CAMUS, SUETONIUS AND THE CALIGULA MYTH
THE PHENOMENON of the revival of classical Greek themes in the French theatre in the mid-twentieth century has by now been well discussed and documented. More than one commentator—and not least Albert Camus in his ¡°Conference prononc? a Ath?es sur l¡¯avenir de la trag?ie¡±—has attempted to draw parallels between the metaphysical climate of Periclean Greece, the Renaissance, and twentieth-century Europe. Endeavoring to account for the appeal of classical myths in France specifically during the Renaissance and again in modem times, Mine Jacqueline Duchemin has made a case for their philosophical relevance to the temper of the age: ¡°. . . il a fallu qu¡¯ils r?ondissent parfaitement aux tendances profondes qui cherchaient a s¡¯exprimer.¡± The modern French dramatist, to a far greater extent than his contemporaries in other countries, has made use of a framework of archetypal situations and relationships involving death, exile, violence, madness, and love in which to set the crisis of the Western moral conscience in the modern age, especially during its time of sharpest focus: the Second World War and the events immediately leading up to it. The work of C. G. Jung, particularly when complemented by that of C. Kerenyi, suggests that in modern references to classical mythology we are not confronted with convenient utilization of existing material, a sort of cultural tomb-robbing as George Steiner sees it, in order to indulge in jeux d¡¯esprit. Classical tombs may well have been robbed in France between 1920 and 1950, and the genre has undoubtedly been endowed with an aura of frivolity—some might put it as strongly as ¡°sacrilege¡±—by some of the work of Cocteau and Giraudoux. Yet on the whole it was not for easy gain that bodies were lifted from Troy, Thebes, and Argos and resurrected in Paris. The very limited range of Greek myths used, and the striking obsession with one or two, seem to suggest that the theft was a genuine response to needs of the French collective unconscious, a theft in fact carried out in the dark shadow of a handful of archetypes. Well over a dozen leading French authors each wrote an average of almost two ¡°neo-Greek¡± plays during this period. Yet of the enormous range of themes and characters which were fully exploited in the Renaissance, the number transposed to the modern period is small. Oedipus and Jocasta, Antigone and Creon, Orestes and Electra, -- these are the characters and relationships which dominate the age, reflecting, perhaps, some of the most significant aspects of the French malaise at this time: increasing sensitivity to the arrogance of political power, a growing consciousness in intellectuals of metaphysical alienation, and a general re-examination of personal (particularly sexual?) values.
Few writers of the late 1930¡¯s were more concerned with these and kindred dilemmas than Albert Camus. They inform every line of his fiction, philosophical essays, and theatre. In this last medium, however, Camus was almost the only member of the generation of leading French dramatists who came to the fore at this time who did not draw directly on Greek mythology. He was in fact opposed to the ¡°movement,¡± and spoke of the weariness of the theatre-going public with contemporary versions of the Atridae. In particular he despised the ostentations intellectualism of Giraudoux (¡°l¡¯un des ?rivains les moins faits pour le théâtre¡±), with his constant recourse to ¡°la grace, l¡¯esprit, le conventionnel et le charmant.¡±
The nearest Camus came to a personal treatment of a Greek myth in the theatre was the ¡°adaptation¡± of Prometheus Bound which he did with the Theatre du Travail in March, 1937. By this time, it will be remembered, Camus had been heavily involved in the creation of two semi-Brechtian, anti-Fascist plays, Le Temps du M?ris and R?olte dans les Asturies, the latter having been banned by the municipal authorities of Algiers. At the same time, by March, 1937, Camus was in the process of breaking with the Algerian Communist Party, and thus dissolving an allegiance which, as is clear from many entries in the Carnets for this period, was from the outset far from staunch. In view of the symbolic use Camus was later to make of Prometheus in his anti-Communist polemic, it is tempting to suppose that his Prom?h? enchain?might have cast some light on the early stages of his political and social evolution. Le Mythe de Sisyphe and L¡¯Homme r?olt?are proof that Camus was not on principle averse to borrowing mythological figures to embody his ideas. Miss G. Br?, however, who is the only person to have succeeded in tracking down a copy of Camus¡¯s adaptation, reports that ¡°he stuck very closely to the Aeschylus with very few modifications,¡± and ¡°respected the text of Aeschylus.¡± Surprising though a totally scrupulous fidelity to the original text may be, and whatever the temptation to suspect the ¡°few modifications¡± as being possible evidence of modernization, here the speculation must nevertheless end until such time as the manuscript becomes available again. At all events it is clear from Miss Br?¡¯s description that Prom?h? enchain?can in no way be regarded as the same sort of highly individualistic adaptation as Gide¡¯s OEdipe, Anouilh¡¯s Antigone, or Giraudoux¡¯s Electre.
And yet Camus could not resist the pull of the classical archetype at this time. A play which has not yet been considered in the context of the ¡°neo-classical¡± movement is Caligula, a work which, although believed to be based on historical as opposed to mythological material—and Roman history at that—may be shown to possess very real affinities with the ¡°Greek¡± plays of Camus¡¯s contemporaries.
To begin with, the extent has not yet been appreciated to which Caligula is based on myth, ¡°par opposition a la pens? logique et a sa traduction en paroles claires, un r?it d¡¯allure merveilleuse [. . .],¡± recounting ¡°des faits l?endaires, aventures divines, exploits b?oiques.¡± As is well known, Camus based his play on a reading of the Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius, but disclaimed any intention of writing an ¡°historical¡± play. Most critics have accepted this disclaimer without any difficulty, since Camus has clearly grafted on to the character of Caligula his own highly personal sensitivity to the ¡°absurd.¡± The assessment of John Cruickshank would thus meet with general approval: ¡°Although he took so many facts from Suetonius Camus naturally interpreted them in a way that suited his own ideas at the time the play was written. Caligula belongs to the period in which he was most acutely aware of the absurd.¡±
But this is not enough. It is not just in this metaphysical interpolation that Caligula is totally unhistorical. Two far more fundamental issues have so far escaped attention; both are relevant to a discussion of the mythic nature of Camus¡¯s play.
In the first place, to what extent can any modern dramatist take ¡°facts¡± about the Emperor Gaius Caligula from Suetonius? By a curious coincidence—and the temptation to regard it as anything more should be resisted—twentieth-century historical research on Gaius Caligula built up to a climax in the years immediately preceding Camus¡¯s first jottings for the play. Between 1930 and 1934 no fewer than six books or substantial articles appeared. In one of the latter, M. P. Charlesworth explains why, of all the Julio-Claudian emperors, Gaius Caligula is the one whose character has been, and will probably continue to be, embellished with all the lusts and quirks which, once the propagandist has done his work, are commonly attributed in the popular imagination to the monster-tyrant figures of history:
For the bulk of the information we are compelled to fall back on Suetonius and Dio Cassius, and we do not possess (as we do for the three other Julio-Claudian Emperors) any of the books which Tacitus wrote on the reign. The lack must be emphasized, for it is very important: in studying the reigns of Tiberius, Claudius or Nero, we can usually rely on Tacitus to control the errors and generalisations of Suetonius and Dio, and so can assess them at their true worth. In spite of this many writers, in dealing with the four years of Gaius, behave as though by some kindly compensation of Nature, once Tacitus is missing Suetonius and Dio automatically become better authorities and their statements more worthy of credence. Such a frame of mind is uncritically optimistic, for it goes clean contrary to all experience of these authors elsewhere.
The task of arriving at a more objective—and morally attenuated— assessment of Caligula than that provided by Suetonius (who was about eighty years closer to Caligula than Dio Cassius) is thus much more complicated than in the case of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero. Most modern commentators would concur with Charlesworth in his judgment that:"Suetonius and Dio Cassius are quite untrustworthy as regards Gaius¡¯ personal character, Dio through his love for drama and sensation, and Suetonius because his items are often the merest hearsay or gossip. On occasion we have evidence that definitely confutes them, and we are justified in disbelieving rumours of habitual incest with all his three sisters, or of wallowing in gold, or of universal poisoning plans."
J. P. V. D. Balsdon, author of a full-length study of Gaius Caligula, is of the opinion that the incest stigma is a complete fabrication in the first place—¡±mud which in antiquity was thrown at any man who was unusually fond of his sister.¡± Ren?Lugand argues that, if not actually a gross fabricator, Suetonius was at least guilty of partiality and elaboration. He examines two cases of allegedly outrageous conduct: the propitiation of Caligula by human sacrifices, and secondly his intention to award his horse Incitatus a Consulship. His conclusion is that, even if Suetonius is not exaggerating, as is frequently the case elsewhere, such conduct was not so very monstrous for those times. Suetonius was more of a propagandist than an historian:"Au terme de ces deux petites etudes, la ¡°maniere¡± de Su?one apparait assez clairement. Su?one n¡¯a pas rapport?de choses fausses; rnais son r?it, volontairement d?ousu et anecdotique, tient plus du pamphlet que de l¡¯histoire. Ce n¡¯est pas la premiere fois que l¡¯examen d¡¯un detail aboutit a cette conclusion; et depuis longtemps, Su?one n¡¯est utilis?qu¡¯apr? une s??e critique."
Such then is the raw material which Camus used for the plot and characters of his play: prurient sensationalism and highly suspect history, destined to be forever doubted but seldom corrected. It is tempting to suggest that it is precisely because it is such a text, whether or not Camus knew it to be such, that it has served his purpose so well. Caligula has attained an almost mythic stature, rivaling in the popular imagination such figures as Herod, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, the Borgias, Richard III, Ivan the Terrible, and Adolf Hitler. He is a giant of tyranny and depravity who, for want of an historical corrective, cannot be reduced in size by comparison with the other eminent figures in the field at this time: Nero, Claudius, Tiberius, and not forgetting Galba, Vitellius, and Domitian. With reference to the difficulty of distinguishing clearly between Greek myth and Greek history, between Gods and men, Mine Duchemin observes in addition that:"La difficult?se mesure peut-?re mieux encore a propos de certains episodes dit ¡°historiques¡± et non ¡°mythiques¡± de l¡¯histoire romaine la plus ancienne. On sait que les recherches les plus r?entes tendent a montrer dans les origines de Rome un ensemble complexe beau-coup plus proche du mythe que de l¡¯histoire. Devrions-nous a ce titre ?udier l¡¯?olution mythique de tant d¡¯Horaces, Brutus, Lucr?es? Nous ne le ferons pas: le sujet encore plus gigantesque: mais nous savons combien Calliope est la soeur de Clio."
We know too how much Caligula considered himself to be the brother of Jupiter and a reincarnation of Venus in the myth created by Suetonius and perpetuated by Camus. Fact and fiction about the empire are just as much clouded in myth as during the early period of Roman history. ¡°Le prestige du personnage mythique est en effet considerable. Certains personnages historiques partagent dans une certaine mesure ce prestige¡±—of few ostensibly historical figures is Mine Duchemin¡¯s claim truer than of the range of diabolical semi-, sub-, and superhuman emperors enlarged, and in some cases created, for posterity by Suetonius, and believed until relatively recent times to be accurate portraits. What Camus needed was not history but myth, and he found it in Suetonius, and best of all in the Ljfe of Gaius Caligula.
So much for the raw material; what of the end product? Here again, critics have not always appreciated the extent to which the very nature of Suetonius¡¯ account has enabled Camus to adapt and stylize his material to suit his purpose. In a number of important respects he breaks completely away from Suetonius. Caligula is portrayed by Camus as an admirable man who is suddenly unhinged by the death of his sister and mistress, Drusilla. In the early drafts of the play her death made a considerable personal impact on Caligula. He lamented to Caesonia:"j¡¯ai compris un soir aupr? d¡¯elle que toute ma richesse ?ait sur cette terre. Et c¡¯est de ce soir-l?que je ne peux me d?acher. (Sourdement)—Avec elle c¡¯est la terre enti?e que je viens de perdre."
After 1943, the shadow of Drusilla is considerably fainter. The sensual yearning and self-piteous rhetoric which her death provoked in Caligula in the early manuscripts are now muted. He replies to Caesonia in the corresponding speech to the one above in a very different way: "Quite pane de Drusilla, folle? Et ne peux-tu imaginer qu¡¯un homme pleure pour autre chose que l¡¯amour? [. . .1 Les hommes pleurent parce que les choses ne sont pas ce qu¡¯elles devraient ?re."
Even though in this, the final version of these particular scenes, the relationship between Caligula and Drusilla is recast in a considerably more abstract form than previously, the fact remains that for Camus it is the death of Drusilla which acts as an instant catalyst on Caligula¡¯s sensibility. That this is entirely Camus¡¯s invention has so far passed unnoticed. W. Strauss has allowed his knowledge of the end-product, Camus¡¯s play, to influence his reading of the source, Suetonius:"the loss of Drusilla upset Caius completely; he contracted a sudden illness from which he emerged a changed man." The transformation was so remarkable that Suetonius felt compelled to inject a new note into his biography of Caligula: ¡°Thus far we have spoken of him as a prince. What remains to be said of him bespeaks him rather a monster than a man.
Cruickshank takes a similar view: "Drusilla suddenly died and almost overnight Caligula¡¯s character seemed to change completely. He abruptly became a monster of vice and cruelty. Suetonius speaks of him as being ¡°rather a monster than a man¡± [...]. In his play Camus draws directly from Suetonius. The text of the Life does not justify either of these two statements. The line quoted by Strauss—Hactenus quasi de principe, reliqua ut de monstro narranda sunt—introduces the twenty-second of the sixty numbered sections into which this Life is divided, and means: ¡°So much for the Emperor; it remains to deal with the Monster.¡± It is simply a formal device of a sort used elsewhere by the author occasionally to divide his Lives on a moral basis. A long list of virtues is followed by a (usually longer) list of vices. Another good example of this method is to be found in a rather less lapidary form, at the end of the nineteenth section of the Life of Nero:"I have brought together these acts of his, some of which are beyond criticism, while others are even deserving of no slight praise, to separate them from his shameful and criminal deeds, of which I shall now proceed to give an account."
The corresponding announcement in the Life of Augustus makes Suetonius achronological method even more explicit:Having given as it were a summary of his life, I shall now take up its various phases one by one, not in chronological order, but by classes, to make the account clearer and more intelligible."The crucial line does not therefore mean that an initially virtuous Caligula was suddenly transformed into a monster. Even less does it mean that he was transformed into a monster because of the death of his sister, for the reason that it occurs a full two pages, or numbered sections, before Suetonius deals with the death of Drusilla, and not immediately after it, as Strauss implies.~ It is true that Drusilla¡¯s death caused Caligula considerable distress—since he loved her far more than the other sisters with whom he is accused by Suetonius of living in habitual incest. But Suetonius certainly does not state that this was the cause of Caligula¡¯s derangement. Rather be believes that this disorder was either an intensification of the epilepsy he suffered as a child, or the result of an aphrodisiac administered by Caesonia.24 Furthermore, he does not imply that this madness resulted in an abrupt deterioration of Caligula¡¯s moral character. As far as the latter is concerned, Suetonius does not write in fact, of a sudden transformation at any time in Caligula¡¯s life. Thus for Suetonius Caligula¡¯s madness is physiological and in no way results from the death of Drusilla, and secondly is independent of his moral depravity. To interpret the line: ¡°Thus far we have spoken of him as a prince. What remains to be said of him bespeaks him rather a monster than a man¡± to mean that Suetonius ¡°felt compelled to inject a new note into his biography of Caligula¡± is therefore to misunderstand the form of all of Suetonius¡¯ Lives as well as the content of this particular one.
In addition to the question of the rapidity or otherwise with which Caligula went a) mad and b) depraved, and the attribution of these disorders to the shock caused by the death of Drusilla, there is the third problem of Caligula¡¯s fundamental character. In the preface to the 1958 American edition of his collected plays Camus wrote of Caligula as being, before the death of Drusilla, ¡°[un] prince relativement aimable jusque-l?¡± In the opening scene of the play Cherea voices the generally accepted opinion of all the other characters that ¡°cet empereur ?ait parfait.¡± It is above all Scipion who stresses the moral excellence of Caligula both as a public figure and as a private individual before the death of Drusilla:"Je l¡¯aime. Il ?ait bon pour moi. Il m¡¯encourageait et je sais par coeur certaines de ses paroles. Il me disait que la vie n¡¯est pas facile, mais qu¡¯il y avait la religion, l¡¯art, l¡¯amour qu¡¯on nous porte. Il repetait souvent que faire souffrir ?ait la seule facon de se tromper. Il voulait ?re un homme juste."
But we are justified in wondering to what extent the Caligula portrayed by Suetonius was ever ¡°cet empereur ... parfait.¡± It must be admitted that at the outset of his reign he was enthusiastically acclaimed by the general population for various reasons of a rather negative nature: ¡°because of the memory of his father Germanicus and pity for a family that was all but extinct,¡± and because of his known passion for sports and spectacles. But there is no trace in Suetonius of the moral excellence implicit in Scipion¡¯s description of Caligula: ¡°Il repetait souvent que faire souffrir ?ait la seule facon de se tromper. Il voulait ?re un homme juste.¡± Indeed, Suetonius considers him to have been quite the contrary in his late adolescence, that is to say six or seven years before Drusilla¡¯s death:"Yet even at that time he could not control his natural cruelty and viciousness, but he was a most eager witness of the tortures and executions of those who suffered punishment, revelling at night in gluttony and adultery, disguised in a wig and long robe, passionately devoted besides to the theatrical arts of dancing and singing, in which Tiberius very willingly indulged him, in the hope that through these his savage nature might be softened. This last was so clearly evident to the shrewd old man, that he used to say now and then that to allow Gaius to live would prove the ruin of himself and of all men, and that he was nursing a viper for the Roman people and a Phaeton for the world."
The meritorious actions of Caligula on his accession—liberation of prisoners, expulsion of the spintrians, and various legal and administrative reforms—are considered by Suetonius to be nothing more than attempts to ¡°rouse men¡¯s devotion by courting popularity in every way.¡± The initial popularity of Caligula should not therefore be thought to be a reflection of genuine and instinctive virtue of the sort that appealed to Camus¡¯s Cherea and Scipion.
By now the differences which exist between Camus¡¯ play and the source material from which it is derived should be clear. Camus has drawn on the anecdotal wealth of Suetonius for most of the incidents which make up the plot of the play, and has done so fairly accurately, as several critics have noticed. He has given himself, however, a completely free hand with regard to the factual essentials: the character and evolution of Caligula, his relationship with Drusilla, and the origin, nature, and timing of his madness. Insofar as the Julio-Claudian Emperor portrayed by Suetonius—a most unreliable historian and biographer in any case—possessed little or no innate virtue, showed signs of depravity from his adolescence onward, went mad for physiollogical reasons, and was not irrevocably unhinged by the death of his sister, Camus¡¯s Caligula may be seen to be even less of an historical play than has previously been thought. All the more credit must go to Camus for the ingenuity with which he has adapted the Drusila incident in a way which is convincing in the context of the Caligula myth—it can hardly be described as anything else—as propagated by Suetonius, and yet which at the same time serves his purpose of illustrating ¡°le sens de la mort.¡± The Life is ideally suited to this end, with its jumbled presentation cutting completely across chronological lines, its constant resourse to hyperbole, fantastic rumor, and transparent propaganda, and—when the author manifests something approaching a scientific spirit—its occasional advancement of different versions of the same anecdote. As presented by Suetonius, a macabre Homer of Roman biography, the myths of Tiberius, Nero, Caligula, and the rest have almost the same power of evocation in the modern consciousness as the myths of the participants in the Trojan War. The difference—and this is perhaps where Suetonius has served Camus most usefully—is that, paradoxically, they give an overall impression of being myths not so much of action as of situation. They have little ¡°plot¡± and do not narrate a saga of consecutive and logically motivated deeds in a dramatic order, but instead constitute a composite presentation of a state of tyranny and moral decay. It is possible to discern a common pattern: the absolute ruler, scorning ethical principles, embarks upon a campaign of increasingly brutal oppression, which inevitably leads to his assassination. But what matters is less the course of each Life than the atmosphere—one of terror, suspicion and decay. The twin themes are death and gratuitousness. The Lives of the Caesar is indeed the ideal raw material out of which to forge a myth of the absurd.
It is of more than passing interest, finally, to consider how Camus came to be interested in Suetonius. One of the works which made the greatest impact on Camus in his formative years was a collection of meditative and semi-autobiographical essays, Les Iles, by his friend and teacher, Jean Grenier. In one of the essays, a particularly sensitive one called ¡°L¡¯Ile de Paques,¡± Grenier treats the themes of isolation and death (¡°ce fait aveuglant et ?rasant de la mort¡±) in a way that could not fail to appeal to Camus at this time. It is in this essay that Grenier explains the title of the whole collection: "D¡¯o?vient i¡¯impression d¡¯?ouffement qu¡¯on ?rouve en pensant a des iles? Ou a-t-on pourtant mieux que dans une ile l¡¯air du large, la mer libre a tous les horizons, ou peut-on mieux vivre dans l¡¯exaltation physique? Mais on y est ¡°isol?#148; (n¡¯est-ce pas l¡¯?ymologie) Une ile ou un homme seul. Des lies ou des hommes seuls."
The narrator describes his relationship with an invalid, a simple, uneducated man and very much ¡°un homme seul,¡± being a paranoiac, who esteems his company for his enlightened conversation. The invalid senses that death may be imminent and tries to elicit the narrator¡¯s opinion about the possibility of ¡°la vie future,¡± evidently considering him a likely actuary of such metaphysical hazards (¡°vous qui avez fait des etudes¡±). But the narrator hedges, for this is by no means his province: ¡°Je ne sais si le boucher s¡¯en rendait compte: ce qui rendait possibles nos conversations a nous qui n¡¯avions rien de commun, c¡¯?ait une ?ouvante commune et quotidienne de mourrir.¡± And in fact, just as it had always been his custom in the past to avoid such speculation by means of a heavy program of reading and cultural activity, so he now tries to distract his friend: "Pour ?iter qu¡¯il ne m¡¯interrogeat de nouveau, je pris l¡¯habitude de porter un livre quelconque dont je lui lisais quelques passages. Ses goiits ne ressemblaient gu?e aux miens. Ii n¡¯aima pas un romancier qui pourtant parlait en termes path?iques de la vie et de La mort. ¡°En voil?un, disait-il, qui doit avoir son bifteck cuit tous les jours.¡± J e lui apportai Su?one (je pr?arais un examen de latin). Les vies de Tib?e et de Caligula le ravirent et c¡¯?ait signe qu¡¯il allait mieux. Dieu sait queues atrocit? Su?one raconte. Chez le boucher ce n¡¯?ait pas du tout plaisir de ¡®decadent¡¯ mais plaisir tr? humain et tr? naturel de l¡¯homme bien portant, comme un dieu ou un enfant s¡¯amusant aux r?its de massacres. Voyant qu¡¯on se prepare a tuer une victime sur l¡¯autel Caligula saisit a pleines mains le maillet et assomme le sacrificateur. Un jour ii fait tuer tous les inculp?, t?oins, avocats d¡¯un proc? en criant: ¡°Ils sont tous aussi coupables.¡± Si l¡¯on faisait son testament en sa faveur pour lui plaire, il vous faisait empoisonner, disant que sans cela le testament e? ??une plaisanterie. Je ne go?ais gu?e que la couleur locale de ces histoires dont quelques-unes sont bien plus belles—et n¡¯en voyais pas le sens profond." ¡°Voil? des durs, disait le boucher. Ah! Que la vie est belle! Votre lecture m¡¯a fait du bien.¡± Ce n¡¯?ait qu¡¯un mieux passager.
Having thus been distracted from mortal speculation by this macabre encyclopedia of death, the butcher dies and the essay ends on this ironic note. The enigmatic allusion to ¡°le sens profond¡± has subsequently been explained by Grenier: ¡°j¡¯ai du en parler [de Su?one] plusieurs fois a Albert Camus en en faisant ressortir le sens nietzsch?n de vies comme celles de Caligula.¡± In one of his earliest works, an ¡°Essai sur la musique,¡± written shortly after he had come under the influence of Grenier in the 1?e sup?ieure at the Lyc? d¡¯Ager, Camus was writing of Greek civilization in precisely Nietzschean terms, those of the Birth of Tragedy, which will find a direct echo in Caligula a few years later:"En effet, l¡¯apollonisme et le dionysisme r?ultent du besoin de fuir une vie trop douloureuse. Les Grecs ont ??d?hires par les luttes politiques, par l¡¯ambition, par la jalousie, par toutes sortes de violences. Mais, direz-vous, il en est de m?e pour d¡¯autres peuples? En effet. Mais par leur sensibilit?et par leur emotivit? les Grecs ont ??les plus aptes a la souffrance. Ils ont plus cruellement senti l¡¯horreur de leur vie et ont ??ainsi fatalement destin? au dionysisme barbare. De la le besoin de rem?ier a ces horreurs sauvages, en cr?nt des forines ou plut? des r?es, plus beaux que chez aucun autre peuple. Et pour cela us se sont servis de la danse et de la musique."
This immediately suggests a link between Caligula and ¡°le sens nietzch?n¡± which Grenier attached to the original Suetonius account. The Emperor transforms himself into Venus, ¡°D?sse des douleurs et de la danse¡± and justifies himself with an argument which appears to be directly inspired by Der Wille zur Macht:
"Tout ce qu¡¯on peut me reprocher aujourd¡¯hui, c¡¯est d¡¯avoir fait encore un petit progr? sur la voie de la puissance et de la libert? Pour un homme qui aime le pouvoir, la rivalit?des dieux a quelque chose d¡¯aga?nt. J¡¯ai supprim?cela. J¡¯ai prouve a ces dieux illusoires qu¡¯un homme, s¡¯il en a la volont? peut exercer, sans apprentissage, leur m?ier ridicule." But this Appolonian antidote to suffering is only a masquerade, a game played in front of a mirror. Right until the end of the play Caligula appears to be content with his ¡°dionysisine barbare¡±: ¡°je vis, je tue, j¡¯exerce le pouvoir d?irant du destructeur, aupr? de quoi celui de cr?teur parait une singerie.¡± However, it is the failure of H?icon to bring the moon which elevates Caligula to the truly Nietzschean plane of anagnorisis at the end of the play: ¡°Je n¡¯ai pas pris la voie qu¡¯il fallait, je n¡¯aboutis a rien. Ma libert?n¡¯est pas la bonne.¡± It remains for Caligula to shatter the mirror of delusion and be struck down by the mediocre, but relatively harmless, representatives of humanity. Critics have interpreted the direction ¡°Cherea [le frappe] en pleine figure¡± to indicate Cherea¡¯s ¡°loyalty¡± in contrast with the blow delivered by the old patrician. It would, however, have been just as loyal, and yet less brutal, for him to stab Caligula from the front, but in the body instead of in the face. Cherea¡¯s earlier remark to Caligula that ¡°on ne peut pas amer celui de ses visages qu¡¯on essaie de masquer en soi¡± suggests that there is rather a symbolic significance to this precise blow. Cherea, the true Dionysus-Apollo synthesis, shatters the mask of the false one, of the unbridled and self-deluding Dionysus which he himself might have become.
It is no doubt from this Nietzchean perspective that it is most appropriate to end an examination of this highly unusual play. At the prompting of Jean Grenier, Camus has succeeded in turning a late-Roman ragbag of prurience and propaganda into a tragedy which, relative to the transpositions of Cocteau, Giraudoux, Anouilh, et al., is more metaphysical, more primordial, and—why not ?—more Greek.
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. . . Caligula is an actor's and director's play ... . French criticism, although it greeted the play very cordially, often astonished me by speaking of it as a philosophical play. Is there any truth in this? Caligula, a relatively attractive prince up to then, becomes aware, on the death of Drusilla, his sister and mistress, that this world is not satisfactory. Thenceforth, obsessed with the impossible and poisoned with scorn and horror, he tries, through murder and the systematic perversion of all values, to practice a liberty that he will eventually discover not to be the right one. He challenges friendship and love, common human solidarity, good and evil. He takes those about him at their word and forces them to be logical; he levels everything around him by the strength of his rejection and the destructive fury to which his passion for life leads him.
But, if his truth is to rebel against fate, his error lies in negating what binds him to mankind. One cannot destroy everything without destroying oneself. This is why Caligula depopulates the world around him and, faithful to his logic, does what is necessary to arm against him those who will eventually kill him. Caligula is the story of a superior suicide. It is the story of the most human and most tragic of errors. 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.
Consequently it is a tragedy of the intelligence. Whence the natural conclusion that the drama was intellectual. Personally, I think I am well aware of this work's shortcomings. But I look in vain for philosophy in these four acts. Or, if it exists, it stands on the level of this assertion by the hero: "Men die; and they are not happy." A very modest ideology, as you see, which I have the impression of sharing with Everyman. No, my ambition lay elsewhere. For the dramatist the passion for the impossible is just as valid a subject for study as avarice or adultery. Showing it in all its frenzy, illustrating the havoc it wreaks, bringing out its failure -- such was my intention. And the work must be judged thereon.
Translated by Justin O'Brien (from the foreword to Caligula & 3 Other Plays, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Vintage Books, New York: 1960).
The Evolution of Caligula
"Caligula is Camus¡¯ first completely original and undoubtedly his best and most enduring play." (E.H. Freeman, The Theater of Albert Camus)
All the immediate evidence suggested that Caligula, published in 1944 and first produced in 1945, was a later work, for instance, than Le Malentendu which had been published in the same volume as Caligula: Le Malentendu preceded Caligula on the stage as it did in their joint first publication; Caligula is more polished theatrically than Le Malentendu; furthermore, where Le Malentendu reflects the same rather gloomy preoccupation with the world's hostility to man that one finds in Camus¡¯s earliest essays L'Envers et l'Endroit, Caligula, by placing the emphasis rather on how man should rebel against the world's hostility, is more consonant with Camus¡¯s thought in the latter part of the war and early post-war years. (I.H. Walker, "The Composition of Caligula." Symposium, Vol.xx, #3.)
E.H. Freeman expresses two pieces of conventional wisdom. Walker agrees with the positive evaluation of Caligula but thinks that the play¡¯s polish is partly due to the fact that it is not Camus¡¯ "first" play. Even in scholarly circles the narrow question of chronology is not exactly a live issue these days. Still, clarifying Caligula¡¯s complicated evolution does cast light on an interesting aesthetic question. Germaine Bree, for example, notes that Camus¡¯ "reworking"of Caligula over the years reflects a "certain plasticity of the medium which lends itself to modifications." In the case of Camus, moreover, the creative tension between the demands of writing a play and the exigencies of performing it is much sharper because he had extensive practical experience in dealing with the mass of variables involved with producing a play. In fact, Camus had originally planned for Caligula to be performed by his own company, Theatre de l¡¯Equipe, and to play the lead role himself. In writing this play, therefore, Camus had various incentives to exploit the plasticity of the medium to the fullest.
Camus had the idea of writing a play about the Caligula myth in 1936 but only produced a sketch of it. He finished the "first version" in 1938.
The play is first mentioned in Camus¡¯s 1936 notebooks as Caligula, Or The Meaning of Death, but only two of four projected acts are sketched, and the content of neither finds its way into the first performed or published version. Because Camus eventually eliminated any action representing Caligula¡¯s accession to the throne and his early policies (act one) or his relationships to his three sisters and political elite (act two). What he retained from the original sketch in 1938¡¯s first completed version of the play was the simple, but dramatically potent idea of a "transformation" in Caligula during his disappearance after Drusilla¡¯s death. Caligula¡¯s return and the revelation of this transformation became the subject of act one, and fixed the dramatic structure of all subsequent versions: act two takes place three years later and portrays the effect of Caligula¡¯s madness on those who surround him; act three shows the beginnings of a conspiracy while Caligula swings between megalomania and suicidal despair; and act four sees the conspirators pushed over the edge by Caligula who embraces his own assassination.
The "second version" of Caligula was published in 1944 and then performed in 1945. The relationship between the "first" and "second" versions is not easy to sort out.
Two facts seem to be universally accepted: that Camus finished the first written version of Caligula in 1938; and that during the war he completely revised it into the version which was published in 1944 and was the script for the first performance in Paris, 1945. Germaine Bree¡¯s discussion of the play tends to assume a sharp difference between the two versions, and concentrates on delineating the artistic superiority of the latter. Walker, on the other hand, is much more concerned with clarifying the stages in which the difference took shape (although he, too, agrees that the 1944 version was a superior play). On the basis of his examination of Camus¡¯ notebooks, that is, he concludes that the 1938 "first version" was not simply reworked in 1939-40 into the "second version" published in 1944 (Bree¡¯s assumption). Rather, by 1939 Camus had again revised the play by making the character of Caligula a much less admirable person. Throughout the rest of the war, Camus completed yet another revision in which this change was taken further: Caligula still possessed a basic "truth" about life, but was represented as a "menace" who chose a radically "wrong path" in response to that truth.
Camus produced a "third version" of Caligula in 1958. A critical evaluation of this revision partly depends on one¡¯s understanding of the play¡¯s evolution over 20 years.
By the time Camus had put the finishing touches on this defining representation of Caligula, Le Malentendu (The Misunderstanding) had most certainly been written and performed on stage. So Walker is probably right -- it is inaccurate to call Caligula Camus¡¯ "first" play. And his suggestion that Camus¡¯ comments to the contrary consisted in an exaggeration intended to distance himself from Jean-Paul Sartre¡¯s "existentialism" also rings true. Yet Walker¡¯s analysis also entails the important aesthetic point that it was Camus¡¯ first-hand experience of the terrors of absolute power during the war that motivated and shaped his persistent tinkering with Caligula¡¯s character. This knowledge undoubtedly influences one¡¯s appreciation of the so-called "third version" of the play -- the 1958 revision made for the opening of the "Nouveau Theatre de Paris." Again, Germaine Bree describes well Camus¡¯ substantive artistic changes for the 1958 production, but in developing "allusions to the contemporary scene," she thinks Camus diminishes the play¡¯s dramatic impact. She has "a feeling that the ¡®real¡¯ Caligula will always be the 1945 Caligula." Looking at the 1945 version from the point of Walker¡¯s scholarship, however, perhaps we would not be so resistant to the character of later revisions?
English readers probably come to Caligula through the widely available Stuart Gilbert translation of the 1944, "second version." The script made available to directors by Samuel French, on the other hand, is Justin O¡¯Brien¡¯s adaptation of the 1958 "third version" for the 1960 Broadway debut of Caligula directed by Sidney Lumet. Philip Thody¡¯s excellent critical edition of Caligula in French contains a very helpful appendix in English in which Camus¡¯ various revisions are noted. Copyright as well as scholarly issues must be confronted by any director interested in producing what he or she conceives to be the "best" version of the play.