Word: caligula
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When I read Camus' Caligula as a depressed sophomore, I was preoccupied with its central argument: what happens when a man accepts the meaninglessness of life and doggedly follows the logic of that position to its bitter conclusion? Pure logic dictates that if life is meaningless, so is death, and therefore Caligula's deliberately capricious murder of his friends and subjects is, however morbidly, rational. Yet Camus always argues that man must make a commitment to life in the face of the logic of meaninglessness...
...nobility, a feeling of exhilaration from recognizing the absurdity of existence and deciding to live a committed life nevertheless. But I suspect there is something phoney about Camus' noble affirmation--it's too conveniently noble; one doubts how real an alternative suicide was for Camus. Director David Wheeler's Caligula, which opened Thursday evening, quite properly emphasizes the agonizing psychological turmoil which precedes strictly logical murdering...
Camus has said that "everything begins with lucid indifference," and in the opening scene Caligula declares, "I am not mad. I have never been so lucid." Yet rather than play Calugula as existential lecturer, Karlen in fact appears a bit mad, like a boy with a whopping identity crisis and an over-powering impulse for self-destruction. When he announces that "people die and they are not happy. Everything is a lie and I want people to live in truth. I will teach them," and spends the rest of the play degrading, insulting and murdering his comrades, Karlen gives...
...Great chunks of his life have been spent in misery and in mental asylums (an experience he has duly and dispassionately recorded in a poem). Now, for the first time, he has kind words for his father; for Jonathan Edwards, symbol of rigid Puritanism; even for that total tyrant, Caligula: ". . . yours the lawlessness/ Of something simple that has lost...
...Britons knew his name, and even fewer could pronounce it correctly. Most critics were angered by the fact that the Foreign Secretary would sit in the Lords, sheltered from the heavy fire of Commons debate. His decision was called "the most reckless appointment since the Emperor Caligula made his favorite horse a consul...