Rebellion And Art: A Reading of The Outsider By Albert Camus

ABSTRACT

The Outsider by Albert Camus has been read as a rebel in general without particular reference to “Rebellion and Art”, wherein Camus has given his view of rebellion in art. Camus’s discussion in “Rebellion in Art” provides a clear instance of two kinds of false rebellion, one that all art is essentially a revolt against reality; two, all art conforms to reality Camus seeks the third dimension of art, that it both needs the world and denies it. He wrote his novels to show that contemporary art has allowed itself to the side tracked. Formalism gravitates too exclusively toward negation, banishing reality and ending in delirium. Realism, however, by reducing man to elemental and external reactions, is too eager to impose its own order on the world. But both arise, in a sense, out of the spirit of revolt, protesting the hypocrisy of bourgeois conventionality; both fail as art in as much as they lose touch with the springs of revolt. Camus thus suggests that the creative way is not that of all or nothing but that of moderation and limit.

FULL TEXT