend your life making arrangements where you see these things as more owed to you or unchanging than they really are, well this is to do what most of us do, and spend your life on the run from exile.

When we encounter these sorts of limitations and are hit with the fact that our old set of illusions are shattered; as Camus puts it at one point, when we realize that there really is no “promised land” for us in this life when it comes to anything, the realization of that fact, the living immersed in that fact is going to be one of the most important things you can ever experience if you wanted to affirm life at a level that few people ever get to see.

Almost like an existential compass, it’s something that points the way towards a reintegration with your fellow people and the world itself. It moves someone away from reducing these things into theoretical abstractions.

We’ll talk about several different examples today of very important ways exile shows up in our lives.

We’ll also talk about some common methods people use to run away from it all the time.

Should be said though, Camus has already shown us some pretty beautiful images of exile so far in the work we’ve already covered.

He describes Sisyphus, as clearly in a state of exile as he’s alone, pushing his rock up a hill condemned by the gods. There’s also Meursault in The Stranger who’s in a state of exile, where he’s a stranger within the very society he lives in.

Then there’s his book The Plague we’ve talked about, where Camus shows us a more collective state of exile. Where Dr. Rieux, Jean Tarrou, and others encounter the plague, and then they’re quarantined into a state of exile, where their city’s cut off from the rest of the world.

He eventually shows us how it’s only through being in this state of exile together that they eventually face the absurd head-on and find solidarity. Exile, again then, becomes the uncomfortable thing that gets them to this deeper understanding of their true connection to others.

And if all you had were these well-known versions of exile from the work of Camus, well you’d be fine honestly. Your life would probably still be okay.

But as the resident guy in your life that’s spent way too much time reading philosophy in my life, I wanted to turn you on to another book that Camus wrote later in his career, where it’s the most focused effort he ever gives us in his work of creating images of this concept of exile that are highly relatable.

It’s a book he wrote in 1957 called Exile and the Kingdom.

Six short stories, all of which paint a different image of people caught in a state of exile. And it’s usually, by the way, a complicated double form of exile for these characters as we’ll see.

And these examples are great I think because look: bubonic plagues, mythical figures pushing a rock up a hill, these are wonderful and all… but there’s something about having real examples dramatized from the lives of people that’ll allow us to unpack exile on this post a lot more effectively than we otherwise would.

Consider the first of these six short stories. It’s a story about a woman named Janine, who finds herself pressured to go on a vacation with her husband. It’s the story that Camus chooses to open the book with and he gives it the title: “The Adulterous Woman.”

Now you hear that title, and you may think this is a woman who’s going to have an affair with someone in this story. Well, not in the way you may be thinking.

This vacation that Janine got pressured to go on isn’t just a vacation for her.

Her husband’s a salesman. He travels to the Sahara Desert in the country of Algeria to try to sell stuff to people. And it was a situation where he didn’t want to be on this trip all alone, so he asks his wife Janine to go along with him and keep him company. Let’s go together and just call this whole thing a vacation, he says.

She admits when she imagined going on this trip she thought it was gonna be a bunch of soft sand and palm trees everywhere, paradise basically.

But then she actually gets there, and she’s soon hit with the reality of being in the desert. The heat, the cold, sand everywhere in your shoes, in your hair, rocks and dead grass essentially as far as the eye can see.

More than just with the landscape though, Janine is shocked when she gets there by the very different, nomadic sort of people that live in this desert region of Algeria.

She doesn’t like them that much. She finds the way they act to be abrasive, different from the way she’s used to seeing people act where she comes from in her home country of France.

Pausing for a second to give some important context here about this story and the rest of the book.

Camus himself was a man born in Algeria who then moved to France later on to further pursue his artistic career. And because of this, he’s a man who feels a special connection outside of writing this book to both Algeria as a country and France as a country. He loves both of them.

Now during this time that he’s writing the book Algeria was a colony of France, struggling for independence. There’s a war going on. And as is the case with many colonial situations like this, even if you’re not someone actively shooting a gun, there’s almost always horrible violence going on around you, there are power struggles; to call it “tension” that exists between the people of Algeria and their French colonizers would be an understatement.

But remember though: Janine in this book is a woman from France, on vacation in Algeria, looking at the people that live there, annoyed by many of their differences.

She thinks they’re weird at times. Arrogant and inconsiderate at other times.

I mean you can almost imagine this stuck up married couple from France in the middle of the desert on vacation. Someone walks a bit too close to them and they say something nasty about them quietly to each other.

They’re a couple of very closed-off people, judging everything around them, trying to keep their world as small as possible. And this is Camus’ point here. On this particular trip, Janine is going to start to notice that keeping the world small like this is primarily what her and her husband are doing when they’re in their marriage together.

She starts by taking a long look at her husband. And in that moment she just sees through the game they’ve both been playing more than she ever has before.

She hears the way he’s talking to people as he’s trying to sell stuff to them, where he has this really obvious set of tactics he’s using just to get something from people. It’s a bit cringe from her perspective.

More than that though, she looks at him and she sees how he just starts complaining the second things get immediately outside of his comfort zone. She starts thinking about him more as a partner: you know, 25 years ago they got together, he was a law student, she was a young woman, and he asked her to marry him.

They agreed to be the thing for each other that was always going to be there no matter what happens.

When the world gets hot or cold or sandy, when these annoying nomadic people start coming around them getting a bit too close, let’s make an arrangement, they said, so that we never have to deal with any of this stuff alone, facing it head on.

And look, she doesn’t hate the guy by any means. He has good qualities. He’s generous with her, she says. When she really asks for something he’ll always do it.

But there are things about the way they talk to each other in this marriage that show her something important about this arrangement they have. He’ll say things like, “Don’t worry, if I ever die I’ve made sure you’re gonna be financially taken care of.”

And she hears that and she’s like, “Okay, that’s great.”

But it’s also in another sense a really fearful thing to say. To say something like that is completely missing something important about what life is, isn’t it?

To her, think of the kind of person you’d have to be to hear that and just be completely relieved. Where running from the volatility of life is one of your biggest concerns every day when you think about what your partner provides to you.

Don’t get her wrong, she appreciates that her husband would do this for her. But there’s a whole other way of looking at life here, where financial hardship like that, having to start over, having your back up against a wall sometimes, is just part of what it is to be a human being.

What person structures their life around being able to run from life all the time?

This goes beyond just a marriage for Camus though. I mean imagine if any time life like this came your way and you were about to have to face something difficult head on, imagine if you always had someone to bail you out, so that you never had to experience the hardship fully.

You, of course, wouldn’t resent the support system. But to structure your life this way would be in denial of something about what life is. Maybe something very important about life. To Camus, this is a way to avoid a feeling of exile.

And when it comes to Janine and her marriage: how much of this whole arrangement that they have as a couple is just an elaborate setup so they can avoid this feeling of exile?

There’s a sense in which she’s not even sure if her husband loves her anymore. But at the same time she wonders, sadly: does it even really matter if he does or not, given the nature of this service that they provide each other that helps them keep their world mutually small?

Now noticing this, Janine finds herself in what you could call a double state of exile.

On one hand she doesn’t feel at home even in her own marriage, and feels like she sees beyond the set of illusions she used to live in that allowed her to deny some aspect of her life.

But then she also doesn’t feel at home when she’s not in her marriage, or when she’s out in the desert of Algeria, around all these people that don’t play the same set of social games that she does, and so their existence becomes an affront to her and her husband.

And it’s this metaphysical homelessness she’s in, combined with the inability to go back to the way she used to see things, that puts her in a place that is very uncomfortable, where it drives her to move forward in her life in a transformative way.

Exile here becomes a catalyst for finding a way to relate to her existence and the people around her in a more lucid way.

And what she starts to get drawn to in the story is the desert itself. Which in my opinion is just beautiful work by Camus here, to have the desert be the thing that she has a love affair with.

Again, The Adulterous Woman as a title is not referring to her cheating on her husband with another person. She cheats on the set of cold, shallow arrangements that they have with each other that ground the very essence of their marriage.

See, they’re walking around one day in the story, and someone recommends to them that they climb up on top of this fort and go check out the view of the desert that’s all around them. It’s beautiful, they say.

Janine suggests they do it. Her husband tries to get out of it. Janine insists. Her husband finally relents. She gets up on the top of this fort, looks out at the expanse of the desert shooting out in all directions, and in this moment she starts to feel overwhelmed by how connected to this place she feels.

As she looks out she can’t help but think that the desert, while it’s very empty, some might even call it a barren landscape, on some other level is also a place that’s very free. She even sees some of the nomadic people in the distance living in the desert. They have no idea who she even is, probably never will.

In other words, the desert becomes a place for her that’s unrestricted by a bunch of the normal hallmarks of civilization. Things that are usually built in an attempt to try to protect people from the sun, the elements, and all the problems that come with the freedom of a place like the desert. These people in the desert, to her, become people that are “possessing nothing, but serving no one, they are the destitute and free lords of a strange kingdom.”

And if you’ve read the last few posts we’ve done on Camus, you will no doubt see what he’s doing. This whole scene clearly represents some of the symbolism we’ve talked about throughout his work. The desert represents the absurd, where on one hand, yes, it’s an empty void, but on the other hand it brings to a person a new level of freedom. The sun represents the immanence of reality and the Mediterranean spirit outside of the typical abstractions people live in. There’s also the intense weather of the desert, representing what we sometimes have to face while affirming the world and our own existence.

See, Janine feels the spirit of this lucid revolt calling to her in a sense here. And experiencing the desert fully like this wakes her up into a feeling of deep longing that she has, a longing for something that has no object but is absolutely there.

But still, as Janine’s looking out at the desert, and her husband’s complaining and wanting to go back to the hotel, calling her silly asking her what she’s even doing staring off into the horizon, she can’t help but feel that this moment is one that is shattering a set of illusions that she will never be able to go back to.

Once they get back to the hotel in the book she starts to feel sick. They decide to go to sleep for the night. The room is cold, sand is everywhere, it’s maybe the worst hotel room ever designed.

But they’re snuggling in bed next to each other, and she can’t help but notice how easy it would be to just do what they’ve always done: to keep each other warm, wake up the next day, and live yet another day the same way they always have.

But on this particular night, with her husband asleep, she sneaks out of the room into the cold. She runs back to the spot where she saw the desert earlier that day and decides to take it all in again, this time all by herself.

After she returns to the room, she crawls back into bed. Her husband wakes up, walks over to the sink to get some water like he normally does, and he notices that his wife’s crying. He asks her what’s wrong. She says, “Oh it’s nothing dear, don’t worry.” And that’s where the story ends.

Now the similarities here to the behavior of a person having a different kind of affair are deliberate. And the ending of the story being so ambiguous is also very deliberate. To Camus, to be in a state of exile is not to arrive at some neat end to the story, and it’s not to have perfect information about what exactly is going to be happening next.

This is a really important detail about exile that Camus wanted to get across in this story. Exile, when you pay attention to it, is often the price someone has to pay for being honest about their existential condition.

To Camus, choosing to spend your life on the run from exile is a recipe for two things you’re gonna start having more of in your life.

1. You’re not going to fully appreciate things like love, belonging, or meaning as much when you do provisionally have them. You’ll always, to a degree, be taking them for granted.

2. It’s a recipe for being absolutely blindsided when the events of your life inevitably show you the limitations of this set of arrangements you have.

Notice how Janine could live her life for twenty-five years in a set of arrangements masquerading as love and belonging, only to be blindsided during one moment of lucid reflection that all of this was an attempt to deny certain realities about what her life is.

See, when she looks back twenty-five years in the story, thinking back to a time when her life made more sense to her; nostalgia like this is a very predictable response people have when they’re hit with a state of exile.

Camus seems to be making the case that one way to think of nostalgia is that it’s a type of metaphysical homelessness at the level of time.

Nostalgia is feeling so not at home during the current moment that you’re living in, that you run from that feeling and then harken back to a time when it felt like things were less absurd. In other words nostalgia is a response to exile.

And consider how a point like this makes his entire project so unique. If you asked so many people alive today to give an explanation of nostalgia they would likely try to come up with some sort of psychological explanation for it.

That’s the hallmark of our times. What is nostalgia? Well, you seek nostalgia all the time because you have some insecure attachment that wasn’t formed properly in your childhood, so now you long for this other time you used to live in. Or how about: nostalgia is a maladaptive avoidance behavior you’ve developed over time that distorts your view of the past and the present, and then fuels this depression that we’ve been trying to heal in you. Any psychological narrative where we simply explain our behavior in terms of how it connects to a set of protocols.

Camus would be very skeptical of this approach being the final word on any of this. And of course he wouldn’t say that we should stop doing psychology, but he would see it as incredibly valuable to not lose sight of the permanent set of tensions that we are always having a psychological experience within.

He’d invite people to see their own experience as not just a problem to be solved. He’d invite them to try to be in their experience more fully. To not try to rationally subordinate it by linking it to a set of theoretical abstractions like this.

Part of affirming the absurdity of existence fully for him is knowing there are things about it that exceed rational explanation. It is part of the kind of creature you are to want more out of life than life can give you. And what if exile is not just some epiphenomenon of some underlying complex you’ve developed over your life? What if exile is a fundamental existential condition of the kinds of creatures we are?

Let’s talk about another story in this book that shows more sides of what Camus called exile. Totally different characters in this one, but the story’s still set in Algeria. The title of the story is The Guest.

The main character of the story is a schoolteacher named Daru.

Daru is a guy that is ethnically French but was born and raised in Algeria. For most of his life he’s lived in a schoolhouse on top of a big hill, and his life has been to teach the Algerian children that live in the villages surrounding this hill he lives on.

And Daru, for whatever it’s worth, loves his life as a schoolteacher. He doesn’t want anything other than what he already has.

So if you’re someone that enjoys your own life, you may be able to relate to him as a character, because he becomes extremely frustrated in the book when this war breaks out in Algeria between the indigenous population and the French colonial rule.

This war is rather inconvenient to him as someone who not only doesn’t want his life to change, but he also feels like a citizen of both these countries. He sees it from both sides and doesn’t really want to pick a side. And the whole situation gets even more inconvenient for him when he looks out his window one day and sees a French colonial guard leading a prisoner with his hands bound up this giant hill to his schoolhouse. He has no idea what any of this is all about.

The French guard arrives and tells Daru that he’s being commissioned by the state to deliver this prisoner to be executed. There’s a town several miles away where the authorities are waiting for him, and Daru, after the weather calms down, is being commanded to walk this prisoner to that town and hand him over.

Of course Daru wants nothing to do with this. He tells the guard he’s not going to deliver him and that he refuses to take a side. To which the guard just tells him to do whatever he’s going to do and leaves.

Daru spends all night hoping the prisoner will just make a run for it. That he will change the situation so that Daru doesn’t have to make a choice.

But the next morning, he wakes up, feeds the prisoner, and starts walking him toward the town where he’s supposed to turn him in. As he’s leaving his house, he hears something behind him move, a little rustle of the leaves. He looks back, sees nothing, and decides to keep going.

Later on, a couple miles away from the town in the middle of the desert, Daru stops the prisoner from walking and gives him a choice. He gives him some money and some food, and he tells him there are two paths here to take. Follow this road to the left and it will take you to the town. You can turn yourself in and face your execution. This other road to the right will take you to a group of nomads. They’ll welcome you in and protect you from the French authorities. You can live your life going on with them.

Daru starts walking back to his house and the prisoner just stands there. As he gets close to where he’s about to be out of eyeshot, curiosity gets the better of him, he looks back, and sees the prisoner chose to go to the town and turn himself in.

Daru goes back to the schoolhouse, opens the door, happy to be done with it all…when he sees written on the blackboard a message that was left for him while he was gone.

Scribbled in chalk it says: “You turned in our brother. You will pay.” Clearly a message written by the surrounding Algerians that he teaches, who were watching the whole thing go down and got the wrong idea.

Now just like in The Adulterous Woman, the story ends right here, right at a point where we don’t know exactly what is going to happen next.

And let’s talk about the state of double exile that this character Daru was living in, because it’s similar to a state of exile that Camus faced during his own life.

Daru looks around him at the political options available to him, and he’s someone who doesn’t feel like either side really represents how he feels about the situation. And by the end of the story, he’s clearly someone who because of the choices he has made has become disliked by both sides of the conflict.

The French people can’t trust him, and the Algerian people think he just turned their guy in.

This metaphysical homelessness, where Daru would love to have a side or he’d love for everyone to just leave him alone in his schoolhouse every day so he never has to take a side: Camus is showing us a character here who, completely against his will, is being forced into a state of exile from both of the places he once thought of as home, despite being physically right in the middle of them.

He’s forced to confront the fact that the illusions he was once living in were never a real state of stability or peace in the first place.

And for Daru, even when he tries his hardest not to make a choice in the story, Camus is showing here how sometimes, when it comes simply to the judgments of the people around you, making a choice isn’t even something of your own doing.

Sometimes a choice has already been made for you by the events of the world, and there’s nothing you can do about it except face the exile head on.

And like I said, Camus definitely put a lot of himself into this character of Daru. Not only was he also French Algerian, but the political events of his time also put him in a similar situation.

Very early on in his life Camus was part of an upstart Communist movement. Once he made that choice, any right-wing person from there on out was pretty much guaranteed to despise the guy.

But then later in his life when he condemned the violence carried out by the totalitarian left after World War II; even those people, some of them his closest friends at the time, rejected him for being too moderate, for not standing up sufficiently to all the evils going on in the world.

Now we know, by this point in the series, why Camus in his work tried to be so moderate, measured, and balanced in his approach. Augustine must have been almost always present in his thoughts.

But regardless, during his time he found himself living in a world where the events around him forced him into a state of double exile from the only two options that seemed available if you wanted people on your team.

Does anyone out there know what it feels like to truly love your country and feel a real sense of belonging to it, but then also feel appalled at some of the moral realities of the things that it’s doing? This is a state of exile that you’re living in.

And this brings me to another very important point about exile that Camus wanted to talk about with this book: exile is almost always something you have to be forced into if you ever want to experience it fully.

This can sound kind of weird at first. Because exile, at least on the surface, seems like a pretty voluntary thing to do.

If I can theoretically put myself in a place where I see through the illusions I once was living in, aren’t I putting myself in a state of metaphysical homelessness simply through my own will? Why shouldn’t that be possible?

But the way Camus talks about exile at times in his work, it just seems like he thought to get the full effect of it, it needs to go beyond some point of no return. In a place where we, as people, don’t really have full control over what’s happening to us.

So it might be tempting to hear all this from Camus and think hey, if exile’s so important, why don’t I just put myself in a state of exile every day and it’ll be part of some existential anime training montage for my life?

But it’s almost a paradox. You can’t put yourself into exile by just pushing yourself on the elliptical at the gym or something. Because there’s no point there where you truly feel like there’s no going back.

See, in a way it brings us back to that hypothetical village that we started the post with.

The title of the book today is Exile and the Kingdom. And Camus is saying that when it comes to the hypothetical village in the middle of the jungle: it can function for someone kind of like a kingdom. A kingdom that keeps them safe from all the realities of living in the middle of the jungle.

That people often create kingdoms all over the place in their experience of the world. Kingdoms that keep them safe from pain, from heat, cold, sandiness in the desert; also kingdoms that promise them meaning, love, belonging, in a way that’s completely permanent.

The point he’s making though is that most of these kingdoms are illusions. That we should always remember that if there is actually a kingdom to be had out there, a kingdom based more in a lucid confrontation with reality, then that kingdom is always going to be something that’s provisional, and it’s certainly not something that’s ever going to be made by someone in an attempt to avoid anything about their reality.

Next post will be the last in this series on Camus. It will be on his book The Fall and his commentary on the work of Franz Kafka, one of the artists he respected the most.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you next time.