57 pages • 1-hour read
The Misunderstanding
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Background
Philosophical Context: Existentialism and Absurdism
During World War II and the postwar period in Europe, intellectuals struggled to conceive a new foundation for personal identity, meaning, and morality in a world rendered senseless by war and genocide. One of the philosophies that flourished in this climate was existentialism, a decades-old school of philosophical thought and artistic practice that developed in Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries. Written in occupied France, The Misunderstanding falls into this category of existentialist works grappling with a world shaken by global war.
The main figures of this new existentialism were the French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, and Albert Camus (whose philosophy of absurdism differs slightly from existentialism). Sartre and Beauvoir posit that people, though partially constrained by the circumstances into which they were born, are condemned to be free. People have a duty to create a meaningful life through the projects they pursue, to befit themselves and others. This duty is a source of anguish: One cannot be sure of the morality of one’s choice until its consequences unfold, meaning there is always a danger of unintentionally harming oneself or others. They argue that despite this risk each person must make choices to the best of their ability.
Existentialism teaches that many people try to avoid the anguish of choice by seeking certainty in a predefined role. By doing so they not only become inauthentic, they also evade responsibility for the consequences of their actions. This “bad faith,” as Sartre called it, is akin to play-acting. Sartre gives the example of a waiter who acts like a caricature of a waiter and, in making his job his entire identity, forsakes other parts of himself. In The Misunderstanding, the Mother acts in the bad faith Satre described when she clings to motherhood following the revelation of Jan’s death. By choosing the security of this predefined role, she forsakes the other part of herself: the free person.
Camus’s philosophy of absurdism is similar to Sartre and Beauvoir’s existentialism. In his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus defines the absurd as the tension between the urgency of one’s desire—one’s wants but also one’s longing for meaning—and the total indifference of the world. For Camus, this experience of absurdity defines the human condition in a world where neither religion nor science can bestow absolute meaning.
Camus rejects suicide as an answer to the world’s meaninglessness. Instead, he believes that to be happy one must not avoid the absurd but acknowledge it, arguing that “crushing truths perish from being acknowledged” (Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O’Brien. Vintage International, 1991, p. 122). In choosing to continue rolling his rock uphill, Camus’s absurdist hero Sisyphus reclaims his fate from the gods in the knowledge that “[t]he struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart” (The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 123). Camus valorizes Sisyphus because he chooses life despite its futility, and in doing so realizes the only happiness Camus believes possible for a mortal.
In The Misunderstanding, Camus illustrates the archetypal ways in which people avoid the absurd. He also intimates a possible response to the absurd in Martha, who, in confronting the absurd, begins what Camus calls existential rebellion: the assertion of one’s limited human will against the indifferent world. This rebellion frees the individual from isolation. As Camus writes in his 1951 essay The Rebel, “The first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness [the absurd] is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe” (Camus, Albert. The Rebel. Translated by Anthony Bower. Vintage International, 1991, p. 33). For Camus, recognizing this common experience is the first step in constructing an entirely human house of meaning and morality amidst an indifferent world. In The Misunderstanding, Martha arrives at this shared humanity before retreating into solitude.
Authorial Context: Albert Camus During World War II
Camus wrote The Misunderstanding in German-occupied France during World War II, where he was a prominent member of the French Resistance. The play evokes the backdrop of Camus’s life during this time.
At the start of World War II, Camus lived in French Algeria, where he was born. In 1940, the government’s seizure of the newspaper he worked for forced him to move to Paris. Depressed by the gloomy weather and denied the opportunity for military service on medical grounds, Camus began writing a cycle of works focused on the absurd: the novel The Stranger, the essay The Myth of Sisyphus, and the plays Caligula and The Misunderstanding. Camus’s exile from North Africa and alienation in cloudy Europe mirrors Jan’s predicament.
When the Germans marched on Paris, Camus fled to Algeria with his wife. Suffering a relapse of tuberculosis, he soon traveled to the French Alps to recuperate. In the author’s preface, Camus notes that he wrote about his feelings of claustrophobia, bounded by mountains, in the setting of The Misunderstanding (page xi). Following the Allied invasion of North Africa, Camus was unable to return to his wife as he had planned. This separation both from his homeland and his “homeland of the heart” resembles Jan’s own (143). Over the next year, Camus spent more time in Paris and finished work on The Misunderstanding (which appeared onstage for the first time in June 1944). Though Camus grouped this play with his trio of earlier works focused on the absurd, it straddles the border between those works and his next cycle of writings that focused on the idea of existential rebellion.
Camus’s philosophy developed alongside his political framework and activism. In 1943, Camus moved to Paris and became a prominent member of the French Resistance as a writer and editor for the underground paper Combat. During that time, he also published a series of letters explaining the necessity of resistance (Hayden, Patrick. Camus and the Challenge of Political Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 15). For Camus, existential rebellion and rebellion against totalitarianism went hand in hand. The seeds of Camus’s reformulation of Descartes cogito—stated in his 1951 essay The Rebel as “I rebel—therefore we exist” (The Rebel, p. 33)—are identifiable in both his resistance writings and in the final act of The Misunderstanding. The individual act of rebellion—whether it be against the inherent meaningless of life or against the senselessness of a world at war—entails an acknowledgment of collective suffering. Rebellion thus frees one from existential isolation and opens the possibility of solidarity.
Camus first proposed these ideas in a series of editorials he wrote for Combat following the Allied liberation of Paris in August 1944. In them, he called for the formation of an equitable post-war France built on the solidarity fostered by wartime resistance (Hayden 15). Just as political resistance against totalitarianism requires solidarity, existential rebellion against the absurd requires sympathy. Neither can be pursued in isolation. Camus hints at this idea in Martha’s revelation of common suffering in Act III.
Authorial Context: The Stranger
Camus’s absurdist novel The Stranger (1942) contains the initial seed of The Misunderstanding. Imprisoned for murder, Camus’s antihero Meursault finds under his prison cot a newspaper clipping of a story resembling the plot of this play: A Czech man leaves home to make his fortune and returns with it, his wife, and his child 25 years later to surprise his mother and sister. When his mother doesn’t recognize him, he decides as a joke to stay a night in her inn as a stranger. He flaunts his money, and that night his mother and sister rob and murder him before dumping his body in a river. The next day, the man’s wife appears and inadvertently reveals his identity, leading both the mother and the sister to die by suicide. Meursault reads this story countless times. He remarks it is at once unbelievable and “perfectly natural” (Camus, Albert. The Stranger. Translated by Mathew Ward. Vintage International, 1989, p. 80). He concludes the traveler got what he deserved for playing such a foolish game.
The Stranger is also the thematic progenitor of The Misunderstanding. In both works, a nihilistic antihero commits a murder (though Martha premeditates the murder; Meursault doesn’t). Subsequently, both characters evolve from the nihilism that allowed them to commit the murders, taking the first step of existential rebellion. Martha realizes that her dream of an ideal life by the seaside was an illusion that blinded her to her actual world. In Act III, her resolution against turning to heaven for answers, choosing instead to live with the terrible reality she has (in part) beget is a statement on the ultimate value of life over death. For Camus, as his Sisyphus realizes, it is better to live in guilt and knowledge of mortality than lose oneself in fantasies of salvation.
Similarly, Meursault realizes that he was happy in life before the murder. In the conclusion, he, too, rejects the lure of another world. A chaplain incredulous of Meursault’s refusal of salvation questions: “Do you really love this earth as much as all that?” (The Stranger, p. 119). Meursault’s impassioned response is the cri de coeur—a passionate appeal—of absurdism. One should not respond to the certainty of death with longing for another life. Instead, one must embrace life as something of supreme, singular value. Camus argues that while it’s easy to embrace a charmed life, its immediacy easily dispels fantasies of another existence. The ultimate test of Camus’s life-affirming dictum is to accept life at its worst, when things have gone terribly wrong and images of salvation flood the mind. Once hounded by the glaring sun—a symbol of the world’s absurdity—and now condemned to death for murder, Meursault nonetheless opens himself to “the gentle indifference of the world” (The Stranger, p. 122). This affirmation of life represents the beginning of existential rebellion against the absurd.
Camus doesn’t glorify Martha and Meursault; he presents them as they are. Both characters are wrong in their crimes and right in their subsequent embrace of life. According to Camus’s definition of tragedy, this makes them tragic figures.
Literary Context: Camus’s Analysis of Classical Tragedy
Camus’s definition of classical tragedy and his view of modern tragedy are crucial to analyzing The Misunderstanding. In his 1955 lecture “On the Future of Tragedy” Camus argues there have only been two eras in which tragic works were produced: Ancient Greece from Aeschylus to Euripides and Europe from Shakespeare to Racine. He asserts that tragedy was possible during these eras because they were times of conflict between the old, divine understanding of the world and the nascent, rational conception of the world. Camus identifies the mid-20th century as a third tragic age. In upsetting global stability and undermining the very notion of common humanity, the atrocities and mechanized death of World War II threatened the rationalist worldview that predominated since the Enlightenment, necessitating a new understanding of the world. The characters in The Misunderstanding struggle to reconcile themselves to this world failed by reason.
Camus defines the essence of classical tragedy as the conflict between competing worldviews. The tragic figure is torn between themselves and the world they oppose, righteously asserting themselves against a world that is equally right. Camus formulates this ambiguity as, “‘All can be justified, no one is just’” (Camus, Albert. “On the Future of Tragedy.” Lyrical and Critical Essays. Translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy. Vintage, 1970, p. 279). This conflict endangers the tragic figure: If they push too hard in their self-righteousness, knowing that “all can be justified” (“On the Future of Tragedy”), they risk being crushed by the equally valid order they oppose. The only escape is to accept the limits imposed by the dominant order while asserting oneself in whatever ways possible. Camus describes this salvation through a reinterpretation of Oedipus’s fate in Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus Rex:
The only purification comes from denying and excluding nothing, and thus accepting the mystery of existence, the limitations of man—in short, the order where men know without knowing. Oedipus says, “All is well,” when his eyes have been torn out. Henceforth he knows, although he never sees again. His darkness is filled with light, and this face with its dead eyes shines with the highest lesson of the tragic universe (“On the Future of Tragedy,” p. 282).
Following the style of classical tragedy, The Misunderstanding depicts all the characters as both absolutely justified and fatally flawed. However, Martha stands slightly above the rest. Her clear-eyed yet indignant acknowledgment of the world’s absurdity is a partial victory over that absurdity. Like Camus’s Oedipus and Sisyphus, Martha reclaims her freedom in the acknowledgment of her predicament in a way that no other character does.
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