Albert Camus
Caligola

One [pause for a few seconds and then in rapid succession] two three four.

And an Arab is dead.

Certainly, the gunshots were fired by Meursault and he will have to face human justice. But let's consider the facts carefully.

At the moment of the murder, Camus places his (anti)hero on a semi-deserted beach burdened by the heat of the afternoon. Imagine the unbearable thirst, the slow and monotonous roll of the waves licking the feet and burning the synapses, feel the sweat dripping down your cheeks and neck, the crusted lips gasping ceaselessly. The head heavy from the fumes of alcohol, that light that seems to fall from the sky like a rain of fire, the legs like two blocks of marble sinking into the sand. And then the scent of salt left on the skin by Maria's hair, the unreal silence of the hour, the sticky calm that erases the ticking of existence.

Finally, the pupils stabbed aimlessly by those sunrays refracted by the blade of a knife drawn by the Arab and the flat, smooth grip of the gun that the right hand holds in the pocket.

One two three four: an Arab is dead. And to the examining magistrate who asks him the motive for that murder, Meursault opposes a stubborn silence whose subtext seems to be: "Why? Because that's how it was."

Camus - a philosopher sui generis who favors images over concepts - highlights the Absurd through a mechanism made of sensory concatenations, of physical perceptions that have nothing to do with the intangibility of elaborate abstractions and, in the case of "The Stranger", seems to suggest that Meursault is only the last link in a chain of events that led to a murder.

Is he the sole responsible, or rather one of the pieces in a specific domino effect triggered by Nature? Is it his will to power that pulls the trigger, or is he nothing more than an agent (and a victim himself) of that Absurd whose destructive force can overwhelm anyone at any moment?

Now try to replace the anonymous little clerk of "The Stranger" with a Roman emperor who has (and, above all, uses) unlimited power, think of a Raskolnikov with no qualms of conscience, a Stavrogin in full delusion of omnipotence. What face would that Power that demands Josef K.'s condemnation have? How far would the Shakespearean Richard III have gone, purged of the fear of death?

Think of all this and then place it in a dramaturgy.

The Caligula of the pièce is nothing but the quintessence of that homme absurde postulated by Camus in the essay "The Myth of Sisyphus". He is a man tired of the world as it is, of the vile laws it promulgates, the worn-out conventions it requires, the artificial postures it imposes (in this sense almost a blood brother of Hamlet).

Caligula, above all, has understood that everything is governed by the Absurd. And if this is so, then there are three consequences: "my rebellion, my passion, my freedom".

And he pursues all this as emperor.

If Meursault was a mere cog in the inscrutable machinery of the Absurd, Caligula - exploiting to the fullest his "social position" - wants to replace the Absurd. He is the Absurd: "Fate cannot be understood, that's why I became Fate. I have assumed the stupid and incomprehensible face of the Gods."

In his kingdom, has there not yet been a plague worthy of note? Then he will close the imperial granaries causing a general famine. Are Rome's coffers languishing? Then all the patricians will disinherit their children, appoint the State as the sole heir, and be killed completely arbitrarily if the situation might require it.

Is Caligula just a man? Then he will stage a theatrical performance in which he will play the role of a grotesque Venus, showing the people the depth of the cruel indifference and capricious will that characterize it (a sort of mise en abyme meta-theatrical that traces, from the point of view of dramatic writing, a further point of contact with Hamlet).

But Camus' Caligula is not that frantic madman without art or part that History has passed down to us; on the contrary, in his lucid madness, he pushes a clear, crystal-clear logic to the point of paradox, with no smudges. He is a philosopher who knows what he wants and, if he seems to the masses insane, it is only because they cannot grasp the grand idea he is imbued with.

Caligula's true passion is human life on Earth, to which he wants to give new meanings and new possibilities, but his is a toxic, furious, and - ultimately - one-directional love. He literally wants the moon, he "simply" wants the impossible - and to do this - he must necessarily turn the world upside down like a sock.

Naturally, he must die.

And in the conspiracy devised behind his back, among the many who will rebel only for petty reasons of personal opportunity, there are two characters who stand out in a different light.

First, the young poet Scipio, who lost his father to the hands of the same emperor during a moment of frenzied homicidal divertissement. A character shrouded in a subtle anarchic aura and endowed with remarkable psychological penetration, he will ultimately refuse to lift the dagger against the tyrant because, despite everything, he cannot help but feel a kind of elective affinity with him in the same spasmodic tension to the absolute: for one, it is towards creation and for the other, towards destruction.

And then Cherea, a learned Roman patrician who becomes the spokesperson of the bourgeois modus pensandi without descending into cowardice or falsehood. The leader of the rebels and sworn enemy who even confesses to Caligula the intention of an imminent coup d'état to which the emperor, in yet another variation of the Absurd, will not lay a finger on him.

However, Camus' is not a pièce that fits into that famous "theater of the absurd" which, in a few years, Ionesco&C. - based on the Beckettian matrix - will impose on the stages of all of Europe. "Caligula" does not outline an abstruse allegory to reveal some truth or social or existential norm.

"Caligula" is rather a drama on the Absurd understood as a primordial and eternal One, as an inexhaustible - and relentless - source of life and death.

And all this is decidedly too much for a human being, even for a Roman emperor at the height of his powers.

Caligula can no longer be alone, neither with the living (for whom he feels more than anything else disdain) nor with the dead (with whom he holds long conversations). He is obsessed, but not by remorse or fear. It is that solitude populated by "gnashing of teeth", it is the footsteps of those "strange beings without a name that he feels growing inside". He has understood, as Sartre would say, that "hell is others" (whether living or dead) and that one can escape this nightmare in only one way: with perfect silence, with dreamless sleep.

For this, he will face death with a sense of liberation finally at hand, and when, with the conspirators' blades now unsheathed, he will shout at the mirror "Caligula, to History!", he will have one last awareness in his heart: a grandiose failure is worth infinitely more than a thousand miserable victories.

Yes, at the moment of his assassination, one must imagine Caligula happy.