3. Quilliot comments that “the attitude of mind evoked here is not without relation to that of Meursault in his prison” (E, 1440).
4. It is equally foolish to insist that Camus is or is not a philosopher, or that he is primarily an artist. These academic classifications presuppose a compartmentalization of experience that Camus rejects. Of course, on occasion he too fell prey to these misleading simplifications, as when he denied being a philosopher. But there he was seeking to distinguish himself from the kind of academic philosophy of which he wanted no part. The more deliberate judgment is revealed by his discussion of Kant and the novel in The Myth.
5. Cf. his discussion of Kafka as the “adventure of a soul in quest of its grace” (MS, 129)
6. ” ‘For three years,’ says Kirlov, ‘I sought the attribute of my divinity and I have found it. The attribute of my divinity is independence.’ Now can be seen the meaning of Kirlov’s premise: ‘If God does not exist, I am god.’ To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being. Above all, of course, it is drawing all the inferences from that painful independence” (MS, 107-8).
7. “I have been nought, I shall be all,” said Marx’s proletariat. Totality will fill the void left by God’s disappearance. From nihilism to absolutism, the psychodynamic path is clear. Tempted by this need to fill the void, Camus had written in The Myth that the conqueror wants “all or nothing” (MS, 86). Claiming that “a revolution is always accomplished against the gods . . . the demands of the poor are but a pretext” (MS, 87), Camus suggests, in another context, that “the way matters little; the will to arrive suffices” (MS, 47). In this passionate will to recapture a lost absolute lies the ground of that historicism to which The Rebel seeks to offer the diagnosis. Sartre’s complicity in what Camus later came to see as a pathology of the intellect has thus been sensed early on. “Caligula” dramatizes this will to arrive, while the successive rewritings of that play testify to the maturation of Camus’s appreciation of its significance.
8. “Mechanical” might have been better expressed as “habitual.”
9. For the ancient Hebrews, existence was ordered by Yahweh, but there was no apparent concern for personal immortality.
10. “Happiness” in an earlier manuscript had been “sadness,” which gives a more sensitive touch to the vision.
11. The images that flower upon this liberation from metaphysical illusion might remind one of flowers at Djemila or Tipasa; or, more generally, of the experience of nuptials with the earth.
12. Problems of community, dialogue, and society in general are implicit throughout but separable from the issues considered here. “The social question . . . cannot be avoided by absurd thought (even though that thought may put forward several solutions, very different from one another). One must, however, limit oneself” (MS, 104n).
CHAPTER 5
1. Roger Quilliot explores this relation in his brilliant early work on Camus, La Mer et Les Prisons. So does James Arnold, among others, in his more recent efforts t< > reconstruct in detail the initial history of Caligula.
2. The English version leaves out the phrase about changing the order of things A more detailed version appears in a November 1939 entry in his Notebooks. Cf. TRN, 1735.
3. In later versions, Camus even removes passages discussing where and how oru might catch the moon. Cf. TRN, 1765.
4. In the 1944 edition, this passage ends with “it’s absurd, but normal” (TRN, 1762).
5. Camus’s growing cynicism about public realities is further attested to by his addition, in the 1958 edition, of a passage in which he favorably contrasts Caligula’s honest appropriation of his subjects’ inheritance with the “slipping in of indirect taxes on those basic commodities without which people cannot exist. To govern is to steal,” observes Caligula. At least, “I will steal openly” (TRN, 22).
6. Earlier editions offer variants of this passage in which “to judge” replaced “to condemn,” “without justice” replaced “without a judge,” and “everything is con-demnable” is first replaced with “all are accused”
before yielding to “no one is innocent” (TRN, 1769).
7. The reduction of human concern to an object of ridicule is nowhere more evident than in Caligula’s treatment of the poets. Here, in what may be viewed as the original “Gong Show,” they are paraded before the emperor to be mocked, told to shut up, and dispensed with (cf. TRN, 86-100).
8. But not, of course, as Martha in “The Misunderstanding.” Dora, in “The Just,” bridges the gap between these types, giving expression to the longing to live in the here and now without a programmatic future, while giving up her life to a future in which such love will “at last” be possible.
9. Scipio now goes so far as to claim, “My suffering is to understand everything” (TRN, 83; CTOP, 56), thus expressing a youthful pretentiousness not yet matured sufficiently to appreciate the limits of its
own insights. Many accused Camus of sharing such an attitude. Somewhat upsetting is Cherea’s claim, in this same dialogue, that only Scipio and his reasons are pure. This supposed motivational innocence in matters of political action raises questions about the sophistication of the perspective here being suggested. It does smell of that moralistic attitude for which many took Camus so severely to task. Was mis the author’s orientation when the play was initially conceived and developed? If so, why does he leave it in? Unless he still believes it or thinks it rings true to the characters he is portraying. The issue remains in doubt.
10. In having Scipio leave Rome, in the 1958 edition, rather than join in the assassination of Caligula, Camus suggests an increasing, though clearly nuanced, discomfort with aspects of postwar political action.
This finds forceful expression not only in the works we are explicitly considering, but in most of his occasional pieces, including “Reflections on the Guillotine.”
11. In an earlier version he had “had a novel to finish” (TRN, 1747).
12. The “Letters” can be taken as a more sustained effort to give expression to the position being defended by Cherea. Camus is there struggling quite explicitly for the first time with the challenge to conduct posed by the absurd. Speaking to a hypothetical German friend, he writes:
For a long time we both thought that this world had no ultimate meaning and that consequently we were cheated. I still think so in a way. But I came to different conclusions from the ones you used to talk about. … I tell myself now that if I had really followed your reasoning, I ought to approve what you are doing. And this is so serious that I must stop and consider it. . . .
You never believed in the meaning of this world, and vou therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to one’s wishes. You supposed that in the absence of any human or divine code the only values were those of
the animal world in other words, violence and cunning. Hence you concluded chat man was negligible. . And. to tell the truth, I, believing I thought as you did, saw no valid argument to answer you except a fierce love of justice (RRD, 20 I, my italics)
But that “fierce love of justice” begs the question of the rational justification of values. Camus recognizes this as he struggles to distinguish the efforts of the resistance from those of the Nazis. “Where lay the difference?” he asks. “Simply that you saw the injustice of our condition to the point of being willing to add to it, whereas it seemed to me that man must exalt justice in order to fight against injustice. … I merely wanted men to discover their solidarity in order to wage war against their revolting fate.” But this response is no better. It is simply one set of preferences against another. On what basis does he claim justice for his positions? Camus then makes appeal to the force of “human evidence.”
What is truth, you used to ask? To be sure, but at least we know what falsehood is; that is just what you have taught us. What is spirit? We know its contrary, which is murder. What is man? There I stop you, for we know. Man is that force which ultimately cancels all tyrants and gods. He is the force of evidence. Human evidence is what we must preserve. . . . If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning (RRD, 10).
Here an almost instinctive revolt gives expression to a faith that human life can generate its own meanings. Reflecting upon this emerging perspective, Camus takes a major, though tentative, step in the direction of the position that ultimately finds expression in The Rebel when he observes: