Ben Stoltzfus, University of California, Riverside
Ernest Hemingway's writing had a profound influence on the new generation of French writers in the 1930s, particularly Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and, in a 1946 essay in the Atlantic Monthly, Sartre said that L'Etranger would not be what it is if Camus had not read The Sun Also Rises.[1] Although there is rebellion of sorts in both works, neither novel displays much solidarity. Sun narrates the erratic behavior of "the lost generation," the term Gertrude Stein used to describe American expatriates in Paris in the 1920s, and Meursault's passive aggression in L'Etranger is a misguided attempt to cope with alienation and the absurd.[2]
The absurd describes the state of mind of individuals who are conscious of a discrepancy between desire and reality: the desire for freedom, happiness, and immortality, and the knowledge that life imposes limits on desire even as death announces finitude. In fact, death in an absurd world is one of the themes that Camus and Hemingway develop in their fiction and in their essays.
In L'Homme révolté,[3] Camus's longest and perhaps most important book, he moves beyond solipsism, suicide, and death, the major themes of Le Mythe de Sisyphe,[4] to address the issues of social oppression, tyranny, and state-sponsored murder. He believes that people who rebel against these dehumanizing forces assert a value that transcends them as individuals. His group cogito, "I rebel, therefore we are," posits a collective ontology based on the fact that rebellion defines and conditions human solidarity (Hr 431). Camus says that in order to exist, men and women must rebel, and he postulates the need for metaphysical as well as sociopolitical revolt. However, in defending freedom, the rebel strives not to violate the freedom of others. There is, in fact, an enormous distance between the rebel and the revolutionary. The rebel respects life, including the enemy's, whereas the revolutionary believes that the means, no matter how bloody, justify the ends. The rebel, because he or she empathizes with the victim(s), stops short of terror and murder, whereas the revolutionary believes that, if the world is to be transformed, the death of opponents is both just and inevitable. But, says Camus, the world is sundered whenever rebellion turns violent (Hr 685).
Revolutions are therefore doomed to fail. Indeed, all modern revolutions, says Camus, have reinforced state control, and, from a human and historical vantage, they have been disasters. The French revolution of 1789 gave birth to Napoleon; the revolution of 1848 to Napoleon III; the Russian revolution of 1917 produced Stalin; in Italy, the difficult years of the 1920s spawned Mussolini; and the Weimar Republic gave us Hitler. The ensuing state terror, murder, and the suppression of human rights, although perhaps not inevitable, were at least predictable (Hr 583).
As for Hemingway, people don't normally think of him as a writer with a social message. However, For Whom the Bell Tolls, To Have and Have Not, The Fifth Column, and his 1937 Civil War dispatches to the North-American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) while he was in Spain covering the civil war belie the legend of a man obsessed by himself, women, and drink.[5]
Both men won the Nobel Prize for literature (1951, 1957), a fact that attests a high degree of artistic integrity, and both men had a social conscience. At one time or another they were both journalists, Camus as editor of Combat during World War II, and Hemingway as a reporter for the Toronto Star after World War I. Camus was in the Resistance in the early 1940s and Hemingway was wounded on the Italian front during World War I.
However, despite similarities between Hemingway's and Camus's lives and works, it is not my purpose to show influence. I am interested in the points of join of their oeuvres that reflect social conscience. L'Homme révolté develops the parameters and the logic of a collective cogito that Hemingway's characters in For Whom the Bell Tolls, To Have and Have Not, and The Fifth Column, all from the 1930s, and even Hemingway himself had put into practice years before 1951, the year L'Homme révolté was published. Despite the exhortations of this important work, most of Camus's books, while striving toward the kingdom of collective emancipation, deal with exile, solitude, and the absurd.
In La Peste (1947) rebellion is metaphysical and social.[6] All of Dr. Rieux's efforts and those of the sanitary squadrons are directed against the ravages of a disease that kills children and adults before their time. The novel's evil, however, is not social injustice, except perhaps allegorically, but death--the tyranny of mortality. Death's random selection, similar in many ways to Caligula's whimsical executions, is an arbitrary oppressor, and Rieux does all he can to diminish its force.
Although death is also present in Les Justes and L'Etat de siège (produced in 1949 and 1948),[7] Camus's two plays explore political oppression and the social commitment of people who oppose the dehumanizing effects of totalitarian regimes. Only in Les Justes and L'Etat de siège does oppression elicit collective revolt against tyranny and social injustice. L'Etat de siège, a "spectacle" based on the myth of the plague (not to be confused with the novel), is set in Cadiz, Spain, where the entire population rebels against a bureaucratic dictatorship. Les Justes, a historical play set in Moscow in 1905, dramatizes the assassination of the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovitch by a terrorist group in order to establish justice and advance the cause of the revolution.
There is rebellion in the play Caligula, but the tyrant's assassination has few positive connotations, and Scipio and Cherea do not share the resolve of the conspirators.[8] In Reflexions sur la guillotine[9] Camus argues against the death penalty, and his reasons for rejecting it echo his passionate indictment of collective murder--the twentieth-century scourge that he chronicles in L'Homme révolté. Indeed, few of his fictional and theatrical works develop the theme of rebellion as a group endeavor. As Germaine Brée points out, Camus's essential dramatic theme is "the fall incurred by individuals and societies who … lose touch with the mystery of man's concrete presence and incarnation in the flesh."[10]
In two of Hemingway's works, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Fifth Column, the protagonists, Robert Jordan and Philip Rawlings, rebel against political oppression and their commitment to the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War is tangible. Likewise, the Cuban rebels of the 1930s, in the novel To Have and Have Not, rebel against the tyranny of the dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Robert Jordan is an American scholar who has taught Spanish at the University of Montana. He goes to Spain in order to defend Spanish Republicanism against the fascists. As E. San Juan, Jr. points out, Spain, in the 1930s, was a "Third World competitive market of alienated labor" where the opposing forces were "overdetermined by the global conflict between fascist Germany and Italy, on the one hand, and the anti-fascist camp of the Soviet Union and the International volunteers, on the other."[11] Hemingway's Jordan fights with the popular forces of peasants, workers, and elements of the petty bourgeoisie, and the novel was written in order to elucidate, defend, and justify that particular political position.
Although Jordan, like Hemingway, was not a member of the Communist party, the communists were the most disciplined group on the Republican side, and the Soviets, who were organizing the International Brigades and forwarding arms and ammunition to the Madrid government, were seen as best able to mould the various Loyalist groups into a unified force that could achieve victory. Despite this alliance, Hemingway chips away at the idea of the Communist party as an organized effort to promote solidarity among the masses, and he rejects communism as a philosophy. Although Jordan respects the Party, works under its orders, and admires some of its leaders, he portrays the majority of them as "maniacs, phonies, fakes, murderers, and propaganda-make-ups."[12] Hemingway is also highly critical of Franco. In a 1937 speech to the American Writers Congress, entitled "Fascism Is a Lie," he excoriates the movement as one "condemned to literary sterility. When it is past, it will have no history except the bloody history of murder."[13]
Camus's criticism of fascism and communism is equally harsh. Fascism, he says, never wanted to free all of mankind. Its goal was to liberate a few while subjugating the rest. As for communism, its purpose was to free all men by provisionally enslaving them all (Hr 648). In denouncing revolutionary causes he says that every revolutionary ends up as an oppressor (Hr 651). It is clear now that Hemingway felt the need to oppose the greater of two evils, whereas Camus denounced both.
Both Camus and Hemingway quote Dolorès Ibarruri, the Spanish communist deputy during the Civil War, better known as La Pasionaria, who said that "It's better to die on your feet than live on your knees" (Hr 425).[14] These words stress the value of rebellion and the dignity of the individual, because those who are willing to die for the general good affirm a value that transcends them as individuals. However, in "La Pensée de midi," Camus draws the line between self-sacrifice and the arrogance of power, which, in killing, denies the freedom of others and nullifies the logic of rebellion (Hr 687-89). Murder destroys the collective cogito and the bond of solidarity that validates history and life: "when rebellion foments destruction, it is illogical. As long as it stresses the unity of the human condition, it is a force for life, not death" (Hr 688). The logic of rebellion, says Camus, is the logic of creation, not destruction.
In The Fifth Column, Rawlings, an American, and Max, a German, are both revolutionaries fighting on the side of the Republicans. When Rawlings says that "we're in for fifty years of undeclared wars" (FC 95), both he and Max believe that they derive their strength and unity from the proletariat in opposition to those classes that exploit the workers; that when the world has been changed, and men and women live in a classless society, the poor will not go hungry nor will they fear the indignities of ill health and old age. Their words echo Karl Marx's egalitarian doctrine, and Hemingway's rebels, like Camus's, are born and emerge out of the spectacle of human folly (Hr 419). Hemingway's revolutionaries want to change history, but change requires action and action means killing. They are committed to obey their communist leaders, who believe that killing is legitimate, and it is this false legitimacy that Camus argues against in L'Homme révolté. For him, Hitler's concentration camps and Stalin's gulags represent a fatal chapter in what he calls "Europe's pride" (Hr 420).
In 1938, Hemingway wrote an article for Pravda, the organ of Soviet propaganda and Moscow's most prominent newspaper. It was entitled "Humanity Will Not Forgive This," and it appeared on page four of the August issue, along with articles by Mikhail Koltsov, the former Pravda correspondent in Spain, Upton Sinclair, Zhou Enlai, and Mao Zedong.[15] Hemingway's article attacked the indiscriminate shelling of civilians, the murdered children, the dead women "looking like bloodied bundles of rags," and a hungry dog "rushing up the street with a four-foot piece of intestine trailing from his jaws" (Hr 117). The Pravda article was not unlike many of his NANA dispatches, which read like war stories, not propaganda. His dispatches equate fascism primarily with the killing of civilians and children, and he opposed it mainly on humanitarian grounds.
In Hemingway's play The Fifth Column, which is set in Madrid during the Civil War, civilian casualties are high, but the casualties in the novel To Have and Have Not are also high, although not for the same reasons. If the depression years in the United States took their toll on ordinary people and displaced veterans who play a role in the novel, Hemingway attributes the blame allusively to the excesses of capitalism, excesses which, according to Sartre, in his book On Cuba,[16] were also responsible for the wretched state of their people--conditions that eventually led to Fidel Castro's revolution in 1956 and its triumph in 1959.
In To Have and Have Not, Hemingway blames corporate America for the economic repression in Cuba as well as Harry Morgan's demise. During the depression years some of the "have nots" have turned to crime in order to survive while the "haves" cruise in luxury, oblivious to the needs of the working poor. The slogan of the rich is "you win; somebody's got to lose, and only suckers worry" (THAHN 238). Harry Morgan's last words before he dies are an implicit indictment of those who have excluded the indigent: "One man alone ain't got … no bloody fucking chance" (225), words that desperately seek a communal solution to deprivation--words that adumbrate Camus's collective cogito.
The Cubans in Florida have also turned to crime, and one gang robs a bank in Key West in order to help finance the revolution. One of the rebels says: "We want to do away with all the old politicians, with all the American imperialism that strangles us, with the tyranny of the army.… We want to end the slavery of the guajuros, you know, the peasants, and divide the big sugar estates among the people who work them" (166).
Despite Hemingway's professed disinterest in politics, he had studied how revolutions worked for over fifteen years.[17] In To Have and Have Not there is an allusion to Spartacus, who was the leader of the Gladiatorial War against Rome from 73 to 71 b.c., and thus indirectly to his army of 90,000 Roman slaves. Allusively, the reader is asked to compare the Roman slaves who could rebel with the plight of the displaced vets in their holding camps who could not because they have been brutalized by neglect. The vets can't organize because they are rummies, because their solace is in booze and in the pleasure of "taking it" (THAHN 206).
However, as Camus points out, despite Spartacus's discipline, the revolt failed because instead of attacking Rome immediately he retreated to Sicily, where he was eventually defeated by Crassus. Because Spartacus crucified one Roman citizen, Crassus crucified thousands of defeated slaves. Camus's point is that Spartacus's revolt contributed nothing new to Roman society and that retribution and bloodshed, the hallmark of all revolutions, did not advance the cause of human solidarity. Spartacus was killed by mercenary slaves who, in killing him, were also killing their own freedom. Camus concludes that Spartacus's revolt failed because the rebels were repeating the mistakes of all previous servile revolts in which the slaves were freed and their masters enslaved (Hr 518-20).
Why rebel, asks Camus, if there is nothing permanent to preserve (Hr 425)? Nonetheless, Spartacus's rebellion confirms the slave's need and desire for dignity. In saying "no" to slavery he says "yes" to freedom, and he thereby asserts the solidarity of humans who affirm these inalienable rights. Spartacus fails to fulfill the premise of the collective cogito because he failed to grasp the metaphysical implications of "La Pensée de midi." This is also the flaw of Hemingway's rebels who fight and shed blood for good causes but do not articulate the essence that binds them together. One man's tribulation is everybody's plague, says Camus (Hr 432), and, when we deny the rights of others, particularly the right to life, we do not eradicate the plague, we perpetuate it.
In conclusion, the affinity between Hemingway and Camus is both artistic and moral. The main difference is that in writing about rebels and revolutionaries Hemingway dramatizes the praxis of social engagement and revolutionary endeavor, whereas Camus, in L'Homme révolté, transcends the expediency of the present in order to focus on the metaphysical dilemma that confronts all individuals who, of necessity, must solve the exigencies of living and dying in a totalitarian age.
Footnotes
1. Jean-Paul Sartre, "American Novelists in French Eyes," The Atlantic Monthly 178 (1946): 114-18.
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2. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner, 1962; Albert Camus, "L'Etranger," in Théatre, récits, nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1962).
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3. Albert Camus, "L'Homme révolté," in Essais (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1965). All subsequent references to and quotations from this edition are cited in parentheses following the abbreviation Hr. The translations are my own.
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4. Albert Camus, "Le Mythe de Sisyphe," in Essais (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1965).
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5. Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (New York: Scribner, 1987; To Have and Have Not (New York: Macmillan, 1937): all subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation THAHN; The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (New York: Collier, 1938) ): all subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation FC; "War Dispatches to NANA (North-Atlantic Newspaper Alliance)," ed. William Braasch Watson, The Hemingway Review 7 (1988): 114-18.
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6. Albert Camus, "La Peste," in Théatre, récits, nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1962).
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7. Albert Camus, "Les Justes" and "L'Etat de siège," in Théatre, récits, nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1962).
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8. Albert Camus, "Caligula," in Théatre, récits, nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1962).
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9. Albert Camus, "Reflexions sur la guillotine," in Essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1965).
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10. Germaine Brée, Camus (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1959) 160.
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11. E. San Juan, Jr., "Ideological Forms, Symbolic Exchange, Textual Production: A Symptomatic Reading of For Whom the Bell Tolls," North Dakota Quarterly 60 (1992): 121.
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12. Gunther Schmigalle, "Seven Ambiguities in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls," North Dakota Quarterly 60 (1992): 73.
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13. Ernest Hemingway, "Fascism Is a Lie," New Masses, June 22, 1937, 4.
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14. Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and Into the Trees (New York: Scribner, 1950) 40.
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15. Ernest Hemingway, "Humanity Will Not Forgive This," Pravda, August, 1938, 40.
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16. Jean-Paul Sartre, On Cuba, trans. anonymous (New York: Ballantine, 1961).
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17. Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: the 1930s (New York: Norton, 1977) 261.
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