Camus as Playwright
BARRETT, WILLIAM
Camus as Playwright Caligula and Three Other Plays. By Albert Camus. Knopf. 302 pp. $5.00. IK State of Siege, a play which reproduces the fundamental situa tion of his novel The Plague...
...All of these plays are very good, and yet I came away somewhat disappointed by this book...
...One of the heroes of an age of boredom, he is the hero of a period whose passion for creation is the complement of its ennui...
...Drinking can be shown and drunkenness, which are speoial states of consciousness, but not the excitation that produce a masterpiece...
...Being a member of an exotic trade is ,not, however, all there is to it...
...He has now earned the right to take a human life by forfeiting his own...
...Dope and madness can also be shown, and the extraordinary ways of seeing and believing they induce, but not the necessities of art which result in esthetic "distortion" All phenomena of creation must therefore be translated into phenomena of pathology...
...In his introduction to the plays, Camus comments upon this point in the play in the light of his recent writings against capital punishment...
...Part of this impression may be due to the deliberate classicism that Camus has espoused as his ideal for the theater...
...In comparison with the plays of Beckett...
...Caligula—the earliest of the plays, written before his first novel, The Stranger—develops the same theme of a logic run amok...
...Sharing in all these attractions, the figure of the doomed great artist possesses an appeal lacking in other beachcombers...
...the r?cit, which he has brought to perfection in The Stranger and The F nil Artists Without Art liani: Man and Myth.Modig] Reviewed by Harold Rosenberg inneBy Jeo Modigliani...
...The idea is turned around slowly, looked at from all sides, and then more or less left to make its peace with all the other data of the story...
...Is it not a fact that he alone of all the characters in popular iore persistently reappears as the protagonist of serious literature...
...Not even his being a kind of innocent, a big baby distracted by the problems of his toy—how to draw a foot or thicken his paint with sunlight—fully explains his fascination : under the current psychopathological dispensation everybody, including motormen and executive vice-presidents, is a big baby if you hold the camera at the right angle...
...Caligula's sweetheart has died, and the young emperor becomes convinced that the fact of death robs everything in human life of its value...
...Later Kaliayev does go through with the assassination (only the Archduke is in his carriage this time), is captured and executed...
...Nor does the fact that he is the scorned outsider who triumphs, when after his death a canvas dragged from behind the dresser is sold for $150.000 in a gilded auction room filled with high society, make his tale a mere version of Cinderella...
...no doubt, a very logical case can be made out for capital punishment, but if a person cannot witness a hanging or guillotining without going sick, then perhaps he had belter take account of the instinct that makes him nauseous...
...Hence even CONTINUED ON PACE 22 The Neu...
...He is, in fact, a writer hard to boil down to any philosophical system, even though he is always working with, toward, or away from ideas...
...In The Just Assassins, where the milieu is pre-revolutionary Russia and the plot concerns a group of terrorists who are plotting to assassinate the Archduke, much the same opposition occurs between 'two of the conspirators: Stephen, who lives solely for the abstraction of justice, and Kaliayev, who is a revolutionist because he loves life and wishes to see social injustice destroyed because it cripples and poisons the Reviewed by William Barrett Department of philosophy, NYU...
...By taking a life without either sacrificing our own, or at least laying it on the line as something possibly to be lost in the encounter, society simply repeats the murder in the guise of social routine...
...For a generation eager to see something new and original come out of itself, this secret and its bearers are objects of veneration, envy and uneasy curiosity...
...Langouste undressed, and end in his breaking his neck by falling downstairs or hanging himself, the artist is not glamorous only for the way he spends his time...
...But this is exactly as it should be if Camus's central message has become what we have said it to be: the danger of the fanaticism of the idea...
...Nevertheless, it does seem that Camus's particular senius is that of a reflective writer, and therefore most completely realized in the kind of novelistic monologue...
...Camus is always in complete control of his subject matter: in every play he does exactly what he wants to do, and the loose ends of anything inexpressible are never left hanging...
...December 1, 1958 Our feeling of the sanctity of human life is really not a very logical one—and in fact very logical jurists have demolished it by cogent argument repeatedly—but it is a very vital and inexpugnable feeling ( at least in some of us) that no logic can extirpate...
...116 pp...
...So from this day on you are going to be rational and tidy...
...Every state of the artist, and especially his least controlled ones, touches upon the deepest of impulses, different from those aroused by the safecracker...
...The trouble is that each of Camus's books is a deliberate exploration of a state of mind, or of a cluster of ideas, and the exploration, being that of the artist, adopts the deliberate device of ambiguity...
...Here, in this passage, we come upon what I think to be the main theme of Camus's writings, and particularly his most recent ones: the fanaticism of the idea that can, and does, kill human life...
...Hence the varieties of interpretations of Camus's books, and particularly of his last novel, The Fall...
...From the point of view of the abstract idea of justice, this is nonsense, for what are the lives of two children against the thousands of children who suffer and die because of 'the unjust social regime in which the Archduke is one of the masters...
...The Plague is totalitarianism— more exactly, the modern totalitarian mind—and in symbolizing it as an epidemic of physical disease Camus has hit upon a brilliantly visible and vivid image of a more poisonous epidemic of the spirit...
...the wearing of badges will be compulsory...
...It is the only way in which he cap prove to himself that his interest in justice was not the fanaticism for an abstraction but the deed of a human being in the service of life...
...The argument against hanging is not really an argument at all, but a simple question : Can you yourself watch a man being hanged...
...I'll be no party to your logic," Cherea, one of the plotters against the emperor's life, tells Caligula, "My plan of life may not be logical, but at least it's sound...
...partly, it may be a case that the plays need to be performed in order to take fire...
...contributor, "Art News,'' Orion...
...Ionesco, or the marvelous indictment of capital punishment by Brendan Behan, The Quare Fellow, these plays of Camus seem to be muffled and pallid in tone...
...But Kaliayev cannot deny his own human feelings in the name of this abstract idea of justice —at least, not when he sees the children he is supposed to kill instead of merely dealing with them in idea...
...I should like, particularly, to see a good performance put on here of The Just Assassins, which strikes me as dramatically the best of these plays, before I could be sure just how exciting this fine, lucid, classical playwriting can be on the stage...
...Kaliayev falters on his first attempt to throw the bomb because there are children in the carriage with the Archduke...
...Camus as Playwright Caligula and Three Other Plays...
...I have suppressed these mental luxuries and put logic in their stead, for I can't bear untidiness and irrationality...
...Leader...
...If a man cannot witness a hanging without a physical reaction, it would seem a little bit schizoid for him to espouse a rational theory of punishment in which hanging is a perfectly perfunctory and appropriate action by society...
...But take care that you don't indulge in nonsensical ideas, or righteous indignation, or in any of those little gusts of petulance which lead to big revolts...
...With a painter this is less so than with a poet or composer...
...For if the idea is no longer to be a tyrant over life, it has to learn its own inescapable ambiguities in the face of all the shaggy and amorphous depths of our human condition...
...but painting, too, is an action of the psyche of which the physical movements represent only the completing gestures...
...For his prestige as a hero of disreputability the artist is indebted, of course, to that general yearning to break loose from routine that has endeared pickpockets and call girls to what is so happily designated as "the family audience...
...The only way to behold the artist is to watch him at work—the most interesting films about artists are educational shorts, like those of Matisse and Leger, which show how thev draw and paint...
...Yet the image of the artist at work actually communicates little about the artist himself...
...It renders only the visible part of his act, most of which is unseen...
...and Caligula, the tyrant, acts upon this conviction in putting people to death at his own whim and without compunction...
...IK State of Siege, a play which reproduces the fundamental situa tion of his novel The Plague without however being merely a dramatiza tion of the novel, Camus has the Plague itself, introduced as one of the characters on stage, address the unfortunate inhabitants of the be sieged city : "So line up for a decent death, that's vour first duty...
...Since we all must die, what difference does it make whether sooner or later...
...Though his days are held to consist of drinking, fornication and ducking the landlord, with occasional frenzied flourishes on a canvas inspired by Mlle...
...Partisan Reviezv,'' "Commentary" THE ROMANCE of the disordered, and disorderly, artist enjoys a rising popularity — Gaugin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh are now rivals of Nero...
...Perhaps, however, that is the trouble: Camus is so in control of what he has to say that nothing seems to break loose and blaze up on the stage...
...To be sure, there are plenty of other themes, either touched on or developed, throughout these four plays, as well as throughout the rest of Camus's writings...
...Savonarola, Al Capone...
...7.50...
...But while the artist as a starred semi-underworld tramp can be pictured without difficulty, to tell the story of the hero of the creative is all but impossible...
...In the relation between the artist's condition and his product we detect the presence of a genuine secret, and one of the first importance...
...His objections to capital punishment derive solely from feeling, not logic...
...4rt critic...
...author, "Irrational Man' life of everybody, oppressor as well as victim...
Vol. 41 • December 1956 • No. 45
