If Caligula embodies a pathology, it lies, no doubt, in his insistence upon the all or nothing of metaphysical rebellion: cither life has eternal significance or it is meaningless.
If his truth is to rebel against destiny, his error is to deny men. One cannot destroy everything without destroying oneself. That is why Caligula destroys the people around him and, faithful to his logic, does what he has to to mobilize against him those who will finally kill him (TRN, 1727-8).
If the metaphysical rebel is right to rebel against that which in the order of things threatens to reduce the human to insignificance, he is wrong to cut himself off from that human community from within which alone a meaningful response is possible. The world must be refashioned from within. It is the task of the rebel to “correct creation,” but not to seek to replace it. There is no outside from which to leverage actions, while resentment only sustains the urge to destroy. “‘Caligula’ is the story of a superior suicide. . . . Unfaithful to mankind through fidelity to himself, Caligula accepts death because he has understood that no one can save himself all alone and that one cannot be free at the expense of others” (CTOP, vi). Caligula realizes that he “has not chosen the path that was required. . . . [His] liberty . . . leads to nothing” (TRN, 108; CTOP, 73).
What then is to be done in an absurd world? What is the required path? Cherea joins with the Patricians to eliminate Caligula because he realizes that life is not possible if Caligula is permitted to pursue his logic to its culmination. What coherent alternative perspective, however, is being offered in its place? And how does Cherea propose to address the ontological need to which Caligula gave such demonic expression? “I can deny something without feeling obliged to besmirch it or to deny to others the right to believe in it” (TRN, 66; CTOP, 42-3), Scipio observes. But neither he—who leaves the scene without taking up arms against Caligula—nor Cherea, nor the play itself, has any coherent response to the gauntlet laid down by Caligula. Life may not be possible without our confronting and purging the Caligula within us, but the therapeutic path remains elusive. No wonder Caligula insists to the last that he “is still living” (TRN, 108; CTOP, 74).
PART THREE
Confrontation and Struggle
Better than [Prometheus’s] revolt against the gods, it is his sustained persistence which makes sense to us. Along with his admirable determination to neither separate nor exclude anything which has always reconciled . . . the suffering hearts of men and the springtime of the world (LCE, 142; L’Ete, 87).
6
Social Dislocations
All of us ate the same sour bread of exile, unconsciously waiting for the same reunion (P, 167).
MISUNDERSTANDINGS
Seeking Reconciliation
“The Misunderstanding” appears to be a transitional work. Written during the bleakest days of the occupation when, in the words of Germaine Bree, “Europe had, like Camus’s inhospitable inn, become a charnel house, a mother wearily slaughtering her sons, hallucinated by dreams of a future felicity” (Bree, 183), its tragedy arises from an inability of individuals to speak with, rather than to, one another. Preoccupied with their personal projects, each has formulated a life trajectory deaf to the speech of the other. But these monads function in a context of social relations; in fact, their projects presuppose the being of those very others from whom they have cut themselves off. Blind to the commonality of their situation, they seek to shape the world in the frame set by their essentially solipsistic projects. In their effort to impose their own world on the others, each encounters the other’s similar and counter effort. Interwoven monologue has replaced dialogue, and tragic misunderstandings are inevitable.1
In the language of Camus’s later writings, we have here the encounter of opposing total views upon a common situation—without either the shared recognition of that commonality or the granting of legitimacy to the perspectives of the other.
Cut off by their projects both from the other and from the natural world, which is itself reduced to being only the setting for their efforts, each lives in a world of abstractions—always excepting Jan’s wife, Maria. While she comes from the land of the South, speaking the direct language of concrete feelings, and serves as a constant reminder of the lost worlds of natural beauty and human interaction, Martha is wrapped up and lost in her longing for a mythical South, as is Jan with the gift of salvation he is going to bring home.
But it is not so much the abstractions that are at fault, as it is their exclusive and all-consuming nature. Treated as salvific, they don’t admit of modification. Jan will not listen to his wife’s plea; Martha cannot respond to her mother’s weariness. Each project excludes the others. Lacking the preconditions of dialogue, without realizing it, we are at a dead end.
The place of “The Misunderstanding” in Camus’s thought is suggested when he says of Jan’s motivation for returning that “one cannot always remain a stranger [outsider]; a man needs happiness, it is true, but he also needs to find his place in the world” (quoted in Thody, 63). Jan thus stands halfway between Meursault and Rambert. Meursault is a stranger in the human world who finds his happiness in union with a natural world in which all human projects are alien. And Rambert longs for happiness above all, but realizes that one cannot be happy alone, and joins the work teams in the collective fight against the plague.
Halfway between the solitude of Meursault and the solidarity of Rambert, Jan seeks in vain “for the word which will reconcile everything”; but that word eludes him. His project is fundamentally flawed. Having returned home out of pity and duty, rather than love or affection, in order to bestow upon his family a gift of grace, he sees himself as their savior. His gift is conditional upon their recognition. But his project lacks mutuality. He does not listen to their speech. It is as if they were but the occasions for the fulfillment of his project.
They, of course, are no more open to hearing his words. Long drained of any sensitivity to the concerns of others by the trying nature of their day-to-day existence, each encountered individual is but one more occasion for pursuing their project of salvation—a project that devours their own lives as much as those of their victims. The inability to find the word that will reconcile everything is therefore meant to be structural, not occasional: their incompatible definitions of their situation exclude the possibility of meaningful communication. That, at least, is Camus’s intention, which invites him to recreate in modern dress the contours of classical tragedy.
If we reflect upon the underlying metaphysic, we can glimpse the movement from the concerns of the absurd to those of revolt. For “The Misunderstanding” seeks to dramatize the tragedy resident in the effort to achieve individual salvation in the context of an essentially common condition. With no perception of the limits intrinsic to individual endeavor, or the mutuality of human relations, or the necessity of opening up to the world of the other, or the commonality of human destiny, the self-absorbed project of the single individual whose perspective is fundamentally inadequate to the social context can only generate a tragic outcome.
The suggestion of the play is thus clear. The absurdity of our individual situation can only be constructively addressed by nourishing the dimension of human existence that is fed by dialogue. As Jan’s mother sobs, upon realizing what has happened, “Oh, why did he keep silent? Silence is fatal” (CTOP, 123).
“The Misunderstanding” is thus a cry from the depths of historically generated despair that has given birth to oppression and torture in the name of salvation. It is a cry for “relativized Utopias”; for a commitment to a community rooted in the dialogic opening up to the fallible world of the other. “It amounts to saying,” wrote Camus, “that in an unjust or indifferent world man can save himself, and save others, by practicing the most basic sincerity and pronouncing the most appropriate word” (CTOP, vii).
Born in “this narrow world in which we are reduced to gazing up at God,” cheated of her generous sentiments by a condition for which she is at best only partly responsible, reduced to the barrenness of a life without significance, Martha, perhaps the most pitiful of Camus’s characters, is finally disabused of her dreams of salvation and draws the nihilistic conclusion in her advice to Maria.
Pray your God to harden you to stone. It’s the happiness He has assigned to Himself, and the one true happiness. Do as He does, be deaf to all appeals, and turn your heart to stone while there is still time…. You have a choice between the mindless happiness of stones and the slimy bed in which we are awaiting you (CTOP, 133).