Imprisonment in Camus’ “Modern Tragedies”: Les Justes, Requiem pour une nonne, Le Malentendu

Imprisonment in Camus’ “Modern Tragedies”: Les Justes, Requiem pour une nonne, Le Malentendu Mary Ann Frese Witt “La tragédie est un monde clos— ou on bute, ou on se heurte. Au théâtre, il faut qu’elle naisse et meure dans l’espace restreint de la scène.”i Camus made this observation in 1939, but the expression “monde clos” appears throughout the Carnets, in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, in the essay on Kafka and in L’Homme Ré­ volté. Furthermore, “monde clos” is only one example of a whole category of images which permeate Camus’ work. Ab­ stract metaphors such as “l’univers fermé,” “la voie sans issue,” and “la prison de l’histoire” play an important part in Le Mythe de Sisyphe and in L’Homme Révolté. The figures which Camus uses in his essays are in a sense complemented by the numerous settings of “closed worlds” in his novels and plays: the prison cells in L’Etranger, Les Justes and Requiem pour une nonne, the inn of Le Malentendu, rooms in “La Femme Adultère,” “L’Hôte,” and “Jonas,” and the cities of Oran and Amsterdam in La Peste and La Chute. “H y a cent cinquante ans,” declares the protagonist of the latter novel, “on s’attendrissait sur les lacs et les forêts. Aujourd’hui, nous avons le lyrisme cellulaire.” The dualism of Camus’ temperament balances this confine­ ment imagery with expressions of joy in nature— sea, sun and earth. One could roughly “translate” Camus’ confinement imagery as diverse manifestations of the absurd and his nature imagery as representations of freedom or happiness. Yet the best images of both types are not only more complex (like all successful images); they are often paradoxical. Liberty is at times inseparable from confinement; “seas” and “prisons” some3 4 Comparative Drama times merge. The best example of this is probably the last scene of L’Etranger— Meursault in his prison cell under the starry sky. The importance of “prisons” or “closed worlds” in Camus’ work makes the theater a natural vehicle for him. If a playwright more or less respects the classical unities, as Camus did, the world represented on the stage must necessarily be a circum­ scribed one. Tragedy, as Camus recognized, is perhaps the most claustrophobic of literary forms. Greek tragedy is filled with variations on the image of a trap or snare. Racine’s strict use of the unity of place enhances the sense of fate closing in about the protagonists. Modem dramatists such as Sartre and Beckett have in a sense continued in the classical tradition with their particular use of a claustrophobic unity of place. If tragedy may be partially defined as the awareness of a situation from which there is no way out, then the image or setting of a prison, literal or figurative, would seem to be its proper vehicle. Yet the tragic experience shows us that such awareness does not bring about total despair but rather expanded knowledge, sometimes relief and exhilaration and, paradoxically, a new sort of freedom. The paradox is implicit in the “All is well” of Sophocles’ Oedipus, a line dear to Camus. The chorus in Anouilh’s Antigone interprets the feeling for the modern public: Et puis, surtout, c’est reposant, la tragédie, parce qu’on sait qu’il n’y a plus d’espoir, le sale espoir, qu’on est pris, qu’on est enfin pris comme un rat, avec le ciel sur son dos, et qu’on n’a plus qu’à crier; — pas à gémir, non, pas à se plaindre, — à gueuler à pleine voix ce qu’on avait à dire, qu’on n’avait jamais dit et qu’on ne savait pas encore.2 The paradoxical experience of freedom within utmost con­ finement is a theme which has developed in modem literature since Pascal and is not limited to the tragic genre. The Romantics proclaimed it proudly (“Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art . . .”), twentieth century writers after the First and Second World Wars more obliquely.3 Kafka’s persecuted, hedged-in creatures have some idea of a possibility of liberation only when their situation seems most hopeless. The experience of imprison­ ment seems to...