‘Undisguised influences’

Abstract

Albert Camus, in his interview with Jean-Claude Brisville in 1959, recalls having wanted to be a writer already at the age of 17 (I, p. ix; Brisville 1959, p. 256). Rather than a ‘vocation’ or a profession, in the Weberian sense, he conceived his artistic creation to be an endless interrogation that evades the categories of analytical reason (‘clarity’) and goes back to a poverty or ‘denudement’, which he experienced in the sensory and sensual plenitude of the Algerian ecstatic nature (EE, pp. 32–3). A stranger to the romantic emphasis on demiurgic will (I, p. x), Camus’s artistic process is said to elude ressentiment and escape the humiliation of misery and ugliness.