‘Forgive Me Reader, for I Have Sinned’: Disponibilité and Confession in the Works of Albert Camus

ABSTRACT

In this article I assess the effects of confessional writing as a philosophical and literary technique, as used by Albert Camus. Drawing on Gabriel Marcel’s concept of disponibilité, I suggest that confessional writing is used as a means of bringing about an intersubjective experience of the Other. The unmediated and vulnerable communication of this form of writing acts in place of the direct, second-person communication we experience in the real world, and the reader is thus situated in a phenomenological space where their empathetic and emotional responses are fully engaged, as if in intimate conversation. I suggest that, for Camus, the openness we experience in encountering a narrative text is of moral significance, as it encourages reflection on the suffering and inner lives of others in a way that otherwise might not be possible, and from this activity we may improve our moral acuity. In bringing together both fictionalised autobiography and philosophical confessional literature, this article endeavours to give the first ever full account of Camus’s vision of the role of life writing in relation to philosophy.

KEYWORDS:

• Disponibilité
• Camus
• Marcel
• confessions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Grace Whistler is a PhD candidate at the University of York. Her thesis entitled ‘Between Content and Form: Camus’ Literary Ethics’ reassesses the writings of Albert Camus in relation to current debates at the intersection of ethics and aesthetics. She has published articles in numerous journals including Literature and Theology and the Journal of Camus Studies, and is currently working on a chapter for Brill’s Companion to Albert Camus.

Notes

1. By philosophical life writing, I mean to refer to any biographical writing which deals substantially with philosophical ideas (assuming that all biographical writing approaches philosophy to a minor extent, it after all being a reflection of human life). It should also be noted that the ‘fictionality’ of any piece of life writing is necessarily a matter of degree – from minor self-deceptions in autobiographies, all the way to entirely imagined literary life stories, most biographies will no doubt contain some fictional elements. For this reason, when I refer to ‘fictional life writing,’ I only mean to include life writings which the author intends to be read as fiction.

2. In Homo Viator, Marcel explicitly critiques Camus on the grounds that he (according to Marcel) celebrates absurdity, nihilism and meaninglessness (Marcel 1945, 195–198), based on his discussion of absurdity in The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus 2005). Camus never responded to these criticisms in any detail, but as I will suggest in this article and elsewhere, these accusations of nihilism are unfounded, as Camus argues for meaning despite the absurdity of our condition.

3. The specific features of confessional writing which bring about his effect will be looked at in more detail throughout the remainder of the article.

4. This idea of attending to a person or character in a text is not dissimilar to Iris Murdoch’s conception of ‘attention’ (Murdoch 2001, 22), but unfortunately it is not within the scope of the current article to do justice to an analysis of Murdoch’s theory. For further reading, see Murdoch (2001).

5. Curiously enough, Rousseau mentions Augustine only once in his Confessions, and even then it is only in passing, failing to give credit to Augustine’s work which no doubt inspired his own.