Book Around the Corner

Caligula by Albert Camus (1945)

Caligula is Camus’s earlier work of fiction and one he amended several times. He wrote the first version of the play in 1938 and the last one in 1958. I have seen the 1945 version, the one the public saw at the Théâtre Hébertot in Paris, with Gérard Philippe as Caligula. The title of the play sounds like Shakespeare, or for France, like Corneille or Racine. But, forget about references to plays like Julius Caesar or Horace or Britannicus. Think about Hamlet and Ubu Rex by Alfred Jarry, you’ll be closer to the mark.

The play opens on an act where different persons from the court are looking for the Emperor Caligula. He’s been MIA for three days, since his sister and lover Drusilla died. When he finally comes back, he’s haggard and has had an epiphany: Les gens meurent et ils ne sont pas heureux. (People die and they’re not happy). Life is absurd and Caligula turned his existential angst into a new vision of life.

Since he’s an emperor his new philosophy results in a new version of exercising power. He can do whatever he wants to pursue his dream and make all the decisions he judges necessary.

The first act sets the context and prepares the spectator for the three other acts. In these acts, we are three years later and Caligula has put his ideas into practice. The Patricians are outraged and are plotting to murder Caligula. The emperor stripped them of their possessions, violates their wives, mocks them publicly. He kills people after fallacious reasoning. Meanwhile he’s still depressed and aching. This is where Hamlet and Ubu come into one named Caligula. Mix Hamlet’s angst with Ubu’s hard-liner’s tendencies and you can picture Caligula. There’s is in Caligula a bit of the outrageous comedy you see in Ubu Rex. Caligula’s action are funny sometimes, bordering to farce and it lightens the mood, even if it doesn’t erase the horror of his ways.

In appearance, he’s crazy. The director sang that tune. Caligula yells, gesticulates, laughs like a lunatic sometimes and Drusilla’s ghost visits him. I had read half of the play before going to the theatre and it wasn’t how I had pictured Caligula. For me, he’s not crazy. In appearance, he is but he’s just someone who has the power to put his personal philosophy into practice and at a large scale. Unfortunately, he’s unbalanced and his deadpanned reasoning leads to deaths and disasters. Thinking Caligula is crazy is a way to say he’s irresponsible of his actions. He is not. He knows what he’s doing and he’s playing with other people’s lives. Caligula is a criminal, not a lunatic. The real Caligula had an odd childhood and lived in troubled times. History made of him a cruel and crazy emperor but from what I’ve read, historians tend to balance what Suetonius wrote about him with other sources.

In the old tradition of authors writing in times when freedom of speech was limited, Camus used a character from the Ancient Rome as a device. There are a lot of thought-provoking lines in Caligula. Given the time and the political context of the years it was written, it’s hard not to look for political references in the text. The way Caligula confiscated the Patricians’ wealth recalls communism. Caligula is a dictator of the cruellest kind and the time provided numerous examples. His twisted mind allied to unlimited power led to chaos. That side of the play brings thoughts about power and how to exercise it. The other side of the play is all about the meaning of life. Is it absurd as Camus states it is? Despite his unlimited freedom of mind and action, Caligula never manages to deal with the revelation of the beginning: Les gens meurent et ils ne sont pas heureux.