You there! What’s to-day, my fine fellow goodreader? Christmas day? Humbug, nay! Today is the day I ramble to you about Albert Camus’ The Fall! Come, You there! What’s to-day, my fine fellow goodreader? Christmas day? Humbug, nay! Today is the day I ramble to you about Albert Camus’ The Fall! Come, come, get yourself a drink. I’m buying. You know, The Fall, the one where Clamence monologues to a stranger at a bar for days on end—he must enjoy it as he returns again and again while also accompanying Clamence on walks—and he implicates all of humanity in a story that surrounds someone leaping from a bridge. What’s that? Angels getting wings when a bell rings? No no no, Clamence not Clarence, and a totally different bridge, different vibes. And there are no angels here, mon cher, and one of the many ‘falls’ that make up the titular The Fall is a fall from one’s own grace in recognition of your own flaws and guilt over actions. Or even your inactions. Happy stuff, eh? Drink up, and now where were we? Ah yes, Albert Camus, 1956, still riding the high of his celebrated novels and war hero status from his time in the French resistance, though this tale takes us far from his home in Paris or the Algeria of to a bar in Amsterdam curiously named Mexico City. You are asking me why Amsterdam? Well, the canals of course! They make rings around the city and if ‘Amsterdam's concentric canals resemble the circles of hell,’ Clamence says, this bar would be ‘ in the last circle,’ This fall for which our narrator monologues parallels a descent into hell a la Dante Alighieri. But now you must ask yourself, is Clamence our Virgil or perhaps the devil himself? Considered to be a highly personal and described by Jean-Paul Sartre as ‘perhaps the most beautiful and the least understood’ of Camus’ works, The Fall is a brilliant plunge into existential quandaries on ethical living, judgment, freedom and more as our narrator weaves his tale towards the shocking heart of the matter.
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There, you see, the circles of Amsterdam
What’s that, mon ami? Who is Clamence? Oh yes, yes, I suppose I should start with him. Jean-Baptiste Clamence—the name a reference to John the Baptist I’m sure you understand, though the goodness of John is in direct contrast to the goodness of our narrator, you shall see, though the only person putting his head of a platter is himself—was a lawyer. A good one, you see, he lets us know how much he helped those in need and was an ideal humanitarian. His earlier monologues—the course of the book is several days of conversation, but don’t worry I won’t keep you that long. But please, order another drink on me in the meantime—but early on he appears entirely self-satisfied. He lists his accomplishments in sports, career and women, and assures you he is a good person. People who go on and on about being a good person are always actually good people, right? Oh you disagree? Well surely his litany of good deeds can—wait, whats that? You mean to tell me that good deeds are inherently selfish in at least some form? The egoism vs altruism debate?Ah yes, Knut Hamsun discusses this well in Mysteries, that the recognition or even simply feeling good about oneself is a reward and he thereby questions if there can be any truly selfless acts. ‘I admitted only superiorities in me and this explained my good will and serenity,’ our narrator here admits, ‘when I was concerned with others, I was so out of pure condescension, in utter freedom, and all the credit went to me: my self-esteem would go up a degree.’ Well surely this puts some light on his earlier statements about how he ‘never felt comfortable except in lofty surroundings. Even in the details of daily life, I need to feel above.’ Perhaps this isn’t just building height, though a high apartment is a status symbol, and more an indication of his need to feel superior. ‘That's the way man is, cher monsieur,’ he says, ‘he has two faces: he can't love without self-love.’
‘I was always bursting with vanity. I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life, which could be heard in everything I said.’’
So now we are getting to it, the pristine veneer he presents of his life begins to show cracks, slowly spidering like a windshield once a stone has struck it. Clamence notices it as well, and several events in his life make him pause and reflect on himself. Hearing a distant laughter unsettles him, and not just from a sense of FOMO. His confessional monologue details a fight with a motorcyclist and a bridge suicide where he regrettably did not act and the weight of these memories are like a stone around his ankle that precipitates his plunge through the personal circles of existential hell. The bridge incident will haunt him, even in leisurely moments upon a cruise, and is the moment that all the book revolves around, caught up in its gravitational pull not unlike the way the beach murder is the center to his earlier novel, The Stranger.
‘I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.’
Now some critics have derived this to be, in part, a criticism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Paris leftists. Oliver Gloag writes in his Albert Camus: A Short Introduction—an excellent and succinct work of criticism I shall lend you if you like after our drinks—that Camus saw that they ‘spoke of helping others but did not concretely help them.’ Many others have seen this book on the whole as Camus’ own self-criticism as well. Have you seen a photo of Camus, mon cher? Surely Clamence’s athletic description of himself could produce a striking portrait of the author in the mind's eye. Rumor has it the bridge scene mimics the suicide of his own wife, Francine, which he alluded to in a letter to his lover, the actress María Casares. Yes, my friend, Camus had many lovers under Francine’s nose, in fact the car accident that took his life was on a trip to where his three mistresses had all received letters from him announcing three different dates of arrival to ensure he had time with them all. Camus’s less than flattering thoughts on women as expressed in his diaries, Gloag tells us, are shared by Clamence himself who finds women a bore aside from intercourse and admits he lies to them to get them into bed.
‘We have no need of God to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men are enough, with our help.’
Not awesome I know, nor is him blithely using his wife’s own suicide attempt, but thats The Fall for you. We are all guilty in some way, but who are we to judge? ‘Today we are always as ready to judge as we are to fornicate,’ Clamence says, something that still strikes a chord in our day where online outrage offers swift and widespread condemnation and a snarky judgment is a sure-fire way to increased clicks to boost social media metrics. I’m a social media person myself by trade, studied it and all, and outrage marketing is a powerful persuasionary route. I told you our narrator was a lawyer but can you guess what he is now? No, he’s not an art thief, good guess though as the dubious possession of the van Eyck painting (it is a true story that this painting was stolen) does work to double his connection with John the Baptist featured in the painting with his finger pointed towards God, a great juxtaposition with the depiction of the narrator pointing towards a chaotic empty sky devoid of God:
‘When all is said and done, that’s really what I am, having taken refuge in a desert of stones, fogs, and stagnant waters – an empty prophet for shabby times, Elijah without a messiah, choked with fever and alcohol, my back up against this moldy door, my finger raised toward a threatening sky, showering imprecations on lawless men who cannot endure any judgment.’
More on the existential absence of God in a book on judgment in a moment, but our narrator here describes himself as a judge-penitent. What is that? Well, its ambiguous, and linguistic ambiguity is much of the way this novel thrives and is Clamence’s charm: ‘You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.’ David R. Ellison asserts in his essay on the novel that it can be read as a ‘textually complex reading’ on The Rebel, so there is an interesting juxtaposition from his statement that ‘only clear language, the simple word, can save us from this death,’ with Clamence’s labyrinthian monologues here full of ambiguous language and inauthentic self-indulgence. Sorry? Yes, the judge-penitent. Well, essentially, he is a penitent because he is confessing his sins (quite literally in the monologue) but also a judge because, well, he wants to judge you. And he’s going to, he’s going to implicate the whole of humanity. The judge-penitent gets a sense of power from judging others, and is something Camus accused Sartre of being, feeling people like this were dangerous as they could quickly rationalize themselves into committing the same atrocities as Stalin.
‘People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.’
Remember the laughter we spoke of earlier, the one that unsettled him so much? It was laughter that made him think of judgment and those who pass it with sadistic glee. Admitting himself a sinner, he realizes laughter is his own way ‘of silencing the laughter, of avoiding judgment personally.’ Laughter is his escape, and if we must imagine Sisyphus happy then perhaps we should also imagine him laughing. Maybe making lewd jokes about rolling his balls. No, don’t cheers me for that. ‘Don’t wait for the Last Judgment,’ he says, ‘it takes place every day’ and this is a true tragedy. Camus was against judgment as he often saw it as absurd, such as the way he wrote about it in Reflections on the Guillotine:
‘To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.’
What does Clamence say about god you ask? Well, for starters, he tells us ‘God’s sole usefulness would be to guarantee innocence,’ but he also believes there is no innocence in this world so thereby no need for a god. And with no god, it is humanity that must do the judging. ‘But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others,’ he says of his solution to be happy and feel superior, ‘consequently, there is no escape. Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched.’ This is why the penitent part is also important though, because by confessing he is absolved, though this reminds me of when people talk about saying sorry isn’t enough and need to see it reflected in our actions. We must act, not just judge or engage in self-flagellation to avoid actual action. Follow? Here, I’ll order one last round.
‘We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.’
I’m sure I’ve exhausted you, but I must reiterate that The Fall is a marvelous novel. Elusive and complex, it is an excellent look in the mirror at our own guilt and the ways we flail about trying to understand what to do with it. It is a novel that uses much religious symbolism (you see the dove fly about the novel, for instance) and language to construct this very existential discourse. Laughter may be the best medicine, they say, but here it is a strategic plan to obtain power and superiority, laughing and judging all the way. An absolutely outstanding novel, all intricately woven in under 150pgs. Thank you for you time, I’ll pay our tab, and no I won’t judge you. Or will I…
5/5
‘We are odd, wretched creatures, and if we merely look back over our lives, there’s no lack of occasions to amaze and horrify ourselves.’...more
I’ve always found these Short Introduction series to be a mixed bag, though consistently strong enough to keep coming back to them as supplementary reI’ve always found these Short Introduction series to be a mixed bag, though consistently strong enough to keep coming back to them as supplementary reading. Oliver Gloag’s work on Albert Camus here is commendable, blending analysis of Camus’ works with an overview of his life. Gloag, a professor of French studies at UNCA, has often witten on the topics of Camus and Sartre and there stances towards imperialism and colonialism (You can read his collection of articles on them for the magazine Jacobin here), which allows for some really interesting critical looks at Camus through this lens. Much of this book deals with Camus via the ways he interacted with the society and politics around him, starting with his youth in Algeria, his time under the occupation of Paris where worked as editor-in-chief for Combat as part of the French resistance, and moving through his relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre and their arguments over Marxism and the Algerian Revolution, to his untimely death in a car accident at the age of 46. Here's a brief overview of what Gloag has to say.
The usual biographical elements are here, with Gloag focusing a lot of Camus’ journalism and the interplay of his actions and philosophies. While I would have enjoyed more engagement with his novels and plays, they are still covered quite well as a general overview with some really interesting analysis on the pieces individually as well as a collective Camus oeuvre. This has me really eager to read his unfinished, final novel The First Man as Gloag analyzes it as being the most concise expression of Camus’ works and a key to understanding him. I enjoyed the was he threaded Camus’ thoughts on absurdity through his analysis of his works and there is a great deal devoted to Camus’ theories on resistance. Having just finished The Plague I was quite interested to read his takes on it, which Gloag seems fairly critical of (he argues that if it is an allegory it is not successful as such as it takes away the agency of those who committed evils) and transitions this well into a discussion of The Rebel.
Everyone has their own level of comfort with separating art from the artist, so do as you will, and Gloag does tend to tie the two pretty closely together. He focuses a lot of Camus’ journalism, which I found fascinating as I knew very little about it, and gets a lot into how Sartre and Camus sparred over topics like the USSR, an explanation on why Camus did not consider himself an existentialist, and his disagreements with other French philosophers on political issues. Reading any biography of people who tend to be idolized will always open up some disappointments, and I was not surprised but disappointed to read that Camus did not think highly of Simone de Beauvoir’s works (particularly The Second Sex, which he claimed embarrassed French men and Gloag writes that Camus was hostile to feminism in general). Gloag discusses Camus’ womanizing as well, writing that it was said the best way to reach Camus was to contact his wife, Francine, and ask her for the address of his current mistress (something printed in the press that embarrassed his wife though the two remained married until his death), asserting that this is likely why Camus wrote an essay in defense of Don Juan. He also sent his three mistresses each a letter with a different date of arrival for the journey during which he died in a car accident.
There is a lot spent at the end on Camus’ position on the Algerian Revolution, with Gloag stating that his works championing the spirit of rebellion did not extend to Algerian independence. He notes Camus either ignored or wrote vague, inaccurate lines in his articles about the mass killings of Algerians by French authorities stating ‘perhaps Camus was aware that widespread knowledge of these state-sponsered crimes would destroy credibility of France’s image as a benevolent and enlightened empire.’ Gloag writes about Camus and the revolution at length in this article, and Camus’ stance is still rather controversial (and understandably so). Camus would agree to a partially independent Algeria, one still reliant on France, but never full freedom, which is rather frustrating and Gloag points to his works to highlight Camus' stances as hypocritical. Gloag centers this as a major reason for his fallout with Sartre, along with Camus denouncing communism (Sartre’s own support of the Soviet Union remains controversial as well). Camus biographer Elizabeth Hawes would write that Camus maintains more of a mythic status in the US due to what she says is less engagement and understanding with Algerian and French politics, writing ‘There was a lot of the mythic to Camus. He was great looking, and he was heroic, and there was the resistance, he was the outsider.’
For those interested, The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud offers a really interesting look at Camus and the legacy of The Stranger (it is written from the POV of the brother to the unnamed man killed by Meursault) as well as frustrations with the aftermath of the revolution.
All-in-all this is a fairly solid overview of Albert Camus that examines the many complexities of the man. It is critical, but fairly so, and while it spends more time on his social and political engagement than on his books, this is to be expected. I do enjoy these short introductions as a general overview, but then always wish they were more in depth despite knowing they won’t be going in, but this does point you in the direction of topic of interest that have certainly been covered elsewhere....more
‘Camus allegorized war as plague, but plague, too, can be deployed as a political allegory.’
The Spring of 2020 shook up the world as the COVID pandemi‘Camus allegorized war as plague, but plague, too, can be deployed as a political allegory.’
The Spring of 2020 shook up the world as the COVID pandemic swept in. For Laura Marris, this was extra unsettling as she first caught wind of it spreading while in the city of Oran doing research for a new translation of Albert Camus’ famous novel about the city of Oran under lockdown from a deadly disease, the aptly titled La Peste, or The Plague. Traveling with Laura was Alice Kaplan, who was teaching the novel at Yale, neither yet aware ‘how much more immersed we were going to become.’ Together they have written States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic, which features rotating essays between Laura Marris and Alice Kaplan to discuss The Plague on aspects including the use of language and the interplay of past and present that also captures the ‘moments where the written and the real collide.’ Deeply engaging and intellectually stimulating, this would appeal to academic interests as well as those with a general interest in Camus, making for an excellent overview of his life and his literary efforts in general, and was an absolute joy to read alongside the novel.
The sections from Laura Marris tend to focus most on Camus’ use of language as well as her thoughts on translating the novel and her reasons for many of the choices. It was also interesting to hear about how this was basically her pandemic project, translating a fictional account of what was basically going on around her in real time. She discusses how she tried to avoid making it feel couched in the language of the current pandemic (scourge instead of pandemic, serum instead of vaccine, etc) and be as faithful to Camus’ intentions as possible. A big aspect is her focus on his use of restraint in the book and all the implications, which I have written on at length here in reviewing the book for those who are interested. By holding back the dazzle for a moment,’ she writes about how the restraint goes beyond the themes and into the experience of reading as well, ‘a writer can let someone look directly through the page, at the part of the world that hurts.’ She also discusses how it plays into so many of his larger literary and philosophical ideas. As he wrote in
‘‘Through style, the creative effort reconstructs the world, and always with the same slight distortion that is the mark of both art and protest…Art is an impossible demand given expression and form.’
For Camus, the book was about achieving that reconstruction of life. Discussing Camus’ own experience with tuberculosis, she analyzes the novel as a way of capturing how ‘his own struggles with illness made him confront his own mortality.’
I also enjoyed her segments on Tarrou, who she calls her favorite character (he is mine as well) and how he not only breaks her heart but Riuex’s as well. She points out that she points out, at the end, it is through Tarrou that Riuex recognizes most that the plague isn’t just some abstract idea they are fighting but concrete and violent and that ‘a plague can never be an abstraction when it takes human lives’ But also her discussion on how ‘Tarrou has to teach the hardest lesson: insignificance is a gateway into human life, and it’s also a gateway out.’ In this way she examines how little narratives within the narrative, such as the man Tarrou chronicles who spits on cats, are seemingly insignificant but also make up for the reality of life. That every individual life matters and has a story to tell, then tying this to his pursuit against death.
Alice Kaplan also has much to say about Tarrou, with her chapters addressing Camus’ world and personal history and passing it through the novel and into discussions of our modern pandemic. Kaplan discusses how Tarrou represents a major theme of Camus about social responsibility as a form of protest. Quoting an analysis of the novel by Jacqueline Rose, she shows how Camus believes we are all responsible for one another:
‘the plague will continue to crawl out of the woodwork—out of bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers—as long as human subjects do not question the cruelty and injustice of their social arrangements. We are all accountable for the ills of the world.’
I greatly enjoyed the segments that discuss our current issues in relation to the novel, though felt that there could have been a lot more of that. Having been written while it was all ongoing, though, I suppose not enough had been sorted out. I would love to see a book that does address this directly however. Though she does discuss how much separation was a major theme of the novel, originally intended to be titled ‘Les Séparés’, or The Separated Ones, and looks at how Zoom and other technology allowed people to be connected still, though as a pale imitation of actually being together.
Her chapters are quite interesting, discussing a lot of history about Camus and how it relates to the book. Mme Rieux, for instance, is based on Camus’ own mother. He had transcribed a conversation he had with his mother at the outbreak of WWII, and that conversation appears in the novel nearly verbatim, only substituting the word “war” for the word “plague. Another interesting thing I learned was that the refugee camps in Oran following the Spanish Civil War were the basis of the camps for the sick in the novel. She discusses much of Camus’ ideas of revolution and protest, though also that he did not support the Algerian Revolution which is quite disappointing. She does paint Camus as a complex figure, and I enjoyed learning a lot here. It could be said there is a bit of idolization of Camus here, which was quite noticeable reading it alongside Albert Camus: A Very Short Introduction which often feels rather antagonistic towards him, but it never seems saccharine or misguided in glossing over anything.
States of Plague is a fascinating read that offers a lot of insight, both textual and historical. I enjoyed the writings by both authors here (I really loved Marris’ essays on translation best, but I am biased) and I would encourage anyone who has read The Plague to give this a read. It is a bit short but it is certainly a wealth of knowledge, like having taken a college course on the novel itself. This was a great companion for reading The Plague.
‘He is converting his philosophy into corpses and—unfortunately for us—it’s a philosophy that’s logical from start to finish.’
Rome’s third emperor, Ca‘He is converting his philosophy into corpses and—unfortunately for us—it’s a philosophy that’s logical from start to finish.’
Rome’s third emperor, Caligula, had a short rule (A.D. 37-41) yet left a lasting legacy of carnage and brutality. Born Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus but nicknamed Caligula meaning “little boot” in reference to his military uniform, his tyrannical reign of terror and fiscal irresponsibility led to his assassination when he was 28 years old. While surviving sources are few, there is reason to believe his first few months as emperor were noble and tame and many believed mental illness may have contributed to his sadism. Albert Camus’ first play, Caligula, harnesses the story of the tyrant emperor in four acts that examine Camus’ ideas of absurdity, reinterpreting the historical figure through 20th century philosophical discourse (though Camus claimed it was not a philosophical play). Through a rather Nietzschean “will to power,” Camus depicts Caligula embracing absurdity through calculated logic, exemplifying the ideas that anything is possible and man must replace God as Caligula attempts to recreate the randomness of death and the arbitrariness of life while seeking to create meaning out of meaninglessness. An eminently readable work, Caligula interrogates heady ideas and thrives on drawing discomfort from the audience in a violent saga of absurdity, power and revolt.
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The assassination of Caligula, depicted by Giuseppe Mochetti
Camus began writing Caligula in 1937, and though he finished in 1939 it underwent several revisions before it was finally staged in Paris after the war. As he writes in his introduction, Camus intended himself to strut and fret his hour upon the stage as Caligula, and what a role it is with on stage murders and plenty of shouting and emotion. Camus adapted the play—primarily Cherea’s role—to fit his changing views on absurdity, though also, as Oliver Gloag argues in his book on Camus, in response to Hitler and the occupation of France. Lines were cut to ensure it didn’t seem apologetic for tyrants, and added Cherea’s line about fighting ideas ‘whose triumph would mean the end of the world’ as a direct callout against the Nazis. Gloag argue’s Cherea exists to tone down the absurd as ‘nihilistic purity was no longer defensible’ In the essay Camus and the Theater, Christine Margerrison writes that Camus expressed frustrations that the play was often misunderstood, being mistaken as an existentialist work (he adamantly refused the label, and considered existentialism ‘philosophical suicide’), being mistaken as a critique of Jean-Paul Sartre (he wrote it before the rise of Sartrean existentialism), or being a critique against tyrants or communism. Many of these elements are justifiable interpretations (or present in other works) though Camus stressed they overlooked the main purpose of the dilemas of freedom and violence, a revolt of the powerful against society, and an expression of living in absurdity through logic.
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French production of Caligula, 1945
This is an excellent play, and Camus launches us into the start of Caligula’s reign of violence by first showing the emperor in a moment of vulnerability. Following the death of his sister, Drusilla, Caligula contemplates that ‘life is quite intolerable,’ existence is absurd, and regrets being unable to obtain the literal moon to have something absurd, something ‘which isn’t of this world.’ What use is power if one can’t have the moon? It is a pivotal moment, one that hardens into a sadism where he has ‘resolved to be logical’ and seeks freedom at the expense of others.
‘I’m surrounded by lies and self-deception. But I’ve had enough of that; I wish men to live by the light of truth. And I’ve the power to make them do so. For I know what they need and haven’t got. They're without understanding and they need a teacher…’
The tyrannical ruler can, arguably, be seen as a tyranny of the academics and philosophers of the time as well, which Camus delves into more critically in The Fall. He seeks to punish his subjects, to become a god of sorts in the absence of one as he sees it. As Camus wrote in his notebooks ‘. If this world is meaningless then …it is on us to create God...we have only one way to create God and that is to become God.’ He first has everyone make a will to the State and decides he will execute people at random, like the arbitrariness of death (‘It has dawned on you that a man needn’t have done anything for him to die.’), and thus fund the empire. ‘If the Treasury has paramount importance, human life has none,’ he says (feels a critique on government and capitalism in general there), and preaches that ‘this world has no importance; once a man realizes that, he wins his freedom.’ This is a very different revolt than the sort he would be noteworthy for discussing in books like The Rebel, though Camus also implies the teachings of Caligula are not his own (another aspect that frustrated him when viewers assumed that was his aim). Though years of senseless and random murder does not make the people happy, and Caligula knows he is backing them into a corner that can only lead to his own murder at their hands.
‘Other artists create to compensate for their lack of power. I don’t need to make a work of art; I live it.’
Camus delivers a fascinating dichotomy with Caligula embracing the absurdity of existence and believing ‘freedom has no frontier,’ or ‘one is always free at someone else’s expense’ with the people who tend to avoid metaphysical thoughts of existence. We are disquieted by the action, with on stage murders, sexual assaults and constant humiliation. There is a counter-balance, however, in Cherea who on one hand understands Caligula’s quest for the absurd (and perhaps shares it) but cannot abide by the violence. He, in turn, also does not wish to commit it and struggles despite organizing an assassination. As Colin Davis argues in his essay Violence and Ethics in Camus, Cherea is an expression of what Camus wrote in his essays Neither Victims Nor Executioners that violence is ‘at the same time inevitable and unjustifiable’ as well the teachings in The Rebel of ‘conceding the existence of an ethical dilemma but endeavoring to overcome it.’
We also have Scipio who also seems a foil to Caligula, ‘perhaps because the same eternal truths appeal to us both,’ as Caligula observes, and is frustrated with Caligula’s rejection of beauty through his brutality. Though Caligula is not a hero, he is still an expression of Camus’ idea of revolting against the absurdity of existence, and Scipio rejects Caligula raging against the heavens and predicts ‘god-men’ will rise against him. As Alba della Fazia Amoia writes in her book of Camus criticism, ‘[Caligula’s] deliberate irrationality makes him a dadaistic figure, hihilitic in character and inevitably self-destroying’ and compares his body count to a plague—which caught my attention as Camus’ The Plague also features a group of men not conspiring but organizing to fight back the irrationality and arbitrariness of death in a sort of personified form. Though there the response is one that is more clearly “good” and justifiable (I love the line by Cherea here that ‘some actions are…more praiseworthy,’ though Davis says 'more beautiful' is a more accurate translation, and gets at what I'm attempting to say here) and not actually violent where here the revolt is one of bloodshed. As Caligula’s dying words are ‘I’m still alive’ we see that, though his body may have succumbed to death, his spirit of violence is very much alive in the new “will to power” (as Friedrich Nietzsche discussed, something Camus toned down in the play due to the Nazi’s embrace of his philosophy) enacted by the conspirators who have slain him. The moral dilemma of violence and freedom speaks loudly in the silence after the curtain falls.
‘All I need is for the impossible to be. The impossible!’
Caligula is part of what Camus termed the “Cycle of the Absurd” along with The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, but of all of them it seems to most leave us in a ponderous state as it asks us how people can apply meaning to meaninglessness, either by challenging the gods or becoming a god oneself, and then justify our actions for freedom in the face of violence or without causing harm to others. This is a subject of ethical living Simone de Beauvoir would address in The Ethics of Ambiguity and here we have Camus directly confronting the audience with that question to take home and grapple with. Caligula is an interesting play that works well as an exciting look at Caligula as a historical figure through modern philosophical inquiry while also functioning as another critical expression of Camus’ canon of ideas. I also enjoy seeing how his ideas morph over time, both in conjunction with his other works but also in response to the history that was happening in real time during the 30’s and 40’s. A problematic figure, but a brilliant one nonetheless, Albert Camus is a wonderful mind to see at work, especially one that can fret about the stage as it does here in Caligula. Also huge shoutout to Kushagri for inviting me to read this together, you should definitely check out her review here too!
4.5/5
‘Yet, really, it’s quite simple. If I’d had the moon, if love were enough, all might have been different.’...more
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