Camus and Hemingway: The Solidarity of Rebellion

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 revolte, (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 revolte 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 revolte was published. …