248
PARTISAN REVIEW
However, if for the most part Camus' plays do not resemble as
drama the products of such a problem-playwright as Bernard Shaw, the
influence of his ideas upon his drama takes another more peculiar form:
he allows the ideas in which he is interested to determine the nature
of his subject-matter, where most authors can be said to let the subject–
matter which has taken hold of their sensibility determine the ideas which
their works contain. Balzac, cited by Camus as a philosophical novelist,
was a Catholic, but he did not write Catholic novels; the ideas of
The
Human Comedy
do not in the least resemble those of
The Divine
Comedy.
And no one has ever been sure of just what ideas Shakespeare
believed, among the many he used. Camus, however, chooses as his sub–
jects the murder of a son by his mother and his sister, a murder the
absurdity of which is heightened because the murderers do not know
whom they are killing; and in
Caligula
he deals with the monstrous
crimes of an emperor who is determined to commit every kind of crime
in order to prove that he is superior to the gods and that there is no
good and evil. Does this not suggest a lack of conviction in the absurdity
of existence, or a desire to prove its absurdity by fastening upon the
monstrous, the extraordinary, and the accidental? It is true enough that
there are monstrous rulers and that a mother may from time to time
murder her son without knowing that he is her son. But surely the
absurdity of existence, if it is in essence absurd, makes itself manifest
in
any
kind of situation. And thus an ordinary story of love and marriage
ought to have more literary persuasiveness than any theme in which
aberration, in the usual sense of the word, is the substance of the plot.
If
the world is one in which everything is given and nothing is ever
explained, in which the very fact that man has the gift of reason and
is thrown into a world of unreasoning things constitutes the absurdity
of existence, then surely what is daily, usual, ordinary and never cele–
brated in newspaper headlines ought to be the proper subject-matter of
the absurd or existential author.
I emphasize this point not because I think that the literary critic
can get very far by discussing what
should
have been an author's proper
subject-matter, but for the sake of showing that Camus is superior to his
ideas; and the truth of his ideas, insofar as they are true, is temporal
and not metaphysical. At the start of
Sisyphus,
Camus declares "11
n'y a qu'un probleme philosophique vraiment serieux: le suicide."
It would follow that much of the history of philosophy has concerned
itself with what is not serious, what is trivial, and perhaps pointless.
"Juger que Ia vie vaut ou ne vaut pas Ia peine d'etre ve<;ue, c'est re–
p<lllldre
a
Ia question fondamentale philosophique," he continues, "Le
reste, si le monde a trois dimensions, si !'esprit a neuf ou douze catego–
ries, vient ensuite." But there are other serious and fundamental philoso–
phical questions, and the very way in which Camus states what he con–
siders the subordinate or auxiliary problems of philosophy is rhetorical
