500
PARTISAN REVIEW
rightly as possible, with no tricks, no sneers, no "modernization."
Both circumstances and characters are very carefully selected to
perform only what the play requires. Nothing is ever thrown in for good
measure or for any incidental purpose. We never encounter in these
plays the casual bystanders whom a Broadway dramatist might permit
to wander in. What characters there are have strict requirements imposed
upon them. Camus primarily demands that his protagonists possess free–
dom, the capacity for exercising free choice. He has to go far to find
his free men. His preference sets Camus off from his contemporaries
in the theater; some of this difference is implicit in the contrast Eric
Bentley once drew between "Strindbergian" and "Ibsenite" actors. The
Strindbergian actor is less restrained: "His emotions come right out of
him with no interference whatsoever and fly like bullets at the enemy."
But Ibsen, not Strindberg, is the father of modern drama, and, conse–
quently, modern stage characters keep their neuroses in check-or at
least in balance. Camus's characters tend to be Strindbergian. Some of
Strindberg's unbalanced heroes earn their freedom at the expense of their
sanity; one of Camus's heroes, Caligula, pays just this price for freedom.
Criminal purposes inspire the principal motivation of
The Misunder–
standing
and so liberate the characters from ordinary scruples. The pro–
tagonists of
The Just Assassins
are also on the far side of the law, revolu–
tionaries who have put aside the usual inhibitions and are in the act of
measuring their freedom. The most dynamic figure in
State
of
Siege
is,
like Caligula, in possession of supreme political power and subject to no
regulation by sanity. Camus's characters tear right into the issues, and
they ignore small details. Just as Lear's "Pray you, undo this button,"
could not have occurred in Racine, it also would be an unlikely line in
Camus. Everyone in these plays is ready for action--or, more often, for
argument. Nothing may intervene to distract, irritate, or enchant us, to
explain the characters or to provide context for the events.
The characters are free so that they may best contribute to the sim–
ple patterns which the plays work out. Of the four plays at hand, two
are constructed to the very simplest
formulas-Th e Misunderstanding
and
The Just Assassins.
The former play requires to be read as an equa–
tion. The prodigal son returns wealthy and incognito, to be killed by
his desperate mother and sister. Most have seen in this play a perfect
paradigm of the absurdity of hoping to escape from poverty or exile.
Camus has become more optimistic about man's fate, but, in squeezing
a new interpretation out of the play, he still, inevitably, reduces it to a
formula:
