Albert Camus - Discours de réception du prix Nobel, 1957

English translation: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1957/camus-speech.html

EN: Albert Camus' Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech, given at Stockholm on December 10, 1957. He was awarded the prize "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times".

FR : Discours d'Albert Camus pour la réception du prix Nobel de littérature, donné à Stockholm le 10 décembre 1957. Le prix lui a été décerné pour « l'ensemble d'une œuvre qui met en lumière les problèmes se posant de nos jours à la conscience des hommes ».

Retranscription complète : http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1957/camus-speech-f.html

Sir, Madam, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies
and Gentlemen,

In receiving the distinction with which your
free Academy has so generously honoured me,

my gratitude has been profound, particularly
when I consider the extent to which this recompense

has surpassed my personal merits. Every man,
and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants

to be recognized. So do I. But I have not
been able to learn of your decision without

comparing its repercussions to what I really
am. A man almost young, rich only in his doubts

and with his work still in progress, accustomed
to living in the solitude of work or in the

retreats of friendship: how would he not feel
a kind of panic at hearing the decree that

transports him all of a sudden, alone and
reduced to himself, to the centre of a glaring

light? And with what feelings could he accept
this honour at a time when other writers in

Europe, among them the very greatest, are
condemned to silence, and even at a time when

the country of his birth is going through
unending misery?

I felt that shock and inner turmoil. In order
to regain peace I have had, in short, to come

to terms with a too generous fortune. And
since I cannot live up to it by merely resting

on my achievement, I have found nothing to
support me but what has supported me through

all my life, even in the most contrary circumstances:
the idea that I have of my art and of the

role of the writer. Let me only tell you,
in a spirit of gratitude and friendship, as

simply as I can, what this idea is.

For myself, I cannot live without my art.
But I have never placed it above everything.

If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because
it cannot be separated from my fellow men,

and it allows me to live, such as I am, on
one level with them. To me, art is not a solitary rejoicing.

It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of

common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most

humble and the most universal truth. And often
he who has chosen the fate of the artist because

he felt himself to be different soon realizes
that he can maintain neither his art nor his

difference unless he admits that he is like
the others. The artist forges himself to the

others, midway between the beauty he cannot
do without and the community he cannot tear

himself away from. That is why true artists
scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand

rather than to judge. And if they have to
take sides in this world, they can perhaps

side only with that society in which, according
to Nietzsche's great words, not the judge

but the creator will rule, whether he be a
worker or an intellectual.

By the same token, the writer's role is not
free from difficult duties. By definition

he cannot put himself today in the service
of those who make history; he is at the service

of those who suffer it. Otherwise, he will
be alone and deprived of his art.

Not all the armies of tyranny with their millions
of men will free him from his isolation, even

and particularly if he falls into step with
them. But the silence of an unknown prisoner,

abandoned to humiliations at the other end
of the world, is enough to draw the writer

out of his exile, at least whenever, in the
midst of the privileges of freedom, he manages

not to forget that silence, and to transmit
it in order to make it resound by the means of art.

None of us is great enough for such a task.
But in all circumstances of life, in obscurity

or temporary fame, cast in the irons of tyranny
or for a time free to express himself,

the writer can win the heart of a living community
that will justify him, on the one condition

that he will accept to the limit of his abilities
the two tasks that constitute the greatness

of his craft: the service of truth and the
service of liberty. Because his task is to

unite the greatest possible number of people,
his art must not compromise with lies and

servitude which, wherever they rule, breed
solitude. Whatever our personal weaknesses may be,

the nobility of our craft will always
be rooted in two commitments, difficult to

maintain: the refusal to lie about what one
knows and the resistance to oppression.

For more than twenty years of an insane history,
hopelessly lost like all the men of my generation

in the convulsions of time, I have been supported
by one thing: by the hidden feeling that to

write today was an honour because this activity
was a commitment - and a commitment not only

to write. Specifically, in view of my powers
and my state of being, it was a commitment

to bear, together with all those who were
living through the same history, the misery

and the hope we shared. These men, who were
born at the beginning of the First World War,

who were twenty when Hitler came to power
and the first revolutionary trials were beginning,

who were then confronted as a completion of
their education with the Spanish Civil War,

the Second World War, the world of concentration
camps, a Europe of torture and prisons -

these men must today rear their sons and create
their works in a world threatened by nuclear destruction.

Nobody, I think, can ask them
to be optimists. And I even think

that we should understand - without ceasing to fight
it - the error of those who in an excess of despair

have asserted their right to dishonour
and have rushed into the nihilism of the era.

But the fact remains that most of us, in my
country and in Europe, have refused this nihilism

and have engaged upon a quest for legitimacy.
They have had to forge for themselves an art

of living in times of catastrophe in order
to be born a second time and to fight openly

against the instinct of death at work in our
history.

Each generation doubtless feels called upon
to reform the world. Mine knows that it will

not reform it, but its task is perhaps even
greater. It consists in preventing the world

from destroying itself. Heir to a corrupt
history, in which are mingled fallen revolutions,

technology gone mad, dead gods, and worn-out
ideologies, where mediocre powers can today destroy

all yet no longer know how to convince, where
intelligence has debased itself to become

the servant of hatred and oppression, this
generation has had, both within and without,

re-establish, starting from its own negations,
a little of that which constitutes the dignity

of life and death. In a world threatened by
disintegration, in which our grand inquisitors

run the risk of establishing forever the kingdom
of death, it knows that it should, in an insane

race against the clock, restore among the
nations a peace that
is not servitude, reconcile anew labour and

culture, and remake with all men the Ark of
the Covenant. It is not certain that this

generation will ever be able to accomplish
this immense task, but already it is rising

everywhere in the world to the double challenge
of truth and liberty and, if necessary,

knows how to die for it without hate. Wherever it
is found, it deserves to be saluted and encouraged,

particularly where it is sacrificing itself.
In any event, certain of your complete approval,

it is to this generation that I should like
to pass on the honour that you have just given me.

At the same time, after having outlined the
nobility of the writer's craft, I should have

put him in his proper place. He has no other
claims but those which he shares with his

comrades in arms: vulnerable but obstinate,
unjust but impassioned for justice, doing

his work without shame or pride in view of
everybody, not ceasing to be divided between

sorrow and beauty, and devoted finally to
drawing from his double existence the creations

that he obstinately tries to erect in the
destructive movement of history. Who,

after all this, can expect from him complete solutions
and high morals? Truth is mysterious, elusive,

always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous,
as hard to live with as it is elating.

We must march toward these two goals, painfully
but resolutely, certain in advance of our

failings on so long a road. What writer would
from now on in good conscience dare set himself up

as a preacher of virtue? For myself, I
must state once more that I am not of this kind.

I have never been able to renounce the
light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom

in which I grew up. But although this nostalgia
explains many of my errors and my faults,

it has doubtless helped me toward a better
understanding of my craft. It is helping me still

to support unquestioningly all those
silent men who sustain the life made for them in the world

only through memory of the return
of brief and free happiness.

Thus reduced to what I really am, to my limits
and debts as well as to my difficult creed,

I feel freer, in concluding, to comment upon
the extent and the generosity of the honour

you have just bestowed upon me, freer also
to tell you that I would receive it as an

homage rendered to all those who, sharing
in the same fight, have not received any privilege,

but have on the contrary known misery and
persecution. It remains for me to thank you

from the bottom of my heart and to make before
you publicly, as a personal sign of my gratitude,

the same and ancient promise of faithfulness
which every true artist repeats to himself in silence every day.