 This particular lecture is titled critical reading of great writers. We had prepared you for this particular lecture. The outline of the lecture is given for clarity. The first part deals with literary notebooks actually as a genre, but we refer to literary notebooks of Albert Camus, the French novelist, philosopher and we have already talked about him earlier. We will choose selected excerpts from Carnets and also provide you student responses. As I had indicated in the previous lecture, this particular approach is a kind of departure from traditional literary studies approach, where the creative writing of the writer is placed before the student. In this case, we took the chance in terms of the fact that students may not have read Albert Camus, although some of the students had read Albert Camus in the particular group in which it was presented. I have not been necessarily sharing all the material in every particular every teaching situation because it really is determined by the nature of the group one has to teach. So therefore, now let us see how this unfolds. First of all, we look at the you know, Carnets in terms of what it offers us. I think it offers us a close look at the overlap between the autobiographical, the literary and its artistic distilling. Now, that is a complex interwoven pattern, but I think this is a fascinating insight into how a great writer like Camus worked out this process. As I had indicated in the last lecture, this particular notebook, the literary notebooks really were not meant to meant for publication. They were his jottings and subsequently he was persuaded to type it out and also you know, share it with his readers. The first volume of the Carnets, which is what we are exploring, it covers the period 1935 to 1942. It was first published in French in 1962 and its English translation was undertaken by Philip Thorey in 1963 and he also provided an extremely useful and really very very I think insightful introduction to Carnets first volume. There are many more volumes available now, but I think this one has the kind of freshness that perhaps other volumes really do not have. So, this is what we would have before you and as I said last time also, we would like you to remember that it is not possible for us to give very detailed quotations from the text that we are looking at because of copyright reasons and also because we would actually like you to read the material yourself first hand and decide if you really care for it or not because we are not really imposing this material on you. It is only sort of prescribed reading, not prescriptive reading that please keep that in mind very carefully. The important sort of explanation that Camus gave to Philip Thorey when he agreed to share this literary notebook with the reading sort of public, he pointed it out very clearly and I have the quote here from Thorey. He says that when Camus was revising the typewritten copy of 1954, he underlined the fact that the notebooks were not to be looked upon as fragments of an autobiography by removing any passages that in his view dealt to directly with his own private feelings and experiences. This is not to say that actually there are no private feelings that come into being obviously when a writer is writing he or she would have very strong feelings about events, experiences, observations but at the same time as I said this notebook provides you a sense of this distilling that goes on and from that point of view whatever he retained by way of strong emotional responses to people there are lots of those I wish I could read all of it because I myself have been greatly fascinated by carnage and what it provides what the kind of insights it provides us in terms of the writing process in general and Camus sensibility in particular. So there are very strong emotions about people, observations about people, passions that people feel and also some of the passions that are shared across different kinds of people but obviously he is interested or he was interested in retaining certain kind of transmutation that took place that is the sense of the writer as a person is withdrawn from this documentation. Thorie goes on to point out that on the one hand of course you know he did not want the autobiographical element to dominate in any way but also it is it should be noted that these are not exercises in style. What Camus wanted to achieve was something which is very paradoxical but anyway he wanted to be an objective writer and when I say that it is somewhat paradoxical I think it is related to the whole energy of existentialism as a philosophy which actually thrives on the subjective you know whenever existentialist philosophy is talked about it is contrasted with the analytic tradition. So in some ways existentialism and also existentialist philosophy I suppose which he was a participant within that process of philosophizing about existence about the meaning of existence about the agency of the individual in providing meaning in a two existence because there is no pre-given meaning according to the existentialist outlook of course I have also pointed out that Camus did not like this label at all but if you look at the writers he was reading the philosophers he was reading certainly some of the existentialist terminologies and preoccupations dominated his outlook also. However, intuitive that may have been at the time he was writing because at the time he was writing in this phase he was a very young man sort of who was in search of a philosophical outlook that sustained him that energized him that provided meaning to him personally also. But in any case because he was interested in being an objective writer Thody points out that certainly this diary does not show what he was doing by way of the style of writing. Again according to Thody it is first and foremost as a writer that Camus interests us and for the light which the carnage throw on the way he worked that they are most valuable. I think Thody does provide an extremely sympathetic and also extremely clear headed introduction to carnage and if you begin to look at all the reviews and evaluations and scholarly comments on different aspects of Camus work you will find that there is very very little available in terms of the carnage. And that is because in the traditional literary framework these are not seen as significant innovative directions that he had worked out. So one has to really remember this. According to Thody this particular volume the first volume of his literary notebooks can be divided into three parts and again that is very very useful subdivision. The first division that in which he has clubbed three different things according to my assessment of this introduction can this can be labeled as philosophical ideas. Now the term philosophy as I had also suggested to you last time you need not feel uncomfortable with it because it really basically deals with the attempt to understand human experience to provide concepts, clarifications that help us understand our own very very complex and amorphous experience. So in his opinion the fragments of descriptions, the scraps of conversation overheard at home or in the street these are an example of this act of philosophizing. I think this has much to offer to us as people who are interested in the writing process. It sort of in a way tells us how to take our own selves seriously. So obviously these notations these descriptions these are fragments but you know it is like in verse you notice something fascinating or something which troubles you and again sometimes conversations that you hear they seem to have a kind of wait for your being and from that point of view this I think is a very very interesting sort of insight or interesting aspect of the carnage that you may take note of and see what you feel about it. So now there are all these descriptions which really do not necessarily sort of you know provide coherent meaning but they are there you know it is like a date is given and there are these you know aspects that are present in the notebook. The second thing that is very very interesting about this notebook is the fact that many of the sentences that Camus incorporated or noted down in the diary are also incorporated in his fiction almost without any major changes. So which means that whole process of distilling was working at a very very rapid and furious space for Albert Camus. The third aspect that Thorie indicates is related to revision of the drafts of fiction plays essays that he was also trying to work out and some of that process also is visible by bringing it to a bare classical outline. For example, there are very few adjectives in Camus writing. So he wanted a very bare classical outline because again as I said he wanted to be an objective writer alright the second subdivision that Thorie has made it relates to Camus reading to explore philosophical questions about the meaning of life. And again I would like to take you back to the last lecture where I pointed out to you that we are trying to find common ground for our discussion and one of the ideas that we have emphasized both in module 1 and in the second module is related to reading process. So whether you are a writer like Albert Camus who actually was not tied down to the literary establishment or creative writing teaching scenario in any way or you are a freelance writer the fact remains that reading is an extremely vital part of your vocation as a writer. If you notice Camus himself was then outside this framework of any of the literary establishments and therefore his writing his reading was governed by the questions that persisted in his mind. So one of the philosophers whom he read with great sense of involvement was the German philosopher Nietzsche the 19th century German philosopher who actually had critiqued the notion of God. If you read Nietzsche yourself you will discover more about it but at this point in time I may just mention that some of the concerns that Nietzsche really dealt with in great detail were related also to the ensuing nihilism. That is if you do not really have a sense of God or if you do not find this notion of a unifying force that provides all the meanings to you for your life then there is a kind of a void that is created and therefore the term nihilism it relates to a sense of purpose you know the absence of a sense of purpose that the nihilist feels as opposed to a person who really has many of the explanations about you know existence that the person finds fairly acceptable. So Nietzsche had explored the notion of God and thereby questioning any coherent sense of objective truth or meaning and this led to multiple perspectives that were possible. So this is one philosopher whose work Camus read very extensively and in the diaries from time to time he notes down some of the statements from Nietzsche. The second reading list of Camus actually refers to works by Dostoevsky the Russian novelist who lived between 1821 and 1881 and in fact Dostoevsky the Russian novelist is often seen by many philosophers as a precursor of existentialism this philosophy that I have talked to you about in terms of a philosophy that Sartre, Albert Camus and Simon de Beau are many of them really explored, developed and debated. Of course Camus did not like that label but the fact remains that he was exploring ideas of nihilism which existentialism has explored ideas of meaning of life that Dostoevsky has explored. And so he extensively read Dostoevsky and translated his work also, adapted his work also and primarily he was interested in many of the ideas that Dostoevsky fictionalized about you know in terms of the turbulence of his own historical period and how many new ideas defined and consumed the characters and therefore what was the sense of being that emerged out of that turmoil. These are all time great novelists and therefore it is not surprising that Albert Camus was gripped by Dostoevsky. There is another part of this literary notebook that Thorey comments on and he says that there was this resultant writing so he was reading all these philosophers and writers and in fact actually he clubbed writing and philosophy. He had said in a carnage that if you want to write a novel philosophize or be a philosopher. So this resultant writing is related to response to his travel and the outbreak of war. Those of you who are more historically governed I think you will find this very very useful in terms of mapping out that period. There is this recurrence of the theme of the finality of death. So in existentialism the notion of death and life they become extremely powerful notions from which all the philosophical constructs are made. The immense value according to physical life. So if there is no sense of purpose in life then your physical life that gains a kind of intensity a sense that within this mortal experience with no meaning provided that sustains you your physical life becomes much more important. Intellectual lucidity so that is hard really so on the one hand there is no sense of coherence and then you try to achieve this coherence through your writing. So then writing takes on much more of a philosophical role than usual and there is rejection of any religious belief. There are also entries in carnage which he did not use subsequently in his published work. So there is much that has been edited out by Albert Camus in terms of pursuing some of the ideas. So what is discarded also may be of interest to those who begin to feel a passion for Albert Camus's writings. Finally Thori points out that there is great deal of the internal conflict that one can read between the lines that is visible while reading carnage and he pins it down as a conflict related to the intellectual recognition of the need for discipline because without discipline you really cannot sit down and write and at the same time the profound anarchy of his temperament. So now I think what we need to do is to look at this genre of literary notebooks and I think it is important if you are really getting serious about writing because autobiography let us say this is not an autobiography but because in the autobiography the author is the protagonist the term protagonist refers to the fact that the writer or a person becomes the central character. So in the autobiography whoever is writing the autobiography is the protagonist of that narrative but the literary diary is you know you should see it with reference to both autobiographical writing and fiction or drama that is creative work that is created out of this process. The literary diary is betweeks and between these two poles autobiography and fiction because it is certainly an intervening stage of the creative imagination in which distancing becomes visible that is so you are not talking only about yourself you are talking about characters you have constructed. So there is a kind of distancing a kind of separation there is a different process that unfolds here and in that sense I would suggest that you can go back to the first module in which we talked about Bildung's roman and also the fact that Bildung's roman gives you a sense of how a writer creates a character or an ideal which allows for symbolic interpretation. There are so many varieties that are available within that so in some sense I think this diary the first volume provides you a sense of how Bildung's roman also unfolds. So it makes it infinitely more interesting when you sit down with the details and sit down with your own possibilities I think it becomes fascinating process. Now we would only choose some excerpts from Albert Camus's diary because I think one of these is just amazingly you know fascinating and before that let me also point out that diaries or notebooks that we are talking about these do touch on the amorphous nature of human experience fictionalizing is a way to find points and moments of significance. So it is like out of this amorphous experience there are some points that reveal some sharp sense of meaning. I would definitely place before you Kundara's definition of fiction as a form where he points out that it really touches on the realm which is left out by analysis. So experiential realms related to the sense of the being the human being how he or she feels and it is very very hard to really talk about it and in that sense I think you really would benefit from reading Kundara also but all you can begin to see how some kind of a preliminary shape of fictional work begins to emerge in carnage and this I want to substantiate. So now one thing one emotion that dominated Camus consciousness is related to the experience of absurdity as I said this is a philosophical term please look at it as a philosophical term and not as a loose term that is used in general. So what is this sense first of all and then I will give you a quote different kind of interlinked quote August 37 this is what Camus has noted down a man who has sought life where most people find it marriage work etc. and who suddenly notices while reading a fashion catalog how foreign he has been to his own life as it is seen in fashion catalogs. Part one is life until then part two life as a game part three rejection of compromise and the discovery of truth in nature. So this moment when the person discovers or is played depending on your point of view by the sense of absurdity. So this is this was a preoccupation in Albert Camus. In an interview given to Roger Quillard he had pointed out that this entry reflected his first conscious formulation of the theme of the outsider it also shows that in his first idea of the character and the character he is referring to is the protagonist of the outsider the famous novel the character is called Muresault. He said it also shows that in his first idea of the character Camus intended Muresault to be seen as a man who had gone through the experience of the absurd before the story began. And that is a very important point for those of you who have been reading Albert Camus this is an extremely important point. And so now I think what I can do is to take you to some really important interlinked reading and this is a diary entry that I am placing before you those of you who have read some of his work will immediately recognize it. The diary entry goes like this to P that is the way it is there today mother died or it might have been yesterday I do not know I had a telegram from the home mother died funeral tomorrow yours faithfully it does not mean anything it might have been yesterday. So now this is the diary entry and this is exactly the beginning of the outsider if you want to really understand the outsider fully of course you will have to read the book and I would suggest that you read this novel which will make for some you know intriguing reading because there are very very intriguing aspects but I think if you place it in terms of this frame of reference of the character who has already experienced absurdity that is lack of meaning in his social and philosophical framework then I think you will be able to understand the novel better and if that also does not really help you I would strongly recommend that you see the 1967 film The Stranger which is based on the outsider this is an Italian movie but the English version or it is I think been dubbed into English that is also available on YouTube in which Muir Salt has been played by the famous actor Marcelo Mastrione. It is a fantastic film and I think that will also help you understand the dynamics of what is being explored by this great writer. On page 59 according to Thori this particular statement that we just read out he has a few observations about it. He says that what subsequently became the opening sentences of the outsider were written straight out without any corrections. The note 2 p gives the impression that Kamu may originally have intended to describe the kind of person Muir Salt was before the discovery of the absurd and his mother's death. Again that is an exercise that you yourself can undertake a creative exercise in order to see what if you know you had captured Muir Salt as a fictional character before the death of his mother and before he had experienced absurdity that would be a very useful exercise for creative composition. Now in terms of interrelated reading one can point out that there is explicit transference of notebook entry to the outsider but what it teaches us is also the use of first person singular because from autobiographical writing where a writer is the protagonist to this distilling that we talked about now we have the novel in which the narration is from the point of view of the protagonist Muir Salt and it is first person point of view. There is also this stance of objectivity and the slow unraveling of Muir Salt's absurdist consciousness. Muir Salt continues to watch everything as if disconnected with I would say some very very disastrous consequences that also have become very controversial and I suppose you can bring in Saeed and have a sort of reading of this particular novel from the position of Algerian point of view that will also give you some interesting and important but disturbing questions. The language also of this novel is spared down to the bare bones of conversation it is very very bare and it is very very austere and very very lucid from his point of view. There is an entry in this diary on the absurd itself is titled on the absurd and this is what Camus has to say almost as if he was talking to himself, Kirillov is right and then he refers to the character of Kirillov from Dostoevsky's The Possessed you remember we mentioned Dostoevsky the great Russian writer who had influenced Camus in a very profound way. So he refers to the character of Kirillov not any other character but this character from The Possessed Dostoevsky's portrayal of life and ideas and how characters are consumed by ideas we have already referred to. Now Kirillov is a philosopher engineer and he is also a nihilist that is a person who does not find that there is any pre-given meaning in life. So life is devoid of any given meaning. There is a nihilist who believes that one can conquer fear of death by killing oneself and in that sense he is a truly absurdist character. So those of you who have started reading the myth of Sisyphus you will see how this notion of death, life all these issues are explored philosophically by Albert Camus in the myth of Sisyphus. Camus went on to adapt this novel for the stage in 1959 as I said to you earlier that writers do not really make a sharp separation between genre, literary genre and certainly I think sometimes they do not even know which form will work for them. So Camus was really actually preoccupied with drama as a form. I think that sat very well with his own desire to find public spaces for discussion and for you know interaction and transformations. So but this particular novel was adapted by Albert Camus. It is in three parts, it has three acts. Camus was involved in various aspects of theatre and it had a very, very deep impact on him in terms of even maybe the way his fiction is shaped. I cannot really make a very sharp connection between these two but certainly to look at his own connection with theatre it may be pointed out that in addition to adaptation of the possessed he acted as Ivan in Coppio's adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Brother's Carbazzov. So he was into acting, he was into production, he was also into writing plays and he wrote a manifesto of his theatre where he pointed out the difference between fiction and drama. Indirectly this becomes visible. He said that theatre is an art demanding an exceptional degree of understanding between movements, voices and bodies. As you know yourself drama is a form which is very, very physically governed. So what you see or read in fiction it really influences your own imagination. You have to imaginatively, vividly reconstruct it whereas in drama the ideas, the experience everything even the milieu is physicalized. And in that sense even the gestures of characters, their language all of these actually cumulatively add to the presentation of the playwright's vision of a particular kind of experience. And therefore he pointed out and he was sharply aware of the fact that it may be, it may seem a bit coarse as a form because there is so much of physicalization involved. But at the same time it is a form that requires a very different kind of sense of how human beings move in those selected important moments and how their voices can weigh meaning, how their bodies can weigh meaning also. So this is something that we cannot take note of when we move to module 3 and 4 where we are also interested in looking at drama and its possibilities. I would say that it is really exciting to access this unfinished shorthand. If you find a particular writer interesting one does require role models in one's field of specialization and Camus certainly could be one of those that you can have your own choices. I think it provides certain nuances for Bildungsroman that you can discuss in order to see how the sense of the self and society is constructed by us actively. We are active makers of these meanings, we are not just passive recipients of meaning. This is a form of apprenticeship that leaves one enriched with the added advantage of undertaking the reading according to one's own choice of time and space. The writers do not necessarily compartmentalize their engagement with different literary genres. However, many writing textbooks have focused on genre specific approach to the teaching of creative writing. That distinction also you may just take note of and see what works for you better both have their own value. The genres of journal or diary shows a link with the habit of writing. It also helps you see how one has to be very regular actually one also has to feel that passion otherwise it really does not work out. According to the workbook that we had also earlier pointed out, the writer's journal according to Cusick and Newman there are many sorts of journals as there are writers. Not only do the diaries let you into the secrets of creative problem solving and I like that word very much problem solving but they are gripping an original works in their own right. Now, of course that is subject to your own aesthetic evaluations I am a bit uncomfortable with that statement. Now, let us move to part 3 where we would give you some samples of the classroom work that we did in this direction. What we had done is to place number of diary entries to begin with there are different ways in which this has been shared with the students but what I have done here is to not really go into the variation of what we tried out depending on the nature of the group. But to give you a question paper so that you also know what kind of focus is required what kind of value systems we are encouraging while undertaking such a reading exercise such a exercise of knowledge building also. So I would not really read this I will just place this first part before you because it is like the instructions that every instructor provides but what you can notice is that is the emphasis on the correct use of language I think that is something that Gardner had also emphasized and we also believe that is very important. Now the question that was posed before the students was to read the given excerpt unfortunately I will not be able to read the full excerpt because again of copyright problems but I will read only parts of it but there was an excerpt that was given. This was an open book exam and therefore the students brought couple of books that we were dealing with or couple of essays we were dealing with and so at that point they could dip into whatever was mentioned in this question. So the excerpt was given and I asked them to identify or label the genre it exemplifies. Also asked them to summarize the content of the given piece in their own words and the summary I had suggested should be written in such a way that the genre features are highlighted. I also asked them to give reasons for the label they had chosen by describing the features of the genre that the text substantiates. So this was the exercise as I said it was open book exercise and there were couple of these excerpts that were floating around some books that were also available for their reading and at that time. So this particular excerpt is part 2 from the source where it was taken from you I think will now identify the source. A in the present B in the past chapter A 1 the house before the world introduction memories affair with Lucien A 2 house before the world his youth chapter 2 B 2 Lucien tells her acts of infidelity. So this sort of goes on and actually as I said I will not place the rest of the reading material before you but I will certainly highlight parts of this material so that you also have a sense of what the student was responding to. And so the plan that is given here it goes on and in fact it moves again to chapter A 3 then chapter B 4 chapter A 4 chapter B 5 chapter A 5 and it sort of develops the A and B interwoven pattern in a sort of sustained manner so that you can also see a rising crescendo and you also see some kind of a summation or a conclusion of that but the last chapter is a title night and the stars Catherine that seems to be a very favorite thing of this particular writer who I think you by now know is Albert Camus because it really reminds me also of his really powerful intriguing story from exile and the kingdom the first one the adulterous woman and her you know moments out in the you know at night all alone and watching the sky and the earth and you know all the experiences related to that very very ambiguous and very powerful. So anyway this is the whole piece but also added to it is the story of Patras and his story of the man sentenced to death and he is describing a man who is being sentenced to death as I said death is a very important theme in Albert Camus and also execution you know trial the patterns of justice all those also are equally important and so he says I can see him the person who is to be executed I can see him he is inside me and so this goes on in this fashion and he also says I know that I now I am going to write this narrator there comes a time when the tree after much suffering must bear fruit every winter ends in a spring I must bear witness afterwards the cycle cycle will start again. So even when one begins to read great writers carefully I think one should keep a sense of provisionality and the flux of experience both are very very important in the writing process and I think I would like to end this session by pointing out what Albert Camus himself had to say about the notion of absurdity he said that this word actually has a unhappy history and he what he was trying to do in the myth of Sisyphus was to actually look for a method and not a doctrine he says I was practicing methodical doubt I was trying to make a tabula rasa on the basis of which it would then be possible to construct something and he goes on to say that I definitely did not think that it would I would stop with the notion of absurdity he says it does have nothing but does nothing have a meaning I have never believed that we could remain at this point even as I was writing the myth of Sisyphus I was thinking about the essay on revolt that I would write later on in which I would attempt after having described the different aspects of the feeling of the absurd to describe the different attitudes of man in revolt I think it is a very very important you know point that should help you understand this whole complex exercise and not take writers in a you know in terms of a very fixed meaning that their work provides us with this I would like to end the session. Thank you very much.