1956
Program note to the Camus adaptation of Requiem for a Nun.
Excerpts from Three Interviews
I
“I had to put the form back in, to prune the text; it is not a play, it’s a world into which I introduced logic. For the French public, the theater is inconceivable without unity.…
I like and I admire Faulkner; I believe I understand him rather well. Even though he did not write for the stage, he is in my opinion the only truly tragic dramatist of our time.… He gives us an ancient but always contemporary theme that is perhaps the only tragedy in the world: the blind man stumbling along between his destiny and his responsibilities. A simple dialogue must be found, acceptable for people who are simple too, but who have access to grandeur despite their coats and ties. Only Faulkner has known how to find an intensity of tone, of situation, intolerable to the point of making the heroes deliver themselves by means of a violent, superhuman act.”
Combat, 1956
II
The Requiem was not a play, but a novel in great dialogued scenes filled with a historical-poetic accent and a psychological climate that I have taken pains to preserve.…
I wanted to clear the way for a more theatrical than fictional progression.… I developed only the role of the husband which I find admirable.… The play poses no racial problem. Faulkner is too great a creator not to be universal. In the Requiem, the religion of suffering, notably in the seventh scene, becomes one with the catharsis, that ancient purification.”
Nouvelles littéraires, 1956
III
Is the meeting of Albert Camus and William Faulkner equivalent to a first modern tragedy? The stage setting will already have told you that the detective element in this tragedy plays a strong role. It does in all tragedies for that matter. Take Electra or Hamlet. Faulkner, who has never been reluctant to look for his characters in news items reported in the newspapers, knows this well. A secret, then. And a conflict. Something which sets the protagonists against their destiny and is resolved with their acceptance of this destiny.
These are the keys to ancient tragedies. Faulkner used them to open the way to modern tragedy. Even though it was not written for the stage, his work, whose intensity is wholly dramatic, seems to me one that most nearly approaches a certain tragic ideal. This problem of modern tragedy, I believe, has always interested you. Is this the reason you agreed to produce the Requiem?
It is precisely the reason. Together with the admiration that I plainly hold for someone I consider the greatest American novelist. You see, we are living through a highly dramatic time that does not yet have a drama. Faulkner permits us to catch a glimpse of the time when what is tragic in our own history can at last reach the footlights. Doesn’t the whole difficulty consist of making contemporary people speak a tragic language?
Without a doubt, but I hope to have surmounted it. Faulkner’s “breathless” style, that I did my utmost to imitate, is the style of suffering itself. The basis of his whole religion …
Just so. A strange religion, more clearly expressed in his latest work, A Fable, whose symbols give a glimpse of the hope for redemption through pain and humiliation. Here, Nancy Mannigoe, murderer and prostitute, is his message bearer. This is not accidental. And the meaning of his title: Requiem for a Nun, did he explain it to you?
He? Not at all. I saw him for only ten minutes and he didn’t say three words to me. No, the title takes on its meaning when one knows the role that bordellos and prisons play in Faulkner’s universe. Nancy and Temple are two nuns who have entered the monastery of abjection and expiation. As diffuse as it is, doesn’t Faulkner’s faith run counter to your own agnosticism?
I don’t believe in God. that’s true. But I am not an atheist nonetheless. I would even agree with Benjamin Constant that there is something vulgar … yes … worn out about being against religion.
Should one see in this the sign of a certain evolution in your thinking, and doesn’t this interest in Faulkner foresee an eventual rallying to the spirit if not the dogma of the Church? Certain readers of The Fall seemed to hope for this. Nothing really justifies them in this. Doesn’t my judge-penitent clearly say that he is Sicilian and Japanese? Not Christian for a minute. Like him, I have a good deal of affection for the first Christian. I admire the way he lived, the way he died. My lack of imagination keeps me from following him any further.
There, in parentheses, is my only similarity to the Jean-Baptiste Clamence with whom people stubbornly insist on identifying me. I would like to have called that book “A Hero of Our Time.” Originally it was only a short novel, meant to appear next January in a collection that will be called Exile and the Kingdom. But I let myself get carried away with the idea: to paint a portrait of a small prophet like so many today. They proclaim nothing at all and find nothing better to do than accuse others in accusing themselves.
Le Monde, August 31, 1956
The end
