In the ever-increasing literature on the “War against Terror”, a number of Anglo-American academics, such as Paul Berman, Michael Walzer and Jean Bethke Elshtain, have summoned for their audiences the examples of past intellectuals and their struggles with terrorism and totalitarianism. The Western intellectual most commonly enlisted has been Albert Camus: hero of the French Resistance, agonized Algerian settler, who stood for a politics of refusal in the face of extremism and nihilism. These critics privilege his work in their urgent appeal to refashion the public against its threatened dissolution in the face of visceral extremism. This canonization of Camus, however, not only glosses over his own vexed identity as an Algerian settler. It also misses a deeply related concern that orders much of his work: the duty of the artist in not merely representing but actively creating and shaping a society and culture. A romantic authorial cliché neglects what he saw as the socially constitutive and productive role art had in regenerating society. In this endeavor Camus drew, astonishingly, upon an aesthetic of terror, using Antonin Artaud's dramaturgy to this end.

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) was, along with Jacques Copeau, among the most influential French dramatists of the twentieth century. Though his work received increasing attention later, even before World War II a number of intellectuals sought to apply his dramaturgy in their own work, including Camus, who was then a young settler artist and engagé in colonial Algeria. Although scholars often pass over the importance of his dramas, Camus privileged theatre above all, and frequently employed dramaturgical techniques in his other writings. Camus was certainly drawn to Artaud's neoclassicist concern for revivifying the power of ancient myths on a modern stage. But Artaud's work also appealed in its innovations and challenges. For Artaud, the theatre should be alchemical, transforming the audience in a performance that supplemented a violent reality in purging excess.Footnote ¹ He sought to transform words, signs and the body itself upon the stage, through sacred incantation, mystification and the violent exploding of taboos, such as murder, suicide and incest. The theatre was not a retreat from reality, but its cruel and terrifying intensification. And it was initially in the specific context of a politically volatile colonial Algeria that Camus, appropriating aspects of Artaud's dramaturgy, sought to create in his works an immersive spectacle of collective destitution and Artaudian terror. This terror would, according to Camus, reconstitute his audience against the nihilism, tyranny and social dissolution of his era. And these aesthetic strategies, if seldom acknowledged, are crucial to understanding his political writings both on Algeria and on France. In this present era, with its own “War against Terror”, when his voice is once again called upon in Anglo-American writing as the timeless voice of moderation against terrorism and totalitarianism, a historical examination of Camus's own aesthetics of terror has become all the more vital, and timely.

AN UNTIMELY CAMUS

To better understand Camus's self-assigned role of the artist as legislator of collective passions, it is first worth noting the number of Anglo-American critics who have come to uncritically internalize his own self-avowal as a Promethean artist whose reach extends beyond his own time. There are, of course, many English-language works on Camus,Footnote ² but a surprising number of Anglo-American critics have suggested, at different moments, that Camus's eternal truths must be called upon to refashion society when needed most by American or Western people.

This is a rhetoric that elides his continuing relevance among writers and intellectuals as diverse as Ahmed Taleb-Ibrahimi, Assia Djebar, Abdelkader Djemaï or Mohammed Lakhdar Maougal. In his famous prison letters, Taleb-Ibrahimi had written of the profound disappointment he felt in Camus during the Algerian War of Independence. For Taleb-Ibrahimi, Algerian intellectuals embraced him as a true Algerian, while Camus turned from them to side with French repression. Camus's death haunts Djebar's Le Blanc de l'Algérie, written during the Algerian Civil War, where he is sororally presented as one of many individual Algerian intellectuals who have died too early. Djemaï's Camus à Oran also acknowledges him as one of the great writers of Algeria, yet whose works efface an indigenous presence. Lakhdar Maougal more recently argues against what he sees as tired arguments that seek to repatriate Camus as Algerian, and which can only reopen old wounds. He instead suggests that his work on the absurd and revolt are of much more immediate relevance for the grave problems facing people in the French banlieue, and that it would be more fruitful to reinscribe his work in this French context.Footnote ³

By the time of his death in 1960, Camus was arguably the French intellectual most revered by Anglo-American audiences.Footnote ⁴ Although he is one of the most widely read francophone authors in the United States since his death, he has been repeatedly rhetorically summoned as the occulted voice of principled measure, speaking to a society threatened by dissolution and political extremism. For instance, in 1972, Robert Pickus wrote in his preface to Neither Victims nor Executioners that Camus was needed now more than ever against American anti-war protest, Black Power, and third-worldism.Footnote ⁵ However, by the end of the Cold War, Edward Said judged that Camus's writing had become less available to Anglo-American concerns.Footnote ⁶ In 1996, David Prochaska agreed: “Albert Camus has moved toward the margins.”Footnote ⁷

His literary exile, if there in fact ever was one, was brief. Already in 1998, Dominick LaCapra observed that there seemed to be a resurgence of (English-language) studies on Camus.Footnote ⁸ That same year Tony Judt wrote, “there is something untimely, even un-French about Camus.”Footnote ⁹ In Judt's writing, Camus the French intellectual is once again represented as the solitary, life-affirming hero, faced from all directions by the death-driven ideologies of his time.Footnote ¹⁰ Only a few years after Judt's essay, and in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center, Camus was once again brought out of Cold War retirement in Jean Bethke Elshstain's Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World, David Carroll's Albert Camus, the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice, and Paul Berman's best-selling Terror and Liberalism.Footnote ¹¹

Berman observes, “We are in an absurd situation. Truly, this is a moment Camus would have appreciated. We have reason to be terrified; but it is not a good idea to be terrified.”Footnote ¹² Berman, a self-avowed liberal pragmatist, sees the sources of his conflated terrorism and totalitarianism in nineteenth-century Romanticism. He adapts this critique largely from Camus's L'Homme révolté, which functions as the mise en scène for his entire discussion. For Berman, an irrational cult of death has infused Romanticism, communism, fascism, present-day Islam, Iraqi Ba'athism, and a supposedly monolithic Palestinian society. On liberalism, Berman does not see its roots in its institutions, but what he stresses repeatedly are the shared desires that shape liberalism as a socially constitutive force, and that require an act of “mass persuasion” on the part of the artist or intellectual.Footnote ¹³ Though Camus the political essayist is invoked throughout Berman's book, Camus as dramatist is absent. This might seem perfectly natural in a political essay, but Camus's notion of theatre was intimately connected to his political commitments and contestations. In Terror and Liberalism, Berman's only discussion of theatre is of Victor Hugo's play Hernani, which he cites as a quintessential example of the romantic origins of irrational anti-liberal terror: “here was a play about rebellion which was itself an act of rebellion—a play in which the hero aimed at freedom, and arrived at murder and suicide.”Footnote ¹⁴ Yet this description is, inadvertently, a perfect recapitulation of Albert Camus's most famous play, Caligula. His aesthetics are in fact much more complex and ambiguous than has often been presented—and crucial to understanding his views on terror.

CAMUS'S AESTHETICS AND POLITICS

With each of the appropriations of Camus—by Robert Pickus, Tony Judt, Jean Bethke Elshtain and Paul Berman—there is a desire to refashion the public in an age of decline and threat. This is an organizing principle of much of Camus's work. For example, the narrative of his 1951 essay L'Homme révolté intertwines its critique of decadent and nihilistic art with a critique of political extremism. If in Le Mythe de Sisyphe his critique of the social and metaphysical impasse of an absurdist modernity is focused upon the problem of suicide, in L'Homme révolté the problem is murder. His solution to the nihilistic threats of his era is to refashion politics through a socially constitutive art, with a central place reserved for the legislative figure of the artist.

He begins L'Homme révolté by stating that revolt not only is a product of lived oppression, but can be brought forth through the “spectacle of oppression, in which the victim is another,” which is how the entire essay, as an account of oppression and of a putatively nihilist decadence, functions.Footnote ¹⁵ The concluding pages of L'Homme révolté explore the possibility for a collective refusal of the nihilism and terror of his era. Here he emphasizes the importance of the artist in shaping people's passions by means of an immersive and confrontational art. Thus people may confront oppression “relatively” in times of political dissolution and nihilism, safeguarding themselves from its realization. On the one hand, he denies that society “should be controlled by artists.”Footnote ¹⁶ However, in contemporary society, artistic rebellion is crucial in providing a visceral but limited experience of oppression to the people.Footnote ¹⁷

What did Camus mean by calling for an immersive art that would thus shape the “collective passions” of people?Footnote ¹⁸ An entry in his notebooks, written as he was working on L'Homme révolté, stresses the role of the artist in shaping the collective passions of people, and thus politics itself:

In his 1955 Athens lecture Sur l'Avenir de la tragédie, he echoed the call of L'Homme révolté for a new classicism that would take the form of a socially regenerative art. Here as in other writings on drama he discusses the importance of a renewal of tragic theatre to this project. He argues that the absurdity of contemporary life needed to be challenged by the theatre, by tragedy above all. But dramatists needed to find a new “tragic language” appropriate for the modern era.Footnote ²⁰ As in L'Homme révolté, he felt that what was missing was a “genius” who could best express this renewed classicism, and have it carried on by a generation of artists.Footnote ²¹ Camus seems to have had his own artistic production in mind when discussing this regenerative project. In his notebooks he conceived of his novel La Peste in precisely the terms with which he called for a “new classicism” in L'Homme révolté and Sur l'Avenir de la tragédie: “From the point of view of a new classicism, The Plague ought to be the first attempt at shaping a collective passion.”Footnote ²²

This aestheticization of politics, or reconfiguring of the murderous impasse of modern politics through art, is an underlying, if underappreciated, motif of L'Homme révolté and is present from his earliest writings among a literary circle of colonial settlers in Algeria. In one of his first published review articles, in 1932 for the journal Sud, he found the fundamental flaw in Henri Bergson's work to be his excessive reliance on logic to prove what should be clear a priori; Bergson's critique of the ideas of the time through logical disputation risked merely repeating this era's own absurd reasoning.Footnote ²³ In his most famous essays and fiction, Camus instead challenged the absurdity and decadence of contemporary European thought not by logical or philosophical argument, but with a call for a socially regenerative art to oppose it. Edward Freeman notes this concern in Camus's earliest play, Révolte dans les Asturies: “Pèpe's dramatic ‘Non!’ does not need to be motivated if one considers him to be a prototype of L'Homme révolté. His decision has not been arrived at by a process of logic; on the contrary, it is a sudden surge of keenly felt but ill-defined emotion.”Footnote ²⁴ Camus did not entirely renounce reason for a celebration of the irrational. But he sought to immerse the individual reader or audience member in unmeasured excess (démesure) and the irrational. This was a starting point towards collectively embracing the classicist limits of measure and order; or, to put it in the Gnostic terms familiar to him, the illness was to be cured with a poison. Despite his deep opposition to public executions, his recurring tropes are images of suicides, mass murder, plagues and executions. It is only through a confrontation with death and excess that a vital, measured individual and social life could be reconstituted. This unfolding process of regeneration occurs in reaction to a shared spectacle of death, immiseration, loss or internment—in other words, of a shared, if virtual, experience of destitution.Footnote ²⁵ Roger Quilliot notes this approach not only with the protagonist Meursault in L'Etranger, but in Camus's first, unpublished novel, La Mort heureuse, where the protagonist, named Patrice Meursault, arrives at self-consciousness through a purification by murder and death, and where the “community, the fraternity of the dead, takes on the character of a near mystical exchange”.Footnote ²⁶ In 1944, while working on his novel La Peste, Camus wrote, “I never said that man was not reasonable. What I want is to deprive him of his imaginary survival and show that with such privation he is at last clear and coherent.”Footnote ²⁷ By taking his aesthetic strategies for societal regeneration seriously, and situating them in the context of a specific cultural setting in colonial Algeria, and later in France, a great deal can be better appreciated about why he sought to shape audiences with terrifying images of mass murder, plague and suicide.

CAMUS'S SETTLER MYTHS

Camus's distinctive trajectory between Algeria and France helps clarify his works’ multivalent meanings. His works strive for universal relevance and are often aimed at metropolitan audiences, but are almost entirely set in colonial Algeria. Studies of his works are often compartmentalized into their Algerian or French contexts (which roughly correspond to his early work centered on the problematic of the absurd, and his later work on revolt), but in reality these two geographic contexts cannot be so easily divided one from the other. Works like Caligula and La Peste were begun in pre-war colonial Algeria, though performed or published in post-war metropolitan France. This is another doubled context to his works: in space and time, divided by a colonial Mediterranean as well as by the events of World War II. La Peste was crafted for metropolitan audiences at least as much as settler ones, yet there is more to its colonial context than the mere fact that the action is set in Algeria. Like many other of his works, La Peste expresses a desire for reconstituting a people facing shared exile, violence and dissolution; these were threats against which society should collectively rebel, with an act of social regeneration in a time of terror and destitution.

To better understand his preoccupation with regenerating society in the face of destitution, it is necessary to initially situate his writings not only in the settler community in which he was born, but in the subculture of colonial writers and artists to which he gravitated, initially under the tutelage of his mentor, Jean Grenier. Carroll's Albert Camus, the Algerian correctly emphasizes that he never renounced his Algerian origins. According to Grenier, “Albert Camus's attachment to his country was absolute.”Footnote ²⁸ But this attachment was more than that of a settler for his people; it was that of a settler intellectual who sought to fashion them through his writing. Camus wrote, towards the end of his life, that he and his generation of settler Algerian writers had attempted to create a people though their works.Footnote ²⁹ Prochaska notes this desire operating among an earlier generation of settler writers, such as Louis Bertrand, Robert Randau (nom de plume of Robert Arnaud), Jean Pomier or Musette (Auguste Robinet).Footnote ³⁰ These intellectuals attempted to transform a settler people into an integral community through literature and art; metropolitan aesthetics were grafted to a colonial setting. This was central to the aims of colonial literary luminaries like Bertrand, and later writers like Gabriel Audisio and Camus. For instance, Bertrand drew upon the literary techniques of Flaubert and other French writers in his attempts to create through his works a distinct settler people forged in exile and violence. Camus used Artaudian techniques in his fashioning of a unified and eternal settler society. As Patricia Lorcin argues, Camus, like Bertrand before him, desired to “stabilize an essentially unstable situation by creating social and cultural myths around which the [colonial] society could coalesce.”Footnote ³¹

Settler artists and writers were explicit in positioning themselves as cultural legislators of settler society.Footnote ³² Audisio and Camus repudiated immediate predecessors like Bertrand, but not the need to fashion settler society with constitutive myths. Despite their many differences, settler intellectuals agreed on certain foundations. First, the settler presence on African shores reestablished a Latin Mediterranean hegemony interrupted centuries before by a foreign Arab invasion. Second, these returning Mediterranean settlers (primarily of Spanish, French and Italian backgrounds) had putatively been constituted as a distinct but unified people in the colony through processes of destitution and threats of dissolution: whether by their exile from Europe, their extreme poverty and hardships in colonizing a purportedly barren country, or their common efforts in the face of constant existential danger from a barbarous enemy.Footnote ³³ Finally, Mediterranean colonial culture was often contrasted with a decadent French metropole. Though colonial intellectuals drew upon and shaped these settler myths for different aesthetic and political programs, they all took the myths to be self-evident. Colonial writers, drawing on the myths, sought to fashion the settler communities as a distinct and unified people brought together in waves of immigration and settlement as the colony was forming. In so doing they hoped to overcome (or elide) the class and ethnic hierarchies, as well as the political factions, among the settlers themselves. This new virile and regenerative Mediterranean culture was presented as an advent, always on the cusp of realization.

Camus's efforts to fashion his audience through a spectacle of terror owe a great deal to this colonial endeavor. He too sought to fashion a settler people and culture through the recurring myths of destitution, struggle and a revivified community. But he also reworked these colonial myths in order to oppose the far-right politics popular among settlers. Colonial intellectuals were almost as politically divided as their broader Algerian settler communities. Unlike explicitly pro-Nazi intellectuals like Louis Bertrand, Camus's aim was to fashion a settler people divorced from far-right politics. David Carroll emphasizes that Camus's early works were engaged against political reaction in French Algeria. Conor Cruise O'Brien's study emphasizes that they are in fact steeped in colonial myths of settler hegemony. One of the recurring features of Anglo-American Camusian scholarship is that these two interpretations are often discussed as if they were mutually exclusive. In fact, it is in this intertwined context of Camus's desires to combat political reaction among settlers, while simultaneously partaking in, and in some ways enriching, a grammar of settler privilege, that his early works, and in particular his dramaturgy, seek to refashion society.

AN ENGAGED INTELLECTUAL AND DRAMATIST

By the end of 1935, Camus had joined the Communist Party in Algeria, improbably at the advice of his anti-communist mentor Grenier. As in metropolitan France, Algeria was the site of numerous conflicts between the ultra-right and the partisans of the Front populaire. Street battles and political graffiti proliferated in settler neighborhoods, simultaneous with increasing French anxieties about Italian hegemony in the Mediterranean.Footnote ³⁴ In much of Algeria, especially Oran, it was far-right parties and organizations to which settlers overwhelmingly gravitated. Camus remembered that the settler population was overwhelmingly anti-Semitic.Footnote ³⁵ Camus, like other intellectuals such as Gabriel Audisio, became increasingly engaged in challenging the far-right intellectual hegemony in Algeria. He helped form a dramatic troupe with other leftists, the Théâtre du travail, which performed adaptations as well as his first play, the collaborative effort Révolte dans les Asturies in 1936. Though he later found fame as a novelist and journalist, Camus's early career as an engaged intellectual was centered largely upon the theatre, and he was involved in the politicized aim of transforming reactionary settler communities through artistic propaganda.

As well as performing theatrical works in Algeria, Camus helped found the Algiers Maison de la culture, a regionalist cultural center supporting the Front populaire, which opposed the “right-wing doctrines” manifest in many French neo-traditionalist and Algerian regionalist programs.Footnote ³⁶ Its manifesto aimed to “make Algiers the intellectual capital that it has the right and the duty to be in the Mediterranean world”.Footnote ³⁷ This project was part of a broader strategy by the Communist Party in France to open several Maisons de la culture: regionalist cultural institutions where local people could come to appreciate cultural forms of leftist solidarity and propaganda. There Camus presented a speech entitled “La Culture indigène: La nouvelle Culture méditerranéenne”. Aiming at the racialist image of latinité, typified and shaped in the works of Bertrand and Charles Maurras, as well as at Italian designs on North Africa,Footnote ³⁸ he advocated a regionalism that would embody a universalist Mediterranean culture comprising all its people—yet nonetheless focused on “Western men”.Footnote ³⁹ For Camus, the role of the intellectual, in this period of mobilized hommes lettrés, is vital to the endeavor of revitalizing and reconstituting a Mediterranean people. A Mediterranean culture will only last as long as it retains its “spiritual principle”.Footnote ⁴⁰ In a passage that would later be echoed in L'Homme révolté, this identity was not an “abstraction that leads men to massacre”, but a common sensibility that is emotionally felt.Footnote ⁴¹ It is the intellectuals and artists who will foster this Mediterranean identity and reveal its universal truths to “Western men”; truths that might oppose the colonial myths of a Latin “master race” of settlers (to put it in Louis Bertrand's reactionary terminology).Footnote ⁴²

But as Conor Cruise O'Brien, Azzedine Haddour and Patricia Lorcin have noted, Camus cannot help but repeat in this speech the colonial racialist categories of earlier writers like Bertrand, by framing this universalism in conventional colonialist and traditionalist terms, as well as effectively excluding Arab North Africans.Footnote ⁴³ For example, in Camus's mythologizing lecture, his eternal Mediterranean had transformed an exclusive Christianity's “Judaic” exclusivity into a universal Catholicism, while reactionary exponents of latinité had turned their backs on a Mediterranean exemplified by “the great tragedies and great comedies of a strong and hard Greece”.Footnote ⁴⁴ In emphasizing cultural differences between himself and his opponents, Camus here denies the acknowledged centrality of Hellenism in both Bertrand's and Maurras's aesthetic and political works. That Camus wants to foster an anti-fascist solidarity is clear in this essay, as is his anti-imperialism when it comes to an Italian Ethiopia, if not a French Algeria. He explicitly targets the Manifeste des intellectuels pour la paix en Europe et la défense de l'Occident, a 1935 manifesto in support of the Italian invasion and occupation of Ethiopia, signed by Bertrand and Maurras among other far-right intellectuals.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet his emotive arguments, here as elsewhere in his works from this period, are immersed in the neo-traditionalist imagery and vocabulary dominant among his settler intellectual contemporaries, a set of imagery and vocabulary that threads its way through settler writings as different as those of Jean Pomier and Gabriel Audisio. This should not be surprising; Camus is writing here not as the liberal icon he has since become, but as the young settler intellectual—and influenced by Maurice Barrès among other neo-traditionalists popular among his peers. Here he calls on intellectuals to reawaken a sense of solidarity among settlers. For settlers, he resuscitates colonial myths in the service of creating social cohesion against fascism. As O'Brien observes, Camus's discussion of Mediterranean culture champions Latin, Christian, feudal, and other neo-traditionalist icons in a speech putatively on Algerian “indigenous culture”.Footnote ⁴⁶

After leaving the Communist Party, Camus founded another theatrical troupe in 1937, the Théâtre de l'équipe, whose program, after his exit from the party, would be “without political positions”.Footnote ⁴⁷ He also helped found the journal Rivages, and contributed to the ephemeral Méditerranée Afrique du Nord. Citing the example of the Front populaire's Edouard Daladier, the latter journal's mission was “to create on this land of Africa a human community similar to the French community, animated by this universality that alone can free the earth of its servitude, because it rests upon the respect of all spiritual values.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Still opposed to the ultra-right in Algeria, he would always retain and champion this set of values as well as an avowed universality. His Mediterranean wedded a French universalism to an eternal colonial Algeria, and resided somewhere in the paradoxes between his allegiance to justice and his people.

In 1940, after his stay in Oran, Camus traveled to France, where he would remain, aside from sojourns to other parts of Europe, North Africa and the Americas, for the rest of his life. He would never renounce his settler roots, but would come to call on Europeans, by means of an immersive art, to embrace a universalism nonetheless rooted in French colonial and metropolitan traditions.Footnote ⁴⁹ In their endeavors to fashion a settler community out of the complexities of actual settler society, colonial authors were not isolated from metropolitan communities of intellectuals. Like other settler writers, Camus shared a belief that the European population needed to be fashioned at the hands of artists and writers. And like other settler writers, Camus was drawing on metropolitan intellectuals, like Maurice Barrès and André Gide, but also in his case Artaud—recasting their strategies of social reconstitution and liberation, and grafting them upon a colonial setting. And it is in this doubled context, between France and Algeria, anti-fascism and neo-traditionalist settler fantasies, that Camus's aesthetic strategies become clearer. While many critics contextualize Camus's politics within a colonial or metropolitan framework, too few treat his aesthetics with the same historical curiosity. Yet it is in taking his aesthetic strategies seriously, acknowledging their sophistication, and most of all situating them within a historical framework, that a fuller appreciation of Camus's contested positions regarding terror is possible.

ARTAUDIAN DRAMATURGY AND “VIRTUAL TERROR”

Although painting and the plastic arts were of deep interest to Camus, it was to theatre, and tragedy in particular, that he would devote much of his life, and by which he would often order his philosophical and political essays.Footnote ⁵⁰ Marie-Louise Audin observes that Le Mythe de Sisyphe is itself structured like a drama. Metaphors of theatre proliferate and his argument proceeds through an exposition of dramatic and mythical characters: Don Juan, Caligula, Kirilov and Sisyphus.Footnote ⁵¹ The 1937 manifesto of Camus's Théâtre de l'équipe, like much of contemporary French theatre, was influenced by Jacques Copeau in its selection of plays, in the literariness of the playwriting and in its call for an economy of action on the part of the performers. But it also owes a strong, if conflicting, debt to Antonin Artaud in its attempt to realize the theatre as an arena of cruelty, that will “demand of works truth and simplicity, violence in its emotions, and cruelty in its action.”Footnote ⁵² In his “Sur l'Avenir de la tragédie,” Camus celebrates the inexhaustible debt of modern French theatre to dramatist Jacques Copeau, but it is the writings of Artaud—Copeau's sometimes adversary—that he celebrates for having brought tragedy to the forefront of people's preoccupations: “at the same time the most significant expression of a movement of ideas and reflection on the theatre, is the wonderful book Le Théâtre et son double, by Antonin Artaud”.Footnote ⁵³ Camus was eclectic in his appropriations, but Artaud's influence appears and reappears throughout his career. In a 1958 interview, Camus stated that his vision of theatre, and its relation to its audience, was “for tragedy and not melodrama, for total participation and not for critical reflection”. This vision of theatre, as Ilona Coombs argues, calls on the immersive techniques of Artaud by which both he and Camus sought to reorder tragedy in the modern era.Footnote ⁵⁴

But establishing this intellectual filiation is only a starting point in understanding Camus's aesthetic strategies regarding terror. The works of an artist like Artaud are not like a cargo of identical wares, opened and used the same way by each recipient. Understanding Camus's Artaudian debt, and its relation to his call for a socially constitutive art, requires a closer look at what was appropriated and to what end.

According to Artaud, his own theories of theatre found their genesis in his witnessing a performance of an unnamed Balinese play, staged during the Colonial Exhibition of 1931 in Paris. He thought that the modern theatre had become decadent, like French civilization. A new totalizing theatre, which would resurrect the force of early Greek tragedy, was necessary to reshape the masses in this age of mass politics. Susan Sontag observes that “Artaud's argument in The Theatre and Its Double is closely related to that of Nietzsche who in The Birth of Tragedy lamented the shriveling of the full-blooded archaic theatre of Athens by Socratic philosophy—by the introduction of characters who reason.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In a Dionysian vein, Artaud came to this realization by witnessing Balinese theatre, which as far as he seemed to know at the time, taps into the terror of life, and immerses the spectator in “dance, song, pantomime and music”.Footnote ⁵⁶ Camus wrote in his preface to the 1936 play Révolte dans les Asturies, “the spectator must be the center of the tragedy”.Footnote ⁵⁷ This idea of a total theatre, a performance that involved forcing the audience into a total immersion of a shared reality, rather than merely witnessing its representation, was pursued in many of Camus's stage directions, which included the Artaudian strategies of “synthesizing drama, ballet, mime and music”, surrounding the audience in the scenery, as well as placing actors among the audience.Footnote ⁵⁸

Towards the end of 1938, a productive period in which he was working on Caligula, Noces, L'Etranger, and Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Camus wrote that tragedy was accentuated by discordant music between scenes, and by proliferating “oriental” gestures in “cruel dances” through their “unaffected geometry”, which is precisely the language used by Artaud in his description of the Balinese play he witnessed, and his prescription for the way in which modern tragedy will interrupt and confront its dissolute audiences with the terrible realities around them.Footnote ⁵⁹ Although Camus's theatre productions display a great deal of expository and philosophical discussion contra Artaud's ideas on the body and language, they often contain crucial set pieces that are unmistakably Artaudian.Footnote ⁶⁰ For example, there is a play within the play Caligula that condenses the entire drama into a brief performance by the cruel emperor before the Roman patricians and the audience. In Act IV, Caligula silently mimes strange “ridiculous gestures” in a dancer's robe while “appearing in Chinese shadow” in front of a screen. Immediately after this disconcerting performance a guard announces, “the spectacle is over”.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet the tragedy continues.

For Artaud, the theatre of cruelty should not be an escape from reality, but the intensification of reality that will act upon and transform the audience through mythic and terrifying symbols: “With famous characters, atrocities and superhuman devotions, we will attempt to focus a spectacle which, without recycling the expired images of the old myths, will extract from them the forces that animate them.”Footnote ⁶² Camus's own beliefs on the role of theatre strongly echo Artaud's. Camus believed that “each person has within them some illusions and misunderstandings that must be killed. Simply put, this sacrifice perhaps liberates another part of the individual, the best part, which is that of revolt and liberty”.Footnote ⁶³ The Artaudian cruelty and violence called for by Camus's troupe was not without aim. As Artaud put it, “Whatever the conflicts that haunt the mind of a given period, I defy any spectator to whom such violent scenes will have transferred their blood . . . to give himself up, once outside the theatre, to ideas of war, riot, and blatant murders.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Artaud's conception of the theatre would confront the audience with a terror that “pushes towards a sort of virtual revolt.”Footnote ⁶⁵ According to Artaud, the plague is a significant symbol of this theatre. Instead of finding a modern symbol that will function like Artaud's plague, Camus chooses the symbol of the plague itself for his plays Caligula and L'Etat de siège, and obviously his novel La Peste.

The plague, for Artaud, is an oriental cargo upon European shores, and always simultaneously a symbol of both terror and liberation. It is a submersion into aesthetic excess that produces a socially constitutive revolt in the audience. Camus, more reticent, would usually present the Artaudian cruelties of incest, suicide and mass murder offstage, or narrated indirectly in novels. Artaud recognized that this terrorizing revelation of the theatre as a plague might lead people to atrocity, but he hoped that it would in fact mitigate the need for violence outside the theatre's performance, by subjecting the audience to its transformative realities, without recourse to experiencing literal atrocities and death: “There is a risk involved, but in the present circumstances I believe it is a risk worthrunning.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Constance Spreen has recently suggested that Action Française founder Charles Maurras's attack on Romantic literature as a “plague” upon French tradition and the nation was an important influence in Artaud's decision to invest his theatre with this evocative symbol. The metaphor of the theater as plague “recast the plague as a positive force with poetic capacities.”Footnote ⁶⁷ From Artaud's point of view, the theatre as a “plague” had a doubled purpose: it threatened to collapse society but also to purify it. However, if the theatre as plague was rich in political significance, the pathological signification of this symbol was broader than reference to the Action Française and its nationalist and classicist aesthetic program alone. It was not only in decadent literature that neo-traditionalists saw symptoms of societal disease and degeneration. In the inter-war period, immigrants, Jews, Arabs, Germans, Muslims and communists were regularly presented as pathological infections to the French body politic. And this spectacle of “foreign” influence as contagion was not restricted to the ultra-right. Contagion and disease were paradigmatic images in the representations of metropolitan and colonial threats to the body politic. Nedjma Abdelfettah writes that inter-war administrative anxieties about radicalized or migrant people in France, no matter the actual reality, resulted in a “danger to appear like a many-headed hydra: Arab, Jew, foreigner, German, Italian, panislamist, communist, tuberculic, syphilitic . . . hygienic language dominates, for everything is pathology”.Footnote ⁶⁸

The modern symbol of the plague as theatre was fitting on a number of levels. It simultaneously repeated, intensified and opposed contemporary discourses of “foreign” ideas and populations as pathology from the far right, from French administrators and from the “mainstream” press.Footnote ⁶⁹ According to Artaud's stated intentions, a theatre of cruelty would purge its audience by immersing it in an intensified vision of the crisis still waiting outside the threshold of the theatre, a crisis nonetheless explained by Artaud in a language as familiar to surrealists as to Maurras, that of a crisis of decadence. In his notebooks in 1942, Camus wrote, “the plague is a liberation”—a statement that jeopardizes the assumption that the symbol of the plague in Caligula, La Peste or L'Etat de siège can too easily be reduced to a metaphor of the Nazis alone.

CALIGULA'S SPECTACLE OF TERROR

Caligula is a transgressive, daemonic character in Camus's play. After Emperor Caligula's sister Drusilla, with whom he had an incestuous relationship, dies he is confronted in his despair with the absurdity of existence. The action of the play involves Caligula seeking to refashion the decadent people of Rome, by sharing with them his revelation—and engaging in what Camus calls in Le Mythe de Sisyphe “a superior suicide”. Caligula's personal evolution is rounded by the deaths of the women closest to him—that of Drusilla, but also his murder of the maternal Caesonia—deaths that are but necessary dramatic steps on his path of terrible liberation.Footnote ⁷⁰ Cherea announces that Caligula's philosophy is to force people to think through his torture and violence, a spectacle he shares with his subjects, and the audience.Footnote ⁷¹ Camus has Caligula announce that his mission is to become like a plague in order to terrorize the people of Rome into confronting reality.Footnote ⁷² The people can only be transformed and reconstituted, to realize this universal truth embodied in Mediterranean culture, by Caligula's subjecting them to a spectacle of extreme cruelty and mass murder—a confrontation with terror and excess that Camus also forces on his theatre audience. His decision to have Caligula staged with the audience surrounded by the action and scenery, an Artaudian strategy, emphasizes this impact. When it was first staged at the Théâtre Hébertôt in Paris, after World War II, it was assumed to be an allegory of Hitlerian fascism. According to Roger Quilliot, Caligula is a warning against terror and “is a prophetic play” that suggests the ethical stances of the French Resistance.Footnote ⁷³ Yet the play's original version was begun as early as 1936, certainly completed in 1938, and it was to be performed in Algiers. Camus's own regional troupe, the Théâtre de l'équipe, was to perform it. He wrote to Jean Paulhan, “although it was conceived and written in 1938, events have given it a meaning which it did not originally have . . . it was as I conceived it a drama of the mind outside of all contingencies.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Caligula is a strikingly complex figure: on the one hand he can be seen as a personification of a Maurrassian latinité, or perhaps even fascist Italy, yet if so the play proliferates in strange emphases in its sympathy for Caligula and his embodiment of the plague as a reign of terror.

If the play was misinterpreted, Camus certainly had a hand in this: he had reworked the play during the war, and transformed Caligula from an ambiguous tragic protagonist, who seeks to reveal the truth to society through terror, to more of a terrorizing antagonist. This was accomplished by removing a crucial last speech by Caligula. After his murder, the curtain falls, but he returns from behind the curtain to confront the audience with these lines, excised from the post-war version:

Here Camus's ending presents Caligula returning from death to challenge the audience one final time to a confrontation with the absurdity and terror of the play, and its potential to transform their lives. Rosette Lamont sees this finale as an expression of a youthful Camus full of excess that a mature Camus would repudiate in his quest for measure and order. But Camus did not repudiate excess in his works. Instead he called upon measure and order, constituted in opposition to the spectacle of excess with which he confronted his audience. This pairing of démesure and mesure, excess and moderation, is a leitmotif in Camus's work; a timeless measure and order is achieved through a confrontation with excess and terror. This logic applies to the narratives of Le Mythe de Sisyphe and L'Homme révolté as much as in his fiction. In “Le théâtre et la peste”, Artaud writes that the theatre “is an evil because it achieves a supreme equilibrium that is not possible but through destruction”. Artaud argues that the theatre of the plague, “in revealing to collectivities their dark power, their hidden force, it invites them to face their destiny with a heroism and bearing that they would never have achieved without it”.Footnote ⁷⁶

Caligula is a plague who threatens the populace with his terrible gift of extreme violence and political chaos; Caligula is a scourge whose role is to erase societal apathy and reaction by transforming everyone into either self-aware subjects or corpses—a fate that will befall Caligula as well—murdered but purified, and speaking a terrible truth to the audience. For Camus, “in ancient drama, the one who pays is always the one who is right”.Footnote ⁷⁷ The character who takes Camus's ideas to their limit is a ruler of Rome; the Roman Empire, as Lorcin observes, was privileged by colonial literary writers like Bertrand as the mythic root of settler intellectuals’ claims to Algerian hegemony.Footnote ⁷⁸ The Latin emperor in his madness transforms all people into self-aware subjects, cognizant of their authenticity in an act of terror visited upon his people, to the horror of the audience. Caligula, I would argue, adapts and transforms the icons of latinité by staging them using Artaudian dramaturgy. The Artaudian madness of Camus's Latin emperor challenges the audience against too easily identifying with these myths beyond the threshold between theatre and reality.

THE TERROR OF THE PLAGUE

Camus followed his exploration of the superhuman plague of Caligula with the subhuman, literal plague of his eponymous novel set in colonial Oran. In 1939, he published a searing and impassioned series of articles in the leftist newspaper Alger républicain, where he detailed the famine that was immiserating and devastating Kabylia, shortly before the paper was shut down by the colonial government. Camus then moved for several months to the western coastal city of Oran, where he would work on his essay “Le Minotaur ou la halte d'Oran”, and his novel La Peste, also set there.

Kamel Kateb explains that the recurrence of famine in Kabylia was part of a cycle of immiseration and epidemics that disproportionately and repeatedly swept through the Muslim populations in colonial Algeria. This cycle of dislocation, famine and pestilence would be a feature of the colonial regime in Algeria—partly due to the expropriation of collectively held fertile lands, seized by the French and other settlers.Footnote ⁷⁹ While Camus was in Oran, another outbreak of typhus was killing Algerians to the west of the city. There was even talk of quarantining Oran, and Camus wrote to his friend Emmanuel Roblès for any details he had on the outbreak.Footnote ⁸⁰

The novel La Peste is structured in five parts like a classical tragedy, what Morvan Lebesque calls “a theatre enclosed in a book.”Footnote ⁸¹ In La Peste, there is an outbreak of plague in Oran, which is then quarantined. Camus recounts, through narratives within the narrative, stories of atrocities and terror, a “scourge” which descends upon the citizens, who are confronted with a reality against which they collectively revolt, before the epidemic finally lifts. There are concentration camps set up to quarantine the infected, but they are for European settlers in the novel. They are not the concentration camps, “tent cities”, and prisons of the colony to which in reality Algerians were subjected in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—and in which, during his stay in Oran, thousands of Spanish refugees as well as Algerians were interred. Camus's settler quarantined, a nearly voiceless chorus, write to their loved ones outside, but because they are limited to a few lines, their writing becomes formulaic, then symbolic, another Artaudian conceit.

One of the protagonists, a journalist named Raymond Rambert, arrives in the city to study the sanitary conditions in which native Algerians were living before the plague erupts. But, in La Peste, Camus addresses neither whether the eruption of infection is from native Algerians nor what, in the end, the effects are upon them. He succeeds in reducing their presence even further by situating discussion of the plague's origins in the orient, echoing Artaud's discussion of the plague as oriental cargo. The threat to the settlers is from oriental shores, and though not native to the region, impossible to eradicate once it has arrived. The characters Rieux and Rambert walk briefly through the Quartier Nègre, but only note the quiet and emptiness; they never enter the households or speak to the Algerians in this district—a quarantine within the quarantine of the novel. Abdelkader Djemaï concludes that although Camus wrote exceedingly beautiful pages on Oran, it was nonetheless an Oran from which indigenous Algerians were strangely erased.Footnote ⁸²

In one of the key set pieces of the novel, in the midst of the epidemic, the characters Tarrou and Cottard go to the theatre to see a rendition of the tragedy of Orpheus. The actors onstage perform with an economy of action, to the delight of the bourgeois audience that has improbably come to escape the terror of the plague by enjoying a tragedy about death. In the second act, the actor on stage playing Orpheus begins to exaggerate his movements wildly, as if directed by Artaud, and finally literally collapses of the plague before a horrified audience. In this jolting scene, the intrusion of reality onstage transforms the affluent audience into a mob that crowds the exits rather than confront the presence of death. This passage highlights the power that this death can have to transform people, leaving only Tarrou and Cottard, and the reader, to note the carnage of the performance.Footnote ⁸³ There is thus no escape from the terrorizing and constituting effects of the plague by a retreat to the theatre, nor for the reader of Camus's novel, unless they put down the book. At the end of the novel, with the lifting of the plague and the quarantine, the citizens return to their quotidian lives, but the spectacle of this terror, embodied in the complex symbolism of the plague, has acted upon the reader of the novel, who in the end, addressed by the narrator, is reminded that the plague can always return.

According to Quilliot, Camus chose the image of the plague as early as 1939 for La Peste, under the influence of Melville—whom Camus had read while drafting the work.Footnote ⁸⁴ Its subject was the Nazi infection of Europe—albeit set in French Algeria. Quilliot writes, “on a higher level, Oran bursts out of its own limits. We have France and all of Europe under the Nazi boot, a vast concentration camp”.Footnote ⁸⁵ In a response to Roland Barthes, Camus wrote that he wanted the symbol of the plague

In the novel, isolation camps are set up by the administration; families are separated from the dead, parents from children, and solitude becomes a general condition for all. This collectively experienced abjection, instituted from above by the authorities, will provide the Oranois the shared basis from which they will reconstitute themselves from below.

La Peste is a remarkable novel that simultaneously presents itself as universal in its relevance and specific in its allegorization of the Occupation, set in colonial Algeria and echoing settler myths of an existential threat, destitution, exile and social regeneration.Footnote ⁸⁷ If an anti-fascist stance in La Peste is clear, it is also obvious that Camus had set the action of La Peste in Oran with its own historical specificity of ultra-right parties. It was not only the banality of settler life that Camus opposed (as he had in “Le Minotaur ou la halte d'Oran”), but also the rootedness of their ultra-right politics. As much as Camus would remain eternally devoted to French Algeria, he was opposed to settlers’ anti-Semitism and political reaction.Footnote ⁸⁸ In a colony already notorious as a bastion of support for the ultra-right Parti populaire Français and the Action Française, Oran was its epicentre, with the anti-Semitic Union Latine proliferating among the settler community, whose program was to unify the Latin races against the supposed Jewish or Muslim threats.Footnote ⁸⁹ Caligula was a Latin figure whose spectacle of terror ends in a transcendent liberation for the audience. La Peste is set in ultra-right Oran, its settlers devastated by death and destitution. In these works, Camus subverts many of the claims to community by the ultra-right—by taking their visions to their nightmarish extremes. And yet in both cases, the residual referent, purged from these colonial narratives, remained Algerian Muslims—whose own destitution would be eerily mimicked by the settlers in Camus's works. It is in this initial context that Camus, a partisan of the Front populaire, sought to use the terrorizing strategies of Artaud. He utilized them in order to help fabricate an idealized settler people, embodying “universal” French or Western values, purged of their complaisance and reactionary politics by a reign of terror as spectacle. But he effected this by retaining all the founding myths of settler society, of destitution and exile as strategies for assembling a new basis of settler identity—one that still avoided questioning the fundamental injustice of colonial conquest and occupation.

John Erickson examines the depersonalization of Algerians in Camus's work, but only in passing notes that works like La Peste seek to create a sense of community in the face of collective destitution.Footnote ⁹⁰ Camus was clear about his own intentions: “there was thus no more individual destiny, but a collective history that was the plague, and feelings shared by all.”Footnote ⁹¹ His creative solution was to employ Artaudian strategies as an aesthetic means to reshape a people, with a universal problem requiring universal solutions—for the West, against a terrorizing enemy. La Peste can be fruitfully read as a metaphor for the Nazis, but, as with the pre-war versions of Caligula, such an easy correspondence obscures the positive role the plague plays in creating solidarity and truth in a society that has forgotten its values.

Azzedine Haddour has brilliantly examined how the material conditions existing among Algerians when Camus began writing La Peste, in Oran and Algeria, are transposed both upon European settlers as a mythic plague and upon European civilization as Nazis.Footnote ⁹² Camus, as a reporter for Alger républicain, was well aware of the immiseration of Algerians in the colony. If La Peste is a critique of the contemporary politics of both metropolitan Europeans and settlers in Algeria, it also strangely displaces Camus's awareness of native Algerians’ immiseration: the waves of pestilence, products of the series of famines which Camus in his journalism writes were “ever the scourge”Footnote ⁹³ devastating Algerians; their mass imprisonment and quarantine; and the rise of anticolonial nationalism in opposition to a foreign threat. In La Peste he would present a spectacle of a European population in Algeria terrorized by oriental infection and then quarantined, subject to draconian laws and systematic destitution; these mythic images inversely mirrored the concrete realities of colonial rule for many Algerians, who navigated their personal experiences under the regime in varied ways.Footnote ⁹⁴

A STATE OF SIEGE

Camus's excision of the last lines spoken by Caligula in the eponymous play had helped turn it into a less ambiguous, if less coherent, struggle against a despot. This is precisely how Camus embodies the plague in his post-war collaborative play L'Etat de siège, set in Spain, which he worked on with Jean-Louis Barrault, another dramatist influenced by Artaud. As in other plays, he attempted to synthesize ballet, mime and song in the drama—along with the strategic use of discordant sounds and music. In the staging of L'Etat de siège, the plague was a character with little, if any, ambivalence. The actor portraying him even wore a swastika to make the connection between plague and Nazism explicit. Against this terror, the city's administration is either ineffectual or collaborative, as in La Peste, and it is only the Mediterranean Sea that can rid the city of the plague—although it is from the sea again that the plague arrives—a confrontation with death that purifies its people. Here Camus bifurcates the doubled Artaudian meanings of the plague, as terror and liberation, and isolates them, respectively, on a Hitlerian antagonist and the Mediterranean Sea. The sea's purifying winds signify the turning point in the play, when common resistance to the foreign infection is realized. However, again, it is from the sea that this plague arrives. These pluralities of plagues that Camus explored, in Caligula, La Peste, L'Etat de siège, act to transform a people—both the fictional characters and the audience immersed in Camus's theatre and fiction. The extreme violence and destitution first make them realize their absurd existence, and then move them towards a collective solidarity.

THE CONTAGION IN FRANCE

As a Front populaire militant in Algeria, Camus had urged artists to counter the ultra-right politics of the time; as for himself, he turned to dramaturgy, and Artaudian techniques in particular, as part of his prescription for the social transformation and regeneration of settlers. This collective solidarity was forged in the spectacle of a terrorizing destitution. He developed these techniques in the context of the culture wars of 1930s colonial Algeria, but he brought them and his preoccupation with regenerating society across the Mediterranean to wartime France. Camus was initially uncomfortable and lonely in Paris, with its gray skies and streets. He felt Paris was overcivilized and too refined, though he gradually came to see himself as French. He imagined himself living among the French workers, and seeing the destitution of people under the Occupation, “those French faces and silhouettes I shall never forget,” faces he witnessed from the windows of the train he regularly took between Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and Saint-Etienne. In the midst of war, he wrote that “all the French look like immigrants,” exiled in their own country, like the Oranois in his novel La Peste. For Camus, this strange nomadism and abjection, the image of exile within one's own nation, which paradoxically constitutes the nation, was also how he would narrate the origin of the Algerian settlers’ shared identity, as they arrived in Algeria in his unfinished Le premier Homme.Footnote ⁹⁵

After the war, with Caligula finally performed, and as he finished La Peste, he would continue to write about Algeria in his fiction and journalism, as he also developed arguments about the threats of terrorism and totalitarianism that would culminate in L'Homme révolté. He prescribed an international movement against terror and repression in the collection of essays published as Ni Victimes ni bourreaux. As in Caligula and La Peste, he argued that “we do not cure the plague with means that apply to ills of the mind. A crisis that tears apart the entire world must be solved at a universal scale”.Footnote ⁹⁶ He also explored the phenomenon of French racism in an article for Combat in 1947—the same year as La Peste was published—that he titled “La Contagion”. Camus uncharacteristically compares the French “colonial problem” to Nazism. He frames his discussion of French racism by presenting it as occasional, and crucially as a contagion, to French virtue—as he makes clear even in the title, whose signs may or may not be “spectacular”. Yet the examples he gives undermine his argument: the certainty that many Frenchmen will find that the Jews “really exaggerate” the racism they face, Frenchmen who will condemn their solidarity even if, as Camus rebuts, “this solidarity was taught to them in concentration camps”; femicides in the French countryside that the gallic husband blames on the mysterious sidis, or Arabs; “spontaneous” torture chambers in colonial Madagascar; and the only recent apparition of collective punishment in Algeria in the wake of what has since become known as the Sétif and Guelma massacres (an interpretation that manages to elide the long legacy of systematic oppression, torture and mass murder as French policy in Algeria).Footnote ⁹⁷ These oppressive events, whether they are real or spectacular signs of the contagion of racism, produce solidarity in their abject victims excluded from the nation. And yet they produce indifference in the French citizenry, who, echoing the Oranois of La Peste, “register the news with the indifference of people who have seen too much. Nevertheless, the fact remains, we have done that for which we have reproached the Germans.”Footnote ⁹⁸ He had designed his theatre of “virtual terror” so that it might provide a collective sense of destitution. This would be a starting point to refashion his settler or French audiences against nihilistic indifference to political reaction. But he acknowledged in this essay that it was only among people coming together against metropolitan or colonial persecution as Jews and/or colonized Algerians, outside his own theatre of cruelty, that these lessons were learned. Here Camus reveals many of the ambiguities of his own political positions and aesthetic strategies. His repeated attempts to reconstitute European people through an aesthetics of terror and revolt, while curing them of their racist infection, was elaborated using the exclusionary imagery of destitute Europeans terrorized by inhuman enemies. These conventions of Algerian settler myths, of a community forged in destitution and struggle against a faceless enemy, were perhaps too deep-rooted for Camus to challenge in his audience or even in himself. It was in part European indifference to others’ suffering that Camus sought to shake in his own theatres of cruelty. And yet for Camus, this required the spectacular terrorization of his audience by an amorphous enemy that would in so many instances eerily signify the very recipients, Algerians themselves, of the real suffering and terror to which so many French or settlers were indifferent.Footnote ⁹⁹