Albert Camus Caligula

By Simon Lea
Caligula is a play within a play. What the absurd emperor is attempting is a dramatic and
deadly demonstration of a simple reality: that people die and they are unhappy. What is
Camus attempting to demonstrate? To answer this we need to understand how Camus
worked. From the earliest days of his writing career, Camus talked of his 'works'. These
would come in cycles: the absurd; revolt; and love. He did not live to complete his plan.
Caligula belongs to the absurd cycle along with the novel The Stranger and the essay The
Myth of Sisyphus. Each cycle is made up of three complementary works, a novel, an essay
and a play. The second cycle on revolt consists of The Plague (novel), The Rebel (essay)
and The Just Assassins (play). His unfinished novel, The First Man along with an essay The
Myth of Nemesis and a play Don Faust would have made up the third.
Caligula was written in 1939 and Camus originally intended it to be performed by the
Thtre de l'Equipe, a group he helped found, with him playing the lead. However, the play
did not open until 1945 at the Thtre Hberot where it ran for a year. Between 1939 and
1945 Caligula underwent many changes. Indeed, Camus would continue tinkering with the
play as both his ideas and the world changed over time. During his lifetime there were
three revivals of the play in 1950, 1957 and 1958. More recently, Caligula was performed in
London at the Donmar Warehouse in 2003 and today by the Ashes and Diamonds Theatre
Company in 2012. Just as Camus made changes to his play to meet the changes the world
was undergoing, so have others modernized the play to match their environments. The
Parisian postwar audiences couldn't fail to see a Hitler-like dictator in Caligula; Michael
Grandage styled his Caligula after Prime Minister Tony Blair. Despite these changes, the
play at its core remains the same. Caligula is not a political play concerned with the
dangers of extreme politics nor is it a condemnation of dictatorship. Camus is concerned
with philosophical absolutism. In particular, he is concerned with the philosophy of the
absurd.
What is the absurd? Something is absurd when there is a contradiction between aspiration
and reality. In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus talks of the absurdity of a man armed with only
a sword attacking a group of machine guns. It is the disproportion between his intention
and the reality he will encounter, of the contradiction I notice between his true strength
and the aim he has in view. This mans desperate charge is absurd but it is not the absurd.
In order to put a the in front of absurd there must be something universal, some aspect
of the human condition that is absurd. This universal aspect is the seriousness and
importance we attach to our lives and the values we hold despite the knowledge that
these things may have been chosen completely arbitrarily.
If we hold the universe to be meaningless, it is absurd to search for meaning in this
universe. However, this is what Camus is attempting to do. But if all things are
meaningless, if we are left to attribute meaning based on what? How can we attach great
importance to any value we hold, given that we may simply value this or that based upon a
whim, or because we were told to for reasons unknown, or simply because its easiest to go
with the flow? We express our moral beliefs; talk about what is right and wrong, every day.
For more information visit The Albert Camus Society

But in a universe offering no guide, no standard by which we can judge our actions how can
we know for sure that what we think and say are true? When faced with a tyrant like
Caligula, Hitler, or even just a Tony Blair what justification do we have to oppose them, and
if we do what limits, if any, can we impose on ourselves?
The absurd is experienced as part of the human condition. Rather than a slowly creeping
realization the absurd bursts forth. In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus gives several examples:
suddenly becoming aware on your birthday that you are situated in time (the horror of
confronting your worst enemy); the jolting question why? that interrupts your unconscious
daily pattern (Rising, tram, four hours in the office or factory, meal, tram, four hours of
work, meal, sleep and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday,
according to the same rhythm); suddenly seeing the world as dense and no longer clothed
with the illusionary meaning it had been previously given (For a second we cease to
understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs
that we attributed to it before hand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of
that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again.)
Camus essay passes through three stages. First he looks at how the absurd is
experienced, then at how these experiences ought to be interpreted and finally why the
various solutions currently on offer are inadequate. He is particularly concerned with those
who would conjure away the problem by seeking an escape from the world and the
human condition. Camus was familiar with Gnostic ideas; his dissertation was on Christian
Metaphysics and Neo-Platonism. He recognized in both Christianity and Marxism a
Manichean approach to the problem. Both see the world as hostile and its inhabitants in
need of saving. Both rely on messianic forces, Jesus Christ and the Party, or Proletariat.
Finally, both see history building towards a final endgame, Judgment Day and Kingdom
come for the Christians and the withering away of the State and pure communism for the
Marxists. What comes with this approach is an ethic that holds anything that works to bring
about the end, Paradise on Earth (whether it be Gods Kingdom or a Workers paradise) is
morally good. For Camus this leads to justifications for concentration camps, inquisitions,
show trials and bloody executions. But if Camus wants to oppose this, and he does, in a
meaningless universe on what grounds can he say this is repugnant?
A popular misconception of Camus is that he denied the existence of any transcendent
values. While he is partly to blame for this view, The Myth of Sisyphus lays out his
approach to discovering authentic values. The absurd, for him, is always a starting point,
never the end. For this, he is full of hope, not the nihilist he is sometimes mistaken for.
Meursault in The Stranger and Caligula in Caligula illustrate two possible approaches to the
absurd, both wrong. It is worth noting at this point that Camus characters are often taken,
mistakenly, to be representations of their author. Camus is not Meursault and he is
certainly not Caligula. In fact, Camus own position is most closely reflected in Cherea, the
character who will violently murder the emperor, stabbing him in the face. At times Cherea
speaks lines expressing views very similar to those expressed by Camus in his Letters to a
German friend.
Caligula is not just a murderous tyrant. Nor is he merely an insane dictator. For sure his is
murderous and quite insane but there is clarity to his method. When he is told that the
treasury is the most important thing he treats it as the most important thing. All subjects
For more information visit The Albert Camus Society

are to rewrite their wills, disinheriting their children and leaving everything to the state.
The brothels are to be expanded; the patricians wives are to work there. Medals will be
given to those who frequent the brothels most often, death to anyone not winning a medal.
He does nothing to help himself politically. Most tyrants spend their time trying to avoid
being killed or overthrown; Caligula does nothing to appease the people or patricians. He
murders fathers and deliberately starts a famine. Everyone around him is humiliated and
abused, but why? What is he hoping to achieve? The answer is nothing less than the
transfiguration of the world.
Caligula wants to hold the moon in his hands. To do so is impossible. Sending his friend
Helicon out to find the moon, to see it floating on the surface of a lake and dredge it out of
the water, is absurd. He knows he is asking for the impossible. It would be just as
impossible, in his mind, to send Helicon out to find meaning in the universe, a justification
for living ones life this way or that. If he can not get the moon in his hands, and he knows
he can not, then he will settle for having everyone understand the truth of the world: I
shall make them a kingly gift the gift of equality. And when all is leveled out, when the
impossible has come to earth and the moon is in my hands then, perhaps, I shall be
transfigured and the world renewed; then men will die no more and at last be happy.
I said that Caligula is a play within a play and it is through a series of dramatic speeches,
demonstrations and macabre vignettes that Caligula tries to get his message across. But
he is wrong and he fails. From the start three days after the death of his sister, and lover,
Drusilla an experience from which awareness of the absurd bursts forth Caligula was on
the wrong road to freedom (I have chosen a wrong path, a path that leads to nothing. My
freedom isnt the right one)
If Caligulas path is the wrong one then the question asked by the play is which is the
right one?

For more information visit The Albert Camus Society