Camus's Failed Savior: Le Malentendu

Camus's Failed Savior: Le Malentendu Patricia Hopkins Texas Tech University The inherent irony of Camus's absurdist dialectic has been analyzed by a number of critics, particularly in his novels and short stories. Less attention has been focused on his plays, which offer even greater possibilities for exploring the techniques of dramatic irony. Le Malentendu, in particular , is a drama so heavily laden with ambiguities and multiple levels of meaning that it borders on caricature, a fact that may explain its relative failure as a tragedy. D.M. Church examines several types of irony exploited by Camus in the play. These include, first of all, the author's irony, wherein the characters unwittingly express ambiguities that escape their awareness, as well as the indirect expression of certain philosophical ideas. Secondly, Church points out examples of voluntary ambiguities of which the characters are more deliberately conscious, and he notes that the dominant images used in the play have to do with words and language (40). His emphasis, however, is on comparison of the various texts of the play, which Camus revised between 1944 and 1958. This study will attempt to examine more closely the situational, thematic, and verbal ironies evidenced in Camus's choice of the theme of the sauveur manqué, a savior who fails because of his inability to speak a clear language to those he would save. On the level ofmyth, Le Malentendu may be situated in the ancient tradition of a mythical descent into a lower kingdom, followed by sacrifice and death. There is also, of course, an ironic reversal of the classical theme of the recognition of the brother, with its double origin in the three Electra plays of the Greeks and the New Testament story of the return of the prodigal son. Le Malentendu dramatizes the tale, extant in numerous folkloristic forms, of the long lost son who is robbed and murdered by his family, which, for one reason or another, fails to recognize him. Sartre, commenting upon the mythical structure of the play, saw it as a model of the basic function of the theater, which is to illustrate the great myths of death, exile, and love. For him the characters of Le Malentendu are mythic in the sense that "le malentendu qui les sépare peut servir d'incarnation à tous les malentendus qui séparent l'homme de lui-même, du monde, des autres hommes" (62-63). Above all, however, we should point out the parodistic Biblical intertext and the notion of salvation on an individual and collective level. Not that Camus was preoccupied with any transcendent concept of eternal salvation: he simply, no doubt, found it convenient to adopt an "evangelical" structure for illustrating the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of instant redemption imposed from without. From the outset, Jan's sense of mission is explicit in his words: "Je veux retrouver mon pays, rendre heureux tous ceux que j'aime" (127). At first reading, the hyperbolic "tous ceux que j'aime" appears overstated when 251 252Rocky Mountain Review we consider that it refers to only two persons, his mother and sister. One cannot help but infer that a much more universal significance is symbolically attached to Jan's role. As an exile in search of a spiritual homeland that has been lost or abandoned, he returns to his birthplace from an Edenic land where he has been relatively happy, and he dreams of being recognized without having to reveal his name. His arrival corresponds to an ironic descent into a kind of hell. Although the geographical setting of the play is vague (we know only that the action takes place somewhere in Czechoslovakia), the atmosphere is somber and claustrophobic in this "ville pluvieuse" and "pays d'ombre" (117), where the horizon is veiled by dense clouds, a vision perhaps more Baudelairian than Dantesque. Martha and her mother are irremediably exiled from the only paradise they long for, the sun and the sea. Like souls in limbo, they dream of escaping from their intolerable prison through the mediation of an unknown guest, "celui qui doit venir" (117). As the mother says, "C'est par lui peut-être que nous nous sauverons...