CALIGULA: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION

"For the dramatist the passion for the impossible is just as valid a subject for study as avarice or adultery."

 LOCATING THE WORK

 Caligula’s place within the developing corpus of Camus’s work is unique. Begun with the fiery exuberance of youth, it underwent periodic revision almost to the year of his death, testifying to the subtle transformations of sensitivity and perspective that his work reveals.

Four stages are worthy of note. The initial inspiration to dramatize the life of the Roman emperor flowered in the climate that gave birth to Nuptials and A Happy Death. The latter work certainly seems to be Caligu1a’s twin. Both express a passionate will to live and a contempt for the hypocrisy of the everyday, torn as they are between celebrating life and coming to terms with death. Struggling to emerge from the habitual, the daily routine and social ritual, the individual stands forth in hard-won uniqueness, only to come face-to-face with a reality of death made more poignant by that sin­gular achievement. The intrinsic tension seems almost to invite repose. Its ambiguous legacy haunts all three works—as it does The Minotaur of 1939. This legacy invites the emergent individual to merge with nature, to become one with it and to resemble nothing. Much here is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s brilliant study of the Dionysian, which impressed Camus in those years.

This initial period is submerged and somewhat hidden by Camus’s in­creasing preoccupation with the absurd, which surfaces in 1938 and 1939. As A Happy Death gives way to The Stranger (usually translated as The Outsider), so Ca1igu1a is put aside, only to be taken up again after The Stranger is completed and The Myth of Sisyphus nears final form. The version that first appeared in public resulted from this radical rethinking. Here we begin with the emperor’s realization that “men die and they are not happy.” No attention is paid to Caligula’s life before the death of his sister and mistress, Drusilla. Rather, the focus is upon his rebellion against what he feels to be a metaphysical injustice. “Really, this world of ours, this scheme of things as they call it, is quite intolerable. That’s why I want the moon, or happiness, or eternal life—something, in fact, that may sound crazy, but which isn’t of this world.”

As this initial version achieved published form, the related problems posed by the absurd and by rebellion intermingle, thus placing Caligula at a tran­sition point in the development of Camus’s writing. More explicitly than in The Stranger or The Myth, and conjointly with The Misunderstanding, with which its publication was at first joined, this version directs us toward the emerging problems posed by revolt. Yet we are still dealing with a work primarily focused upon individual attempts to come to terms with the dawn­ing sense that this world may have no transcendent significance. In short, it remains essentially a study in the problems of the absurd.

The last two major revisions, those of 1947 and 1958, do not radi­cally alter the structure and dynamics of the play. Insofar as they bear upon its content—as opposed to Camus’s effort to polish the work stylistically— these modifications seek to sharpen the conceptual focus concerning possible alternative responses to the absurd. Most particularly, the revisions of 1947 develop in detail the rationales for the divergent paths taken by the pro­tagonists, while those of 1958 essentially humanize and contextualize, thus making more credible, the character of the cynical bureaucrat Helicon. But of this, more later.

Clearly, therefore, this work was essentially completed in the early 1940s, contemporaneously with The Myth and The Stranger, and properly forms an integral part of Camus’s “first series” on the absurd. The previous dionysian themes constitute its prehistory, feeding that underground source that, like the stream drawing Meursault toward his confrontation with the Arab, offers the possibly illusory promise of refreshment, serving both as a potentially fertilizing resource and as a dangerous temptation, but that nevertheless, continually recedes into the background of Camus’s explicit preoccupations. Rather the axis of the published work revolves around the struggles, on the one hand, of the 29-year-old emperor to come to terms with the twin problems of the inevitability of death and the hypocrisy of social conventions, and, on the other, those confronting “the others” who must come to terms with the reality with which he confronts them. These were also the central preoccupations of the 29-year-old Camus during the war years.

 A METAPHYSICAL REBEL

 Caligula’s Project

“Men weep because . . . the world’s all wrong,” complains Caligula. The spiritual twin of Scipio, possessed of a profound sensitivity and passion for life, he realized upon Drusilla’s death that life unfolds in time, is of limited duration, and is without guarantees or transcendent significance: “To love someone means to be willing to age with that person. I am not capable of such love. Drusilla old would have been far worse than Drusilla dead. People believe that a man suffers because the being he loves one day dies. But his true suffering is less futile; it comes from realizing that not even grief lasts. Even sadness is deprived of meaning.”

Sobering indeed is the realization of time’s inexorable flow, which, like the winds of Djémila, erodes even the objects of our most precious cares. That, of course, is the source of “the absurd,” the encounter with which literally sets the stage for the drama.

Caligula finds this state of affairs intolerable. He is a rebel against an absurd world. Either the world must be changed fundamentally, or people must stop acting as if it had a meaning that it does not have. In a sense, he is an idealistic youth who has been disabused of his ideals. Having been brought up to believe this world has a transcendent meaning that can justify life, he feels cheated and disgusted. If life has no ultimate meaning, how can people continue to live as if it did? Either they are fools or hypocrites, conditions that, as emperor, he can and will rectify. “Of what use to me is this amazing power which is mine if I cannot change the order of things, if I cannot make the sun set in the east, decrease suffering, and put an end to death?”

Of course, it is not the realization of the absurd that is central here. It had center stage in the initial drafts of the play, which date from 1936-1937. That experience, to which Two Sides of the Coin bears witness, trans­formed and transfigured Camus’s orientation from the sportive concerns of youth through the encounter with tuberculosis to the confrontation with finitude. But what sense to make of finitude when all of our culturally em­bedded meanings point beyond? Here are the existential termites gnawing at the metaphysical foundations of the Western world. As Camus has noted on several occasions, metaphysical problems plague the modern world as never before -- precisely because our once taken-for-granted foundations are no longer secure. Since this is the situation confronting contemporary experience, Camus’s attention has focused on alternative responses -- to explore their logic and dissect their consequences.

One possible response is to go on as if nothing has changed. What is more normal than that, to which the patricians [senators] attest? Another is to focus upon immediate satisfactions, as do so many of Camus’s women, including Caesonia. While Scipio turns toward Nature as a quasi-salvific divinity, and Cherea seeks to preserve the space for art and human relations in the face of a totalizing logic, Caligula finds these efforts derisive and self-deluding.

A twofold theme is being orchestrated here, and it is somewhat contra­dictory. On the one hand, the metaphysical order of things is unsatisfactory and must be changed. On the other hand, since things don’t make any ulti­mate sense, it is dishonest to act as if they do. Thus decency requires that we reorder our experience to coincide with the revised conception of the order of things. Here the focus is transformation not of the metaphysical structure of things, but rather of the existential quality of our lives. Caligula is a meta­physical rebel who embarks upon both courses of action at the same time -- but not with the same energy.

In fact, although he sends Helicon off to find the moon, little attention is devoted to that project. Even more, by saying his need is for the impossible, he attests from the outset to the fact that he places little or no hope in the projected transformation of the metaphysical order of things. It is his own form of self-delusion. He thus embodies Camus’s sense that the absurd currently defines the limits of our experience, thus existentially constituting the situation with which we must come to terms.

 The Psychic Subsoil

If there is no serious question about the actual possibility of a metaphysical revolution, the same is not true of the existential significance of the ontological need. Camus refers to this play, along with “The Misunderstanding,” as constituting “a theater of the impossible.” If a metaphysical revolution is clearly impossible, the passion motivating it may nonetheless express signifi­cant human needs that must be addressed and worked through. These two plays, he says, “try to give life to the apparently insoluble conflicts which must be traversed by all active thought before arriving at the only solutions which are worthwhile.” And he defends his attempt by noting, “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.”

That this passion for the impossible has, for Camus, deep roots in the human psyche should not be in doubt. One of the first indications of his focus upon Caligula appears in a January 1937 Notebook entry. Concluding an outline for Caligula or the Meaning of Death, Caligula observes that he “is not dead…. He is in each of us. If power were given to you, if you had enough heart, if you loved life, you would see unchained, this monster or this angel which you carry within you.” How can Camus claim that Caligula is a universal temptation or suggest that there is something angelic about such a monster? What is fermenting in this psychic subsoil?

It must be noted that this concern never leaves the play, even though it does undergo significant alterations. In the 1947 version it is an embarrassed Cherea, not Caligula, who suggests that all of us harbor Caligula within us when he observes that “one cannot like an aspect of oneself which one always tries to keep concealed.” But there is no longer any suggestion of positive approbation of these traits. Three years earlier Cherea had been able to say, “I do not hate you. I understand and I approve of you” only to have these phrases removed by 1947.

Clearly Camus is walking a fine line. There is something essentially human yet quite macabre about Caligula. To explore these depths was not nearly so touchy a matter in the pre-World War II years. But with the onset of Nazism, of which Caligula can be seen as an unconscious premonition, it becomes clear that Camus has hit upon something both significant and quite dangerous.

 AN ABSURD GOD

 Condemned to Death

“Your pleading comes too late, the verdict’s given,” Caligula tells Cherea. “This world has no importance; once a man realizes that, he wins his free­dom.” If there is no transcendent purpose to life, then there is no compelling reason to subject one’s actions to moral constraints. In ordi­nary circumstances we are prisoners of our fears of divine retribution or our hopes of divine salvation. Alone “among a nation of slaves,” Caligula is freed of such illusory scruples: freed to act upon whim, desire, or calculation. And so are we all, if we but realize it. That was the truth for which Kirlov died.

Of course, prudential concerns drawn from the realities of social inter­course and the practical demands of group living might limit the behavior of ordinary mortals. But these need not inhibit an emperor. Caligula thus concludes that “everything is permitted.” He will exercise the liberty of action that his insight, logic, and social position combine to make possible.

But there are other motives that move the emperor, as they do his artistic creator. Caligula is committed to the Truth -- which functions as a reflective expression of that “passion for living” that he shares with Scipio, Mersault, and the idealized youth of Camus’s Algeria. Life is too precious to be wasted through habit, or squandered in superficial social ritual. And yet it is ultimately meaningless. Caligula lives this ambiguity as he levels all values, thus bringing the truth of the absurd home to his subjects, while teaching them the value of that present which they took for granted: “I can see, too, what you’re thinking. What a fuss over a woman’s death! But that’s not it. Love, what is it? Nothing much. Her death is only the sign of a truth which makes the moon essential to me … [But] I am completely surrounded by lies, and I want people to live in the truth. And I’ve the power to make them do it. Because I know what they lack…. They are deprived of understanding, and need a professor who knows what he is talking about.

 An Absurd Teacher

“Once more the gods have come to earth. They have assumed the human form of our heaven-born emperor, known to men as Caligula.” This new divinity is not, of course, the god of Judeo-Christian mythology. Caligula incarnates a rather different perspective. He comes to: “teach us the indifference that kindles love anew”; “inform us of the truth of this world which is that it has none”; and “grant us the strength to live up to this incomparable truth.”

Such a god is not constrained by rationality or moral scruples, though he does act in accord with the logic of an absurd world. Being subject to no higher law, why would he not do “whatever he felt like?” And being emperor, who is to stop him? “Intendant, you are to close the public granaries. I have signed a decree to that effect. Famine begins tomorrow. We all know what famine means, it’s a plague. Tomorrow there will be a plague, and when it pleases me I will put an end to it. After all, I don’t have so many ways of proving that I am free. One is always free at the expense of others. It’s boring, but normal.”

How instructive it is to be subject to a god who does whatever pleases him at the moment. “I see that you have finally understood that it is not necessary to have done something in order to die.” Letting his desires (or fantasies) become the springs of actions dramati­cally confronts us with the truth of our world, demystifying our faith in its intelligibility and purposefulness. And since when have we failed at least sub­consciously to appreciate the absolute contingency of our finite existence? Is this not the reason for our passionate insistence upon the absoluteness of our religious beliefs as they ground our “eternal” social norms? Is it not precisely this sense of their unquestioned place in a divinely ordained social order that the Patricians exude?

Do we not find here the root of the scandal that is Caligula’s behavior? For is he not right, when he admonishes Scipio for complaining about the human cost of his actions, that “if you knew how to count, you would know that the smallest war undertaken by a reasonable tyrant would be a thousand times more costly than the caprices of my fantasies”? (TRN, 69; CTOP, 44). No, he is not a tyrant in the usual sense, for he does not believe in any realizable ideal for which he is willing to sacrifice human lives. Rather, he chooses to “play the part of fate,” having “adopted the foolish and incomprehensible appearance of the gods” (CTOP, 44). By so doing, he threatens, even more than death, the meaning of our lives. “At least,” says Scipio, the actions of a normal tyrant “would be reasonable, and the important thing is to comprehend” (TRN, 69; CTOP, 44).

Not only is his behavior not constrained by rational or moral principles, nor by practical political realities, but, even more, no values or goals hold any sway over his felt preferences. On what grounds can one challenge an assertion of value in an absurd world? Do not all such claims reduce to matters of felt preference and actual political power? It is to address these very questions that Camus, struggling with the horrors of the Second World War and seeking to shed light on the “blind baffle” that he and his comrades of the Resistance were then waging, wrote his poignant “Letters to a German Friend.”

“I wish men to live by the light of truth” (CTOP, 9), he says. But that light when emitted by an absolutistic sun reveals everything to be “on an equal footing: the grandeur of Rome and your attacks of arthritis” (CTOP, 11). From the perspective of the all or nothing, the relative values of daily life are insignificant. Even worse, they are a cruel delusion. “What I most admire,” Caligula likes to observe after an execution, “is my indifference” (TRN, 86; CTOP, 58).

While Caligula is thus free to express his whims, the rest are subject to them. A momentary disposition, a chance. encounter, a slip of the tongue may suffice for him to put an end to a life. Even more, he may have no reason at all, or simply think it would be amusing. Because of our needs, we will have these people put to death in accordance with an arbitrarily established list. On occasion we will modify that order, entirely arbitrarily. …In reality, the order of executions has no importance. Or rather, these executions have an equal importance, from which it follows that none has any. Moreover, each of these people is as guilty as the other (TRN, 22; CTOP, 12). There need be no reason for being put to death, nor any right time. “Judges, witnesses, accused—[we are] all sentenced to death in advance” (TRN, 28; CTOP, 17). And there is no appeal. Life is a death sentence; the truth of which it is the aim of Caligula’s divinity to bring home to his subjects. “Kill him slowly, so that he may experience dying” (TRN, 86; CTOP, 58).

 Execution relieves and liberates. It is universal, fortifying, and fair in both precept and practice. One dies because one is guilty. One is guilty because one is Caligula’s subject. Now everyone is a subject of Caligula. Therefore, everyone is guilty. From which it follows that everyone dies. It’s only a matter of time and patience (TRN, 46-7; CTOP, 29).

 In an absurd world, life is a gift ever on loan. We should not take it for granted nor act as if our success or our future is assured. Such is the sublime wisdom That Caligula teaches. As for Caligula himself, “who would dare to condemn [him], in this world without a judge in which no one is innocent!” (TRN, 107; CTOP, 72).

 THE OTHERS

 To be one of Caligula’s subjects is to have your world undermined, to have your values and beliefs mocked and discarded, and to face the possibility that at any moment whatever you hold dear may be taken from you—your life included7 For the subjects of Caligula, the reality of their situation confronts them at every turn.

The existential parameters of an absurd world are dramatized by Cherea, Scipio, and Caesonia, those alter egos of Caligula, who carry the burden of the dramatic action precisely because they so deeply share aspects of Caligula’s experience. Helicon, the Patricians, and the servants, on the other hand, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, represent ordinary humanity. Their fate is no less affected by Caligula’s metaphysical revolution, but their preoccupations and deliberations are more sketched than developed.

Caesonia speaks for the body and for love. She has “never had any other god than her body” (TRN, 19; CTOP, 10). She is of the moment, the immediate. She expresses the joys and sufferings of life without reflective overlay or grand design. Reminiscent of Meursault, she is prototypical of Camus’s feminine literary characters, having appeared as Marie Cardona in The Stranger and as Martha and Lucianne in A Happy Death, and reappear­ing as Maria in “The Misunderstanding,” Victoria in “The State of Siege,” and perhaps even Rieux’s mother in The Plague. Like these characters, her attitudes and values are simple and direct. “There is good and bad, high and low, justice and injustice.” “At my age one knows that life is not good. But if suffering is on the earth, why wish to add to it?” (TRN, 27, 26; CTOP, 15, 14). Similarly, with her advice. What Caligula needs in order to come to terms with Drusilla’s death, she tells him, “is a good, long sleep. Let yourself relax and, above all, stop thinking. I’ll stay by you while you sleep. And when you wake, you’ll find the world’s got back its savor” (CTOP, 16). No great adventures or flights of the spirit; but a naturalness and simplicity, pervaded by a maternal care that nurtures and an acceptance of aging that consoles.

Scipio too embodies a commitment to nature, but it is a poet’s nature, not a woman’s. It is the natural world, whose expression is embodied in literature. With Wordsworth, he seems to believe that “One impulse from a vernal wood I May teach you more of man, / Of moral evil and of good / Than all the sages can.” He writes of “a certain harmony. . . between one’s feet and the earth,” and observes that “everything … takes on the appearance of love.” But, unlike Caesonia, this is an emotion to be dreamed of and written about, speaking more to the imagination than to the body.

In wandering and reverie, Scipio believes that nature soothes the spirit, revives the body, and frees the mind from concern for recognition and ad­vancement. He advises Caligula to trust in nature, which “has cured wounds more serious” than those from which the emperor suffers (TRN, 55; CTOP, 35). But, though “the same fire burns in both our hearts” (CTOP, 56), Caligula has been forever cast out of the edenic relation to nature that he had once shared with Scipio, by his encounter with the absurd. He has left Scipio, “following him as usual,” but incapable of sharing that insight by which he has been sundered in two. Caligula had “wanted to be a just man.” He had told Scipio “that life is not easy, but that there was religion, art, love to carry us along” (TRN 19; CTOP 10). And Scipio continues to embody the vision they once shared—so much so that, in the latest editions of the play (where Camus has Scipio’s character assume a more mature aspect), Sci­pio finds that he “cannot be against him” (TRN, 83), even though Caligula had had Scipio’s father put to death. Scipio thus refuses to participate in the assassination of one “who so greatly ressembles” him,’ and whom he now believes he understands (TRN, 101). All he can do is absent himself from the collective decision whose necessity he recognizes, while retreating to a restorative nature that is unable to counter Caligula’s passion.

Cherea is less poetic, more practical. His focus is on how people can live together. He shares some of the metaphysical concerns of Caligula, but tempers them with a feel for others, and for the conditions that make social relations possible. Having wished, perhaps like Camus himself, to have been “left to [his] books” (CTOP, 6)” he was forced by the emperor’s actions to become involved with politics. “I desire and need security,” he tells Caligula. “Most men are like me. They are incapable of living in a universe in which the most bizarre thought can become a reality at any moment. . . . I feel like living and being happy, [and] I believe that by pushing the absurd to its logical conclusions one can be neither of them” (TRN, 77, 78; CTOP, 51).Cherea thus focuses the metaphysical and moral challenge posed by Caligula.

[Caligula] is putting his power in the service of a higher and more deadly passion [than that of murder]. He threatens everything which is most important to us. Doubtless, this is not the first time that one among us was possessed of unlimited power; but it is the first time that such a one made use of it without limits.

... That is what frightens me about him, and what I wish to combat. To lose one’s life is a small matter, and when the time comes I will have the necessary courage. But what’s intolerable is to see one’s life being drained of meaning, to be told there’s no reason for existing. A man can’t live without a reason for living (TRN, 34; CTOP, 21).

 Without a reason for living there obviously cannot be any reason for doing one thing rather than another. Thus at a lower level the metaphysical challenge robs ethics of its rationale. “I believe,” says Cherea, “that there are actions which are more beautiful than others.” To which Caligula counters that “all are equivalent.” “In order to be logical,” observes Cherea, “I should then kill or subjugate” those for whom I have at times such a desire. But “if everyone concerned themselves with fulfilling [such desires], we would not be able to live or be happy” (TRN, 78-9; CTOP, 52-3).

But what kind of rejoinder is that to the metaphysical challenge posed by Caligula? Cherea seems to recognize the theoretical inadequacy of his position when he earlier asserts that “one must strike when one cannot refute” (TRN, 35; CTOP, 21). But are we not then simply reduced to a struggle over power?

Caligula’s logic is coherent but neglects, Camus seems to suggest, the competing logics generated by perspectives rooted in nature, the body, and others. By failing to recognize these competing claims—thus operating with a truncated set of existential premises—Caligula presents the spectacle of a mind gone mad with reason. Cherea senses as much when he observes that “life is not possible if one pushes the absurd to its logical conclusions.” But he is not able to counter with an equally persuasive logic. At this stage in the development of his thought, Camus is himself struggling to find a rationale to counter the implicit nihilism of the absurd without abdicating to the proponents of philosophical suicide and the leap of faith. Poignant expression of the seriousness and difficulty of this struggle is given in his “Letters to a German Friend,” where the passionate logic of Nazism is countered by an equally passionate but not very convincing assertion of the value of human dignity. Cherea’s willingness to stake his life in defense of human dignity will have to await The Rebel for a more articulate exposition.

While Caligula’s three alter egos share aspects of his passion, they do not follow him in his logic—a logic that leads to the subordination and eventual rupture of human relations. Faithful to the destructive potential of that logic—a potential he seems ever more aware of and committed to—Caligula destroys his relation to the body (symbolized by the murder of Caesonia), cuts himself off from the healing and restorative powers of nature to which he had once been drawn (symbolized by the rejection and departure of Scipio), and alienates himself from the world of others, thus motivating the distinctive rebellions of Cherea and the Patricians, culminating in his own death.

Caligula may be said to embody the absolutistic impulse essential to Western philosophical and religious traditions. When the mind demands totality and coherence at all costs, it is implicitly committed to the path of spiritual imperialism. Inevitably, it ruptures concrete relations with nature, the body, and others, leveling human values and wreaking havoc everywhere, ultimately engulfing itself.

As people who have made it, the Patricians express the self-confidence and righteousness of the ruling classes. No doubt the world has been made for them, and they deserve their place. Their superiority has been ordained, it is as it should be, and it will not change. Of course, youth will have their dreams and should be humored, but not taken too seriously. Suffering comes and goes, but who is “able to suffer for more than a year”? They will have nothing of such youthful romantic sentiments. “Happily, grief is not eternal” (TRN, 9; CTOP, 4) while life reasserts its normal routines.

The Patricians thus embody what Nietzsche called the spirit of serious­ness, so well expressed by Meursault’s prosecutor. Their place at the apex of the social order is assured. But heaven help those who tamper with the order of things, especially if they have the temerity to “insult … our dignity” (TRN, 31; CTOP, 19).

Helicon, on the other hand, is the one character in the play who expresses no opposition to Caligula’s action. The only time he seems upset with his boss is when the latter refuses to resist his own assassination. Helicon rejects this passive submission to a destiny which Caligula himself has brought about (cf. TRN, 108). He cares nothing for metaphysical concerns. Far more practical, as befits a former slave, he is loyal to the emperor for the kindness he has been shown, and he knows that his position and power depend directly upon that of Caligula. If Caligula is overthrown or killed, Helicon’s fate will be similar.

In so describing Helicon, however, it must be clear that I am speaking of the person who appears in the final edition of the play. For no other character received as extensive a development following the original publication as did Helicon. He first appears in 1944 as little more than an unthinking lackey. He is ordered around by Caligula, without thinking does as he is told, and gives no thought to the meaning of anything. “As you know well, I never think”; to which the 1947 edition adds, “I am too intelligent for that” (TRN, 15; CTOP, 8). He thus expresses Camus’s simple, and perhaps stereotypical, distaste for official bureaucrats.

From 1947 through 1958, however, Helicon becomes a more articulate nihilist. It remains true that few things interest him, and that he agrees to help Caligula, as he says, quite reminiscent of Meursault, because he has no reason not to (CTOP, 9). Yet he now can distance himself from Caligula sufficiently to justify not concerning himself with anything because Caligula, as an idealist, “has not yet understood” (TRN, 18).

Even more, Camus has come to appreciate somewhat more sensitively the needs that might motivate one loyally to perform some of the more distasteful though routine bureaucratic indecencies. In addition, Camus has developed a more refined distaste for the “guardians” of culture, for the intellectual and financial elites with whom he had had close and increasingly unpleasant relations in postwar Paris. Most particularly, he has developed a heightened sense of the hypocrisy of the liberal intelligentsia, who were quite willing to defend freedom with the lives of others, but were often quite unwilling to expend their personal privileges on behalf of the “lower” classes (cf. TRN, 89—90). Thus Helicon emerges as Caligula’s loyal functionary precisely out of appreciation for the latter’s generosity. His behavior offers a more sympathetic gloss on the subservience of the servants who, like the bureaucrats in Hitler’s Germany, carry out Caligula’s demonic orders, often against their will.

 FROM ABSURDITY TO REVOLT

 While the drama plays itself out on the ideological plane and in the confrontation of alternative psychologics, an almost inarticulate existential undertow seems to pull Caligula toward his own destruction. The demand for the moon but gives articulate expression to the basic need for an ultimate and tran­scending purpose. Only in the context of that root metaphysical demand does the action of the play make any sense. That metaphysical demand, expressing a deeply felt need, is what makes the character of Caligula so peculiarly modern.

“He is in each of us” (TRN, 1733), Canius had written. (Or at least in most Western males, but we will return to that later.) This is the ground of Caligula’s universality. Here lies the existential root of the demand for a metaphysical revolution that has for centuries plagued the West. “Each per­son carries within himself a part filled with illusions and misunderstandings which is destined to be killed” (TRN, 1742), observed Camus. This reiterates Cherea’s comment that Caligula is an aspect of himself that he tries to keep concealed (CTOP, 51).

No doubt here is the source, for Camus, of the appeal of religions and totalizing ideologies. But if we all share with Caligula the secret demand for a metaphysical revolution “which is destined to be killed,” and if, even more, we may harbor the wish that life be brought into conformity with our deepest desires, we must find a way to live through and purge those desires before they wreak havoc upon the world, our self included. Caligula does not. In seeking to bring into the world that “new man” (TRN, 1733— 4) which his insight required, “he challenges friendship and love, simple 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 refusal and by the destructive rage to which his passion for life leads him” (TRN, 1727; CTOP, v—vi).

If Caligula embodies a pathology, it lies, no doubt, in his insistence upon the all or nothing of metaphysical rebellion: either life has eternal significance or it is meaningless. 

If his truth is to rebel against destiny, his error is to deny men. One cannot destroy everything without destroying oneself That is why Caligula destroys the people around him and, faithful to his logic, does what he has to to mobilize against him those who will finally kill him (TRN, 1727—8).

 If the metaphysical rebel is right to rebel against that which in the order of things threatens to reduce the human to insignificance, he is wrong to cut himself off from that human community from within which alone a meaningful response is possible. The world must be refashioned from within. It is the task of the rebel to “correct creation,” but not to seek to replace it. There is no outside from which to leverage actions, while resentment only sustains the urge to destroy~ “‘Caligula’ is the story of a superior suicide.

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” (CTOP, vi). Caligula realizes that he “has not chosen the path that was required. . . . [His] liberty . . . leads to nothing” (TRN, 108; CTOP, 73).