Technically, there were, there are, multiple wars. Albert Camus’ life began less than a year before the start of World War I, and his father died in combat in the First Battle of the Marne. He wrote most of his most famous works, The Stranger, The Plague and “The Myth of Sisyphus” living under the Nazi occupation of France and its territories in World War II. He grew up as a poor, fatherless Frenchman in an Algeria that had been under French control for more than a hundred years, and spent many years advocating for his vision of peace in that country, with varying success. (More on that later.) 

But in 1942, Camus was living in a nation occupied on two levels: by France, and by the Nazis. I am always reluctant to define an author’s work by one event or trauma, but it’s hard to escape the violence that shaped his life. France’s control of Algeria came at a staggering cost to the Algerians — it’s estimated that somewhere between half a million and a million people, between 1/6 and 1/3 of the local population, died between 1830 and 1860 — and was maintained through deportation, banishment, execution, outlawing political parties, and other assorted brutalities. (In 1945, after the fall of the Nazis, a celebratory party turned into a rebellion against French control, which ended with, you guessed it, yet another massacre.) 

In 1942, Camus was also teaching in primary school. Anyone who’s dealt with a child on a regular or more than regular basis knows that children throw you curveballs all the time. Why do bad things happen? Can you explain colonialism to a nine-year-old? Have you tried to explain Nazis to one?

It’s really no wonder Camus became a father of Absurdism. (He was also called a father of Existentialism, and that’s a pretty fair label, even if Camus hated it.) Camus, and his characters, look a cruel and inexplicable world in the face and see no order and no God. In some cases, like Meursault in The Stranger, the character himself has made the inexplicable and cruel choice, murdering a man in broad daylight on a beach. Even Sisyphus knows exactly what he did to incur the divine wrath that sealed his fate, but his punishment feels maddeningly disproportionate; pushing that boulder, up and down, all day, every day, for eternity, for no clear purpose or benefit. It makes no sense, the child within us objects. It’s not fair. The causes and effects are all off. The good no longer end happily and the bad unhappily, at least not the way that Miss Prism intended. Meursault finds happiness and purpose only as he faces the gallows. Camus tells us that we must imagine Sisphyus happy in his unending, pointless labors. Anyone looking for a pattern does so at the risk of their own sanity. La vie est absurd.

People joke about the French inclination to philosophy, to indifference, or both, but Absurdism isn’t so much a French reaction to the maddening contradictions of life as it is a deeply human one. The Biblical book of Job is probably the most famous attempt at wrestling with the nonsensical nature of suffering and death in the West, but it’s hardly the only example. (Job ends up on the wrong end of a bet he didn’t make, and when he points out to God that that’s bullshit, he gets yelled at. Where’s the justice in that?) The absurd is everywhere in the world and in the history of theology and letters; Camus just started putting a name to it. (Later, another philosopher would incorrectly identify it all as “Ironic.”)

But Camus doesn’t give into despair, or advocate that anyone else should. Even Mersault, who finally finds purpose in death, isn’t quite suicidal. Camus’ later work, The Plague, probably his masterpiece, honors the toil and stress of two men facing the implacable challenge of, well, a plague. Cut off from the outside world, their struggle seems endless, and death becomes a constant companion. The men keep working. What else can they do? They are too human to do anything else.

It’s no wonder the work of the Existentialists and Absurdists have continued to last. Surrounded by a world that seems to be more ridiculous every day, reading headlines that were parodies the day before, sometimes all we can do is put our feet on the ground and make our stand, however ridiculous, however doomed. In the absence of God and rationality, when flat earthers and QAnon seem to dominate the public square, all we have is who we are. All we can do is the best we can.

(Of course, Camus’s footprint is everywhere, including The Cure’s blunt first single.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdbLqOXmJ04

As impossible as it would be to talk about Camus without mentioning war, it’s harder still to talk about him without bringing up Algeria. By the time Camus was born, generations of white French subjects had been born on Algerian soil, and Algeria was clearly dear to Camus’s heart. He wrote about and critiqued French abuses before and after the outbreak of the Algerian War, including decrying the antisemitism and fascist sympathies many of his fellow pieds-noirs indulged in. (That was the term used for French subjects living in Algeria, and yes, that does literally translate to black foot.) He desperately wanted peace in a country he clearly saw as a home, but he alienated both the French and Algerians and failed to make much of an impact. Being a sexy and charismatic Nobel Prize winner only counts for so much, and it’s no substitute for real political power. 

The trap of colonialism is that it becomes hard for its beneficiaries to see beyond their circumstances; Camus advocated for an autonomous Algeria, but he wouldn’t — or couldn’t — envision a fully independent one. Even Camus’ critiques of the dehumanization caused by colonial rule can reinforce that very dehumanization. Leaving Meursault’s victim nameless means leaving him without an identity of his own. He is reduced to his ethnicity alone, remaining little more than a plot point in someone else’s story. Meursault is so alienated from his own humanity that of course he doesn’t know or remember the man’s name…but he didn’t kill a white man, now did he? At any rate, far smarter writers than me have discussed this: Edward Said had some good things to say in Culture and Imperialism (this blog post is a reasonably good rundown, though he’s much harsher on Said’s prose style than I am), and Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation focuses on the family that Mersault’s victim, now named Musa, left behind, as a deliberate rebuke of Camus’s choices. His legacy in Algeria itself remains mixed at best.

Camus died young in a car accident, one last violent act. His works have never dropped out of the popular consciousness, and I really don’t think they should. Camus had his weaknesses and blind spots (I haven’t even scratched the surface of Camus and women), but there’s something so deeply human in his work. And the man sure could write.

I actually read The Stranger in French years ago. Unlike many of the literary classics I struggled through, it was a pretty easy read. Camus’s prose is bold and sharp, with a voice distinctive enough to shine through even to an intimidated high school student. As a result, I very much enjoyed this discussion of the novel’s famous first line. 

For further reading, The New Yorker has an excellent article on Camus, his life, work and continued relevance. Dazed talks about why Absurdism speaks so much to us.

One day, a young deer is born in the forest. The other animals refer to him as “the young prince,” for he is the son of the Great Prince of the Forest, the oldest of the stags. His mother, who is never named, tells them that her son will be called Bambi. He meets a young rabbit named Thumper, who teaches him to talk; in one of the moments of comedy added for the movie, he then calls a young skunk Flower. Bambi grows and learns, and what he learns is that the biggest threat to him in the forest is Man. Who is never seen, which is the only reason he isn’t killed in the forest fire scene.

To be fair, that’s because there don’t appear to be any other predators in the forest. Friend Owl, to be sure, but no wolves, foxes, and so forth. The only one who hunts the deer is Man. And we never acknowledge that Friend Owl would likely eat Thumper in the real world. Skunks are omnivores, too, and it appears that at least one skunk has been observed going into a rabbit burrow. So, you know, there’s all that. But it is true that the most common predator in a lot of forests, both in Europe and in North America, is human hunters.

This has led to some very weird statements about this movie, one of the first explicitly environmentalist films ever made. Ted Nugent says we shouldn’t use it as an anti-hunting movie, because we know that the hunters used every part of Bambi’s mother. Where, exactly, he gets this idea, I couldn’t even begin to tell you. The IMDb trivia points out that it’s illegal to kill a doe with a fawn, as if that necessarily means it doesn’t happen; the selfsame trivia section also mentions a poacher who was sentenced to, among other things, watch this movie once a month for a year.

At that, it wasn’t meant to be explicitly anti-hunting; Walt was fairly firm on that. Hell, Felix Salten, the original author, was himself a hunter. (In point of fact, it was supposed to be some sort of allegory about the dangers faced by Jews, it seems, though probably I’d have to read it to understand that. Certainly Salten was himself Jewish, and his works were banned by the Nazis, including this one.) A strong argument can be made that it’s a practical effect of personifying a prey species, and you can’t make a version of the story that isn’t anti-hunting whatever your intention, but that wasn’t the point of the movie or the book.

It really is a beautiful movie, though. Its backgrounds were designed by Tyrus Wong, a Disney animator and long-time Hollywood production designer; they’re intentionally made not to distract from the action, so the focus is on the animals, not the trees. The animators definitely spent time observing real-life animals; weirdly, it’s the dogs—surely the animal they were most familiar with—who look the least convincing and realistic. This is one of Disney’s most realistic films, which makes it even more frustrating that it’s apparently intended to get the “live-action” treatment at some point.

There are a lot of differences between the movie and the original book, but the first and most obvious without having read the book is that the setting has been changed. Bambi is a white-tailed deer, not a roe deer, as roe deer are not native to the Americas. Walt apparently initially wanted a mule deer but was talked into the change. Sure, rabbits are everywhere, but skunks are native to the Americas as well. The very word comes from the Algonquian and Iroquoian names for the animal. The original book is also very much Not For Children, even beyond the whole “trauma of a generation” thing, being considerably more violent and more detailed about mating. Also, Bambi and Faline are cousins.

The movie’s cultural impact is interesting, if you think about it; Bambi was a girl’s name first, stemming from at least a 1913 book—it’s from “bambino,” the Italian for “child”—but the most famous cultural Bambi is male. There’s also the whole hunting thing. The idea of Man as a dangerous force to be wary of is so solidly put in place by the film that the Disney animators used “Man is in the forest” as code for “Walt’s coming.”

My Disney+ membership is up this month; help me keep these articles coming by supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi!