Of course, it is not the realization of the absurd that is central here. It had center stage in the initial drafts of the play, which date from 1936— 1937. That experience, to which Two Sides of the Coin bears witness, transformed and transfigured Camus’s orientation from the sportive concerns of youth through the encounter with tuberculosis to the confrontation with finitude.
But what sense to make of finitude when all of our culturally embedded meanings point beyond? Here are the existential termites gnawing at the metaphysical foundations of the Western world. As Camus has noted on several occasions, metaphysical problems plague the modern world as never before—precisely because our once taken-for-granted foundations are no longer secure. Since this is the situation confronting contemporary experience, Camus’s attention has focused on alternative responses—to explore their logic and dissect their consequences.
One possible response is to go on as if nothing has changed. What is more normal than that, to which the patricians attest? Another is to focus upon immediate satisfactions, as do so many of Camus’s women, including Caesonia. While Scipio turns toward Nature as a quasi-salvific divinity, and
Cherea seeks to preserve the space for art and human relations in the face of a totalizing logic, Caligula finds these efforts derisive and self-deluding.
A twofold theme is being orchestrated here, and it is somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, the metaphysical order of things is unsatisfactory and must be changed. On the other hand, since things don’t make any ultimate sense, it is dishonest to act as if they do. Thus decency requires that we reorder our experience to coincide with the revised conception of the order of things. Here the focus is transformation not of the metaphysical structure of things, but rather of the existential quality of our lives. Caligula is a metaphysical rebel who embarks upon both courses of action at the same time— but not with the same energy.
In fact, although he sends Helicon off to find the moon, little attention is devoted to that project.3 Even more, by saying his need is for the impossible, he attests from the outset to the fact that he places little or no hope in the projected transformation of the metaphysical order of things. It is his own form of self-delusion. He thus embodies Camus’s sense that the absurd currently defines the limits of our experience, thus existentially constituting the situation with which we must come to terms.
The Psychic Subsoil
If there is no serious question about the actual possibility of a metaphysical revolution, the same is not true of the existential significance of the onto-logical need. Camus refers to this play, along with “The Misunderstanding,” as constituting “a theater of the impossible.” If a metaphysical revolution is clearly impossible, the passion motivating it may nonetheless express significant human needs that must be addressed and worked through. These two plays, he says, “try to give life to the apparently insoluble conflicts which must be traversed by all active thought before arriving at the only solutions which are worthwhile” (TRN, 1742). And he defends his attempt by noting, “For the dramatist the passion for the impossible is just as valid a subject for study as avarice or adultery Showing it in all its frenzy, illustrating the havoc it wreaks, bringing out its failure—such was my intention” (CTOP, vi).
That this passion for the impossible has, for Camus, deep roots in the human psyche should not be in doubt. One of the first indications of his focus upon Caligula appears in a January 1937 Notebook entry. Concluding an outline for Caligula or the Meaning of Death, Caligula observes that he “is not dead. . . . He is in each of us. If power were given to you, if you had enough heart, if you loved life, you would see unchained, this monster or this angel which you carry within you” (TRN, 1733). How can Camus claim that Caligula is a universal temptation or suggest that there is something angelic about such a monster? What is fermenting in this psychic subsoil?
It must be noted that this concern never leaves the play, even though it
does undergo significant alterations. In the 1947 version it is an embarrassed Cherea, not Caligula, who suggests that all of us harbor Caligula within us when he observes that “one cannot like an aspect of oneself which one always tries to keep concealed.” But there is no longer any suggestion of positive approbation of these traits. Three years earlier Cherea had been able to say, “I do not hate you. I understand and I approve of you” (TRN, 1765), only to have these phrases removed by 1947.
Clearly Camus is walking a fine line. There is something essentially human yet quite macabre about Caligula. To explore these depths was not nearly so touchy a matter in the pre—World
War II years. But with the onset of Nazism, of which Caligula can be seen as an unconscious premonition, it becomes clear that Camus has hit upon something both significant and quite dangerous.
AN ABSURD GOD
Condemned to Death
“Your pleading comes too late, the verdict’s given,” Caligula tells Cherea. “This world has no importance; once a man realizes that, he wins his freedom” (CTOP, 14). If there is no transcendent purpose to life, then there is no compelling reason to subject one’s actions to moral constraints. In ordinary circumstances we are prisoners of our fears of divine retribution or our hopes of divine salvation. Alone “among a nation of slaves” (TRN, 1759), Caligula is freed of such illusory scruples: freed to act upon whim, desire, or calculation. And so are we all, if we but realize it. That was the truth for which Kirlov died.
Of course, prudential concerns drawn from the realities of social intercourse and the practical demands of group living might limit the behavior of ordinary mortals. But these need not inhibit an emperor. Caligula thus concludes that “everything is permitted.” He will exercise the liberty of action that his insight, logic, and social position combine to make possible.
But there are other motives that move the emperor, as they do his artistic creator. Caligula is committed to the Truth—which functions as a reflective expression of that “passion for living” (TRN, 1727) that he shares with Scipio, Mersault, and the idealized youth of Camus’s Algeria. Life is too precious to be wasted through habit, or squandered in superficial social ritual. And yet it is ultimately meaningless. Caligula lives this ambiguity as he levels all values, thus bringing the truth of the absurd home to his subjects, while teaching them the value of that present which they took for granted.
I can see, too, what you’re thinking. What a fuss over a woman’s death! Bur that’s not it. . . . Love, what is it? Nothing much. Her death is . . . only the sign of a truth which makes the moon essential to me…. [But] I am completely surrounded by lies, and I want people to live in the truth. And I’ve the power to make them do it. Because I know what they lack. . . . They are deprived of understanding, and need a professor who knows what he is talking about (TRN, 16; CTOP, 8—9).
An Absurd Teacher
“Once more the gods have come to earth. They have assumed the human form of our heaven-born emperor, known to men as Caligula” (CTOP, 39). This new divinity is not, of course, the god of Judeo-Christian mythology. Caligula incarnates a rather different perspective. He comes to: “teach us the indifference that kindles love anew”; “inform us of the truth of this world which is that it has none”; and “grant us the strength to live up to this incomparable truth” (TRN, 63; CTOP, 40-1).
Such a god is not constrained by rationality or moral scruples, though he does act in accord with the logic of an absurd world. Being subject to no higher law, why would he not do
“whatever he felt like?” And being emperor, who is to stop him? “Intendant, you are to close the public granaries. I have signed a decree to that effect. . . famine begins tomorrow. We all know what famine means, it’s a plague. Tomorrow there will be a plague, and when it pleases me I will put an end to it. After all, I don’t have so many ways of proving that I am free. One is always free at the expense of others. It’s boring, but normal” (TRN, 46; CTOP, 28-9).4
How instructive it is to be subject to a god who does whatever pleases him at the moment. “I see that you . . . have finally understood that it is not necessary to have done something in order to die” (TRN, 39—40; CTOP, 24). Letting his desires (or fantasies) become the springs of actions dramatically confronts us with the truth of our world, demystifying our faith in its intelligibility and purposefulness. And since when have we failed at least subconsciously to appreciate the absolute contingency of our finite existence? Is this not the reason for our passionate insistence upon the absoluteness of our religious beliefs as they ground our “eternal” social norms? Is it not precisely this sense of their unquestioned place in a divinely ordained social order that the Patricians exude?