Caligula
by Albert Camus (1944)
2022 reads, book 5/20:
The primary reason for reading this play was to complete what Albert Camus termed ‘The Cycle of the Absurd,’ a trio consisting of The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Caligula. In this play, the Roman Emperor Caligula, after the death of his sister Drusilla, essentially goes mad and makes life a living hell for all of his constituents. This is the side of Caligula that those invested in Roman history are familiar with. But, in Camus’ version of events, Caligula suddenly obsesses over the impossible, wanting to “transcend God” and “truly be free” (it is truly unhinged behavior).
On the actual play: it wasn’t bad. It was definitely more violent than I expected (I guess I really shouldn’t have been surprised; the play is called Caligula after all). A good number of scenes are just Caligula getting someone to admit they should die, often through some faulty logic. There are interesting conversations happen between Caligula and Scipio, who seems to give Caligula a taste of his own medicine. This play probably had the most on-the-nose absurdist imagery, as there really is no plot to the play itself, it’s just a series of scenes used for philosophical debate.
What I did love was realizing the imagery in all of these works were connected. Caligula is obsessed with the impossible, as seen in the task he assigns one of his patrician: he wants the moon. In The Stranger, Meursault was obsessed with the sun, and of course Sisyphus had his boulder. Whether intentional or not, I was enamored by the symbolism provided by these three natural elements (sun, rock, and moon).