Albert Camus: Another will for Death

You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses…. Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The plays of Albert Camus are here viewed as an attempt to resolve emotional conflicts that began in childhood. (What more they are and must be for the world's acceptance is another matter.) The arguments that follow rest primarily upon the contention that all art is a kind of disguised confession or catharsis motivated by unconscious determinants.

Camus writes:

I have the misfortune of liking only one kind of play, whether comic or tragic. After a rather long experience as director, actor, and dramatist, it seems to me that there is no true theater without

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language and style, nor any dramatic work which does not, like our classical drama and the Greek tragedians, involve human fate in all its simplicity and grandeur. Without claiming to equal them, these are at least the models to set oneself. Psychology, ingenious plot devices, and spicy situations, though they may amuse me as a member of the audience, leave me indifferent as an author. I am willing to admit that such a conception is debatable.2

Debatable? Yes, but in spite of that, Camus' high ideals for the drama were never successfully realized. Although passionately devoted to the theater, he wrote only four plays. None of them achieves first-rate drama. In his plays there is rarely any real conflict of personalities that could produce dramatic tension. Tension is a quality insisted upon but not evolved. The char