He puts on a mask and three hours later he must die

Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus is, above all, a book about nurturing one’s creative energies in the midst of existential despair. But Camus also hoped to invent a philosophy for living that could be followed in principle by anyone, not just novelists like him. So in the “Absurd Man” chapter, Camus presents three stylized examples from different walks of life, each of them living according to his absurd principles: Don Juan, the Actor and the Conqueror. They are pretty much what they sound like: the famously seductive and commitment-averse philanderer, a stage actor particularly of classics like Shakespeare and Molière, and a vague composite of ruthless historical generals. These characters each represent absurdist living by trying to seize every moment and appreciate it to the full. They don’t focus on trying to build a future for themselves in their own lifetime, and they never think at all about what they will leave behind after death.

The first and third of these characters are no longer quite so compelling to 21st-century sensibilities, and I need to imagine myself back into Camus’s time to grasp why they might’ve been key images for him. Don Juan seems to be admired especially because he thumbs his nose at then-prevalent Catholic notions of chastity. And the Conqueror seems to be admired for his self-awareness: he sends conscripts to die in battle with zero expectation of lasting glory or empire --- perhaps this figure might’ve looked like a refreshing contrast to the Nazis’ delusions of a thousand-year Reich. But unfortunately, what ends up dominating my impression of Camus’s Don Juan and Conqueror archetypes is first, how solipsistic they are (they express zero concern about trampling all over others if needed for their self-actualization), and second, that they’re masculine to a degree that feels exclusionary (you start to wonder if “Absurd Man” literally means only men). In a word, these characters haven’t aged that well.

But that’s OK. The fun of The Myth of Sisyphus is precisely that you can tell it’s by a young author who’s very talented and well-read, but also a little immature. Camus is showing off cool turns of phrase, going out on a lot of limbs, and trying to convince himself as much as the reader of what he’s saying sometimes. The book tries hard to sound like a mature and complete philosophical work, but it’s really a stab in the dark. That’s relatable, and it also encourages the reader to think for themselves about what they believe.

And one of the three examples absolutely holds up and genuinely inspires me: the middle one, about the Actor. The section is worth reading in full, but I thought I’d excerpt three of my favorite passages from my new draft translation of The Myth of Sisyphus, and add a bit of personal commentary about them.

Ephemerality and oblivion

About the famous ephemerality of the stage, Camus writes:

The actor’s kingdom is the fleeting. Of all the glories, everyone knows, his is the most ephemeral. At least that’s what is said in everyday conversation. But all glory is ephemeral. From the point of view of Sirius, Goethe’s works will soon be dust and his name forgotten. In ten thousand years, perhaps a few archaeologists will search for “traces” of our era. This thought has always been enlightening. Properly meditated upon, it reduces our agitations to the profound nobility found in indifference. It directs our preoccupations towards the most certain, that is, towards the present moment. […] An actor succeeds or does not succeed. A writer holds onto a hope even if he is unsung. He imagines that his works will bear witness to what he was. At best the actor will leave us a photograph and nothing of what he was, his gestures and his silences, his gasps or his sighs of love, will reach us.

In this passage, Camus surprises the reader by suddenly zooming way out to take the point of view of an alien star. (Although Camus displayed no interest in his era’s version of the genre, it strikes me that this is a common type of rhetorical move in science fiction, and one of the reasons I, who grew up imbibing SF before encountering Camus, felt an immediate kinship with him.) Here Camus reveals how an awareness of the vastness of both space and time is fundamental to his sensibility. As William James observed, one’s worldview grows out organically from our distinctive “total reaction” to the world. And we can surmise from this and many other passages that for Camus, the vastness of the universe and its seeming indifference to mankind have, from a young age, been a vivid and undeniable fact. That’s precisely why he is so passionate about its polar opposite, the fleeting intimacy of the theater.

This passage is not only about the actor, but also about his or her audience. Camus invokes two kinds of “audiences” here: the intimate, engaged spectator in the theater, and the cold, distant spectator Sirius. Spectators are those who have, at least potentially, the independent perspective to appreciate and judge the artist. Indeed in Japanese, the word for philosophical objectivity is 客観 kyakkan, “spectator outlook”. The attentive crowd and the indifferent Sirius each know their respective truths. The intersubjective truth that in the here and now, at least, we are immersed in this performance and this relation: it is vibrant and alive. And the objective truth that for each and every one of humanity’s works, sooner or later the time will come when they have already been appreciated for the last time.

Whether the painting was eventually lost in a museum fire; whether the book rotted away in the library; or even whether the movie (in the event that Camus’s Ozymandias-style assumptions about the future prove too fatalistic) in fact continues to persist for a million years in the form of bits replicated in multiple datacenters --- but after one final viewing by some scholar or curiosity-seeker, henceforth sits idle as mere data, no longer to be witnessed by any further human being. Given that all works that aspire to permanence are bound for somesuch fate, there’s a lot to be said for simply scheduling the date of the final show and having all the actors bow before an ovation one last time.

Silences that make themselves heard

In the second section, Camus writes about appearances and the body. An excerpt:

A mime of the ephemeral, the actor strives within the realm of appearances. In theater, the heart expresses itself and makes itself understood only through gestures and the body — or voice, which is both soul and body. The law of this art is that everything must be exaggerated and translated into flesh. If on the stage we had to love like we love, gaze as we gaze, speak in the gentle voice of the heart, our language would remain a cipher. Here, silences make themselves heard. Love is loud and immobility itself is spectacular. The body is king. Not just anyone can be “theatrical”: this now-undervalued word encompasses an entire aesthetic and an entire ethic. Half a man’s life is spent implying, turning away and keeping silent. The actor intrudes. He unchains the soul and at last the passions rush onto their stage.

I notice something different each time I reread Camus, and this time, what strikes me is the bit about “implying, turning away and keeping silent”. The ‘negative space’ that frames Camus’s glorification of theatricality is precisely this oppressive sense that one is always holding back. Holding back for courtesy’s sake. Holding back because no one cares, anyway. Holding back because your true feelings are too difficult to express right now, or because you don’t fully understand them yourself. Or most frustrating of all, holding back because it would accomplish nothing to give the middle finger to the German soldier swaggering down your street.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus is not holding back: he’s laying out all his feelings and sometimes half-formed philosophical ideas with an almost bodily intensity. That’s why he later wrote in the foreword to the American edition that “in a sense, this book is the most personal of all those I have published in America”. His novels tend to be more restrained, but now that I think about it, they too feature this play of bodies, alternatively revealing and holding back. In the scene in The Plague where two men take off their clothes and wordlessly swim together in the evening sea, are they revealing themselves to each other, or are they holding back?

Our final role

Camus’s third and final section about theater is about the Catholic Church’s staunch opposition to the diversion of the theater. An excerpt:

“What matters,” says Nietzsche, “is not eternal life but eternal vivacity.” The entire drama is indeed in this choice.

Adrienne Lecouvreur, on her deathbed, was willing to confess and take communion, but refused to disavow her profession. She thereby lost the benefit of confession. What indeed was she doing, if not taking against God the side of her passion? When she tearfully refused to renounce what she called her art, this actress in the throes of agony demonstrated a greatness which, under the spotlight, she never quite reached. It was her finest role and the hardest to pull off. To choose between heaven and a derisory loyalty, to prefer the self or be absorbed into eternity, that is the secular tragedy in which each of us has a role to play.

According to Wikipedia, Adrienne Lecouvreur was a pioneering 18th-century actress, who died age 37 of mysterious causes (unproven rumors swirled that she was poisoned by a rival). The church’s refusal to allow her a Christian burial was so controversial that Voltaire wrote a poem about it. Here she is in a contemporaneous portrait of her playing Cornelia:

What strikes me about how Camus tells her story is that even though he clearly does not believe in heaven, he still has an intuitive sense of excommunication as a dramatic loss. There is a paradox in Camus’s worldview here, it seems to me. Forsaking eternal life would not be much of a sacrifice, after all, if it’s just a childish fantasy along the lines of Santa Claus. For Camus, abandoning the hope of eternal life, illusory though it may be, amounts to a weighty choice --- perhaps because eternity (if only the cold and lonely eternity of Sirius) maintains a stubborn presence in his mental cosmology. So he sympathizes greatly with a figure like Lecouvreur who, given the era she lived in, likely literally believed her defense of art meant an eternity of hellfire.

But then Camus pulls another rhetorical trick: he quite deliberately slips into describing Lecouvreur’s dramatic deathbed non-absolution as yet another “role” she played. This may well be a wry comment on the performativity of Catholic rituals. But I wonder if it’s deeper than that. I sense a connection here with this elegant passage, which I will let speak for itself:

At what point does appearing become being? As he hones his craft, the actor reveals the answer. For that is his art: to feign absolutely, to enter as far as possible into lives which are not his own. At the end of his striving, his true vocation becomes clear: to do his utmost to be nothing or to be many. The narrower the limits assigned to him to create his character, the more necessary his talent. He puts on a mask and three hours later he must die. He must in those three hours experience and express an entire exceptional destiny. He loses himself in order to find himself. When the curtain falls, he has already reached the dead end of a course that will take a man in the audience the rest of his life.