This excessively optimistic statement of the emergence of rebellion no doubt suggests a simplified conception of human nature requiring further development. This initial articulation of political rebellion, emerging out of an insistence on collective dignity, hardly offers a political strategy.
By standing forth in rebellion, insisting on solidarity in dignity, Diego, however, in ungagging his compatriots, offers the promise of that living community that challenges dictators. The play then pursues, in schematized
fashion, the emergence and ultimate success of a revolt rooted in communal solidarity.
The human plague tries to break the back of the revolt by turning the citizens against one another, to destroy the emerging solidarity before which it would stand helpless. The Secretary lets the people have the notebook so that private vengeances and recriminations may take over. The Judge’s Daughter brings the spirit of The Judge’s household into the rebellion and thus threatens to dissipate its strength. The citizens fall upon each other.
Rebellion does not come easy. Victoria is stricken and Diego must ask himself how far he will go in revolt. How far is it worth going? How far has he a right to go? Can he sacrifice his own life for such a cause? Has he a right to sacrifice another’s? In a sense, the tables are turned between Diego and Victoria. The Chorus of Women berates Diego in a manner reminiscent of The Myth for having previously left Victoria: “A man cries for the impossible, a woman endures all that is possible. . . . Deserter! That body was your homeland; without it you are nothing any more; do not count on your remembrance to save you” (CTOP, 219).
The Plague is power. He makes his last attempt to break the revolt by hitting where it hurts most—to tempt and threaten Diego into submission. Diego offers an exchange: his life for Victoria’s. “My life is nothing. What counts for me are my reasons for living.” But in this situation they will prove reasons for dying. The Plague offers his own exchange: both their lives in return for ending the revolt. He berates Diego: “Don’t you realize that ten years of this girl’s love are worth far more than a century of freedom for those men?” Here is the Grand Inquisitor’s challenge all over again. But Diego refuses, and The Plague is vanquished, but not without exacting a further toll: Diego’s death.
With The Plague’s departure, civil authority returns in the person of The Governor. Cynically, The Plague observes that he is sodden with inertia and forgetfulness of the lessons of the past. And when you see stupidity getting the upper hand again without a struggle, you will lose heart; cruelty provokes, but stupidity disheartens. All honor, then, to the stupid, who prepare my way . . Perhaps there will come a day when self-sacrifice will seem quite futile, and the never-ending clamor of your rebels will at last fall silent. Then I shall reign supreme, in the dead silence of men’s servitude (CTOP, 227—8).
With The Plague gone, Nada, like Cottard in The Plague, is reduced to isolation and despair. “One day you’ll find out for yourselves that man is nothing and God’s face is hideous!” Before their reborn faith in living, suicide seems alone bearable, but not without challenging the basis of their new-found hope: “As you see, fishermen and governments may come and go, the police are always with us. So after all, justice does exist” (CTOP, 231). To which The Chorus answers: “There is no justice—but there are limits. And those who stand for no rules at all, no less than those who want to impose a rule for everything, overstep the limit” (CTOP, 231).
Heroism Is Not Enough
With “The State of Siege” I have reviewed the logic of social revolt. In its most complete expression it requires incorporating into consciousness all those dimensions that our previous encounter with the absurd has brought forth. Such a realization is enough to dim any simple appeal to heroism. It is rather a question of dignity, of that minimal honor and liberty, without which life cannot be called human. Victoria and the chorus of women insist upon this point. They serve to restrain Diego’s often impetuous desire to revenge the insult. For what is at stake is not simply honor, but the right to live, freely and fully. Although honor must be preserved, of itself it is no more than an abstraction to which life will be sacrificed. No, honor must rest on precisely that quality of concrete living that preserves it from the distortions of justifications. It must be that practical rebellion against the attempts of ideology to question the meaning of life from the perspective of totality. It must also find its justification in a sustaining human community, rather than in the lonely flight of solitudes.
In the last analysis a metaphysics of totality may be justified, but it is not given to us, as finite beings, to see this. The encounter with the absurd has revealed that at present all we can know about the meaning of our life with any degree of certainty is our desire for meaning, the certainty of suffering and death, and the limits that existence places on whatever partial meanings and unities we may be able to achieve. This framework provides the natural conditions of our life and of any endeavor to find a comprehensive rationale for it. What can justify the sacrifice of this limited amount of which we are certain for that eternity of which we can concretely know nothing? Camus’s suggestion is that the willingness to sacrifice this present to that
“future” stands in inverse proportion to the degree of fulfillment we are able to achieve in this present. With the characters of Nada, The Plague, and The Judge, Camus suggests that at the core of total revolt is an almost constitutional incapacity to find fulfillment in daily life, and that their rationalism or nihilism are equally forms of negation of the possibility of concrete intersubjective meaning. In Camus’s adaptation of Dostoevsky’s “The Possessed,” Stavroguine explicitly reveals what is here only suggested, that the destruction of life, which their inability to love seems only accidentally to occasion, is really the inevitable outcome of their position. Later, with the judge-penitent after the fall, the destruction of human relations implicit in this sickness of the soul turns into a quite subtle program of enslavement through universal guilt.
Revolt can only obtain justification, therefore, to the extent that it originates from—and remains true to—a diametrically opposed conception of meaning that finds its justification in the collective living of sensual and free beings. Thus Diego’s revolt must, in principle, be limited, not total. Its poignancy is made the clearer when it is realized that he must risk everything he finds worthwhile in order to preserve the relative values that are being threatened. Bravado is no alternative to a lucid consciousness. In a world where order is not given, but in which the passion for order can bring forth a new dimension of disorder, revolt can find its strength and its direction only by making common cause against that which will deny the human. This provides both the grounds of its justification and the limit within which it must be confined if it is to remain true to its origins.
With “The State of Siege” the problem of the generation of social revolt is set forth. No practical program is offered. “The Just” poses more subtle questions: Within the framework of revolt, what rights do we have? What limits does revolt itself prescribe? To what extent, and with what consequences, can one justify the sacrifice of another, or of the present for the future? In short, can revolt justify murder?
THE LIMITS OF REVOLT
Staging The Rebel
“The only revolution on a human scale would have to involve a conversion to the relative which would precisely signify fidelity to the human condition” (E, 1692). “The Just” may be taken as a dramatic staging of The Rebel. The essay even devotes one chapter to a discussion of the play’s characters and their moral dilemma. Is there a logic to the point of murder? Camus asks.
Can one kill in the name of justice? Given the personal constraints revealed in the encounter with the absurd, and the social ramifications explored in The Plague and “The State of Siege,”
what, if any, are the limits intrinsic to social action? In Camus’s terms, what is the justification and scope of revolt?
In the name of justice and the future of humanity, “Les Justes” propose to murder the Archduke. Seeking “to achieve dramatic tension through classical means; that is, the opposition of characters who were equal in strength and reason” (CTOP, ix), Camus portrays the moral struggle within this insurrec-tional group. Stepan embodies Camus’s image of the revolutionary: complete dedication to the cause of justice. Confronting Stepan is Kaliayev, that most scrupulous assassin. His need for innocence is insatiable, while his joy for life is torn apart by a deep sensitivity to the suffering occasioned by an unjust world. He can neither live in complicity with injustice nor justify murder. It is Dora, speaking for the concrete (as is so often the case with Camus’s women),