who applies phenomenology to study his own alienation. Camus contrives a
murder story in The Stranger (1942) in order to set up a Kafka-reprise trial in
the second part.
Camus did the most explicit work in redefining an ancestral literary canon.
His philosophical essays, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and The Rebel (1951),
depict a lineage of “metaphysical rebels”: the Romanticists with their Byronic
gestures of defying God; the Symbolist poets at their most iconoclastic, espe-
cially Rimbaud and Lautréamont, active in the period of the Paris Commune
of 1871; the nose-thumbing of the dadaists and surrealists of the 1920s, who
were the existentialists’ immediate literary predecessors. Sartre was more con-
cerned to define his philosophical ancestors (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger); he
also appropriated Freud—a popular market success in nonfiction, branching
off from the Brentano philosophical lineage—for a version of existential psy-
choanalysis,^10 and made the novelist-playwright Genet into an existentialist
“saint” (1952). Sartre’s and Camus’s dramas of the 1940s, in allegorical form
suitable for conveying rebellious messages under Nazi occupation, were stylis-
tically continuous with the modernist theater pioneered by Pirandello and
Anouilh in the 1920s and 1930s; they were joined with the plays of Beckett
and Ionesco in the 1950s under the Camusian label “theater of the absurd.”
In literature, the existentialists continued a well-established trajectory. In
ideologizing it with their philosophy, they disguised its social common denomi-
nator. The alienated stance which they depicted as their tradition arose with
the independence of the writers’ market. To be sure, not every market-oriented
writer conveyed a worldview bereft of values other than those of the sensitive
intellectual-creator; Scott, Balzac, and Dickens hit a vein of popularity based
on colorful entertainment while turning out novels as fast as they could write
them. These differences reflect the split between two forms of the writers’
market which emerged after the decline of patronage: between the work of
“highbrow” literary elitists writing to their own standards and “middlebrow”
writing for the middle-class public, with a morally respectable tone, moderately
reformist in politics, but withal entertaining for a leisure audience.^11 It was the
inwardly oriented, professionally self-contained writers who produced the
lineage of “metaphysical rebellion.” What Camus recounts is the history of
intellectual movements within this elite, who adopt successively aesthetic Ide-
alism, Romanticist individualism and pessimism, the art-for-art’s-sake aestheti-
cism of technical formalism and symbolism, and still later the épater-le-bour-
geois gestures of the dadaists and their successors.
Economically, the highbrow segment rarely has been able to support itself
on returns from the market. It arises where writers turn inward upon their
professional connections within the network of peers; the audience which alone
is given legitimacy to set standards of judgment are other elite writers. Such
Writers’ Markets: The French Connection^ •^773