The plot
A Parisian is on a visit to Amsterdam. One evening he is approached by a stranger in a bar, a fellow Parisian who lives in the Dutch capital. This stranger is a regular in the bar, knows the landlord (who he refers to as ‘the ape’ or ‘the gorilla’) and all the other clientele who, he says, are petty criminals, pimps and thieves. He shares a gin with the visitor and his chat about the locals slowly turns into a bit of background about himself. He used to be a successful lawyer in Paris, quite well known in his field and… Time to go? OK, well, I’ll see you here tomorrow night, maybe…
And so begin a sequence of six (unnumbered) chapters in which the one-time successful Paris lawyer Jean-Baptiste Clamence tells, in unbroken monologue, his story to the unnamed, unspeaking auditor. It is an extremely effective technique. The reader is buttonholed right from the start and slowly, mesmerically, drawn into the lawyer’s story.
Physically strong, tall, handsome, charming, Jean-Baptiste went out of his way to open doors for ladies and help the elderly across the road. He did pro bono work for the poor. He discoursed eloquently at dinner parties and attended plays and the opera. He had a string of mistresses, relishing the challenge of seduction then swiftly forgetting them.
But slowly, as the monologue continues, the initial impression we have of his moral perfection and flawless charm is undermined as we come to realise he was really a monster of egotism. By the middle chapter, where he describes his love affairs, he goes so far as to admit that he wanted all his lovers, but ultimately everyone, to dangle on a string, to be dependent on him, to jump when he requires.
I could live happily only on condition that all the individuals on earth, or the greatest possible number, were turned toward me, eternally in suspense, devoid of independent life and ready to answer my call at any moment, doomed in short to sterility until the day I should deign to favor them. (p.51)
And yet… at the height of his fame, his success and his preening self-congratulations… events happened which began to undermine his confidence. One day he is caught at a red light behind a motor cyclist whose bike stalls as the lights go green. He gets out to remonstrate but is unexpectedly thumped by a passer-by who tells him to stop picking on the poor biker. Dazed, Jean-Baptiste stumbles back into his car and drives off but his amour propre is dented.
On another occasion, one night crossing a bridge in Paris, he hears laughter. Healthy, non-sinister laughter, coming from somewhere, a boat passing, he can’t figure out where but… it unnerves him. Years earlier he had passed, on another Paris bridge, a slender female shape in the lowering rain, had reached the end of the bridge and turned onto the quay when he heard a loud splash and then muffled cries and then… silence.
Eventually (although there is no definite moment; I reread the passage several times and can’t identify any actual incident which causes it) eventually, Jean-Baptiste realises that he has many enemies, many people resent his success; many women hate him, many men are jealous, and they are all sitting on judgement on him.
With typical French hysteria, he thinks ‘the whole universe then began to laugh at me.’ (p.60). And he begins to feel for the first time that he is living a double life, playing a game which he just doesn’t care about any more. He is undermined. He begins to hate his appearance of saintly benevolence. He longs to smack children, let down wheelchairs of the disabled. He shouts abuse at beggars and (this is a comic touch) contemplates writing an Ode to the Police and another in praise of the guillotine. He starts calling on ‘the Lord’ in the court room and insulting people at dinner parties.
In other words, he starts guying the bien-pensant liberals he had previously dazzled with his humanity. He can’t bear their adulation of him. He starts to feel impossibly hypocritical, being a lawyer prosecuting people for crimes much more minor than the ones he knows he wants to commit. He wants to be punished.
Jean-Baptiste decides to abandon the world of men and… throws himself into an orgy of sensualism among women, waking between two prostitutes, having an affair with a singer in a bar, drinking himself senseless on unmade beds in brothels etc.
Despairing of love and of chastity, I at last bethought myself of debauchery, a substitute for love, which quiets the laughter, restores silence, and above all, confers immortality. At a certain degree of lucid intoxication, lying late at night between two prostitutes and drained of all desire, hope ceases to be a torture, you see; the mind dominates the whole past, and the pain of living is over forever. (p.76)
After numerous adventures of the flesh, Jean-Baptiste is on a cruise with his latest mistress when he sees a dark shape on the horizon and turns in fear, his heart palpitating. He thought it was the drowned woman, the suicide, come back to haunt him. (This makes it sound more rational, more comprehensible, than the scene actually is. Truth to tell I couldn’t work out amid the verbiage of aphorisms, what actually happened at any point of this narrative. Something made him realise the falseness of his position in society. And then this further epiphany made him understand he couldn’t run (away from what, isn’t comprehensibly explained).)
The penultimate section transitions rather suddenly to six pages meditating on the purpose of God and the real meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion. I understand this is literature not theology or philosophy and I understand it is a fictional character speaking, so he is entitled to ramble on about whatever he wants to, but at around this point I began to run out of patience. It’s a short enough book, at 108 pages in the Penguin paperback, but even so, by this stage it began to feel padded out with an over-familiar type of pseudo-Christian fustian.
This Christian imagery continues into the sixth and final section where Jean-Baptiste confides in the listener his adventures during the German invasion of France. Since this took place in 1940 we suddenly realise that all the preceding narrative, Jean-Baptiste’s successful career and then flight into debauchery, all this is set in the 1930s. Even though this book wasn’t published till 1956. Wow.
He took part in the retreat from the advancing German army, fled to the southern sector of France and toyed with joining the Resistance but thought it would be pointless. Crossed the sea to Tunisia where he found a job for a while before he and his boss were arrested and he was sent to a prison camp. Here, as a joke, he was elected ‘Pope’ among his little group of prisoners. (There is such a fatal inevitability about these French writers’ addiction to Catholic teaching, ideology, metaphor and culture; they just can’t break free.)
This final section takes place in Jean-Baptiste’s spartan flat in Amsterdam where he’s invited his listener. He isn’t feeling well. He’s stopped reading. In a revelation he opens a cupboard and shows the listener the lost panel of the Van Eyck altarpiece The Adoration of the Lamb. One of the customers at the bar where we first encountered him, had stolen it and given it to the landlord (the ‘gorilla’) in lieu of payment. When Jean-Baptiste saw it he told the landlord just how valuable it was and persuaded him to hand it over for safe-keeping. And so here it is.
The Just Judges by van Eyck (1432)
Jean-Baptiste explains the bitter irony. Tourists who go to the cathedral to see the Van Eyck altarpiece file past a copy of this panel. In other words, he knows they are worshiping false judges and that tickles him, being a lawyer with an obsession with judgement, guilt, penitence and all the rest of the Christian fol-de-rol.
In the last ten pages, weak and feverish, from his sick bed, Jean-Baptiste explains to the listener what it means to be a ‘judge-penitent’, the odd title he’s used to refer to himself throughout.
I found it hard to follow this final section. He seems to say we all need God or a master of some kind, and since God has gone out of fashion, it will have to a cruel master. Thus he is in favour of slavery for everyone, as the only form of democracy and the only way we will all get our just deserts.
On the bridges of Paris I, too, learned that I was afraid of freedom. So hurray for the master, whoever he may be, to take the place of heaven’s law. ‘Our Father who art provisionally here … Our guides, our delightfully severe masters, O cruel and beloved leaders …’ In short, you see, the essential is to cease being free and to obey, in repentance, a greater rogue than oneself. When we are all guilty, that will be democracy… Death is solitary, whereas slavery is collective. The others get theirs, too, and at the same time as we – that’s what counts. All together at last, but on our knees and heads bowed. (p.100)
This seems a bit demented to me. Is this meant to be an exploration of the mentality of a fascist? Or of a decrepit old debaucher? Jean-Baptiste goes on to explain that this is why he now spends his time in a low dive in the Amsterdam docks, preaching his beliefs to anyone who will listen and excoriating his life and loves just as he has been to us.
And, he explains, as he describes his own ‘fall’, slowly, during this explanation, the ‘I’ passes to ‘we’, gradually implicating the listener in his crimes, gradually making the auditor realise that he, too, is a hypocrite…
Jean-Baptiste has not, in fact, repented at all. He continues his wicked ways, serving himself and loving others – only now with a lightened heart, lightened by his confession and lightened by implicating, by dragging down, by sitting in judgment on his hearers.
Whenever one of them cracks, after a lot of gin and berating bursts into tears and beats his breast – then Jean-Baptiste feels again that sublime sensation of being above them, on the mountain, breathing freely. Revels in his superiority.
It is night. It is starting to snow over Amsterdam. Jean-Baptiste works himself up into quite a state, raving about being taken up into heaven in a flaming chariot. He is a neglected prophet, he is Elijah in the desert. Then, a little more rationally, he hopes his listener is a policeman who will arrest him for hiding the stolen Van Eyck painting so that he will be prosecuted, sent to prison, maybe executed, his blood sodden head held up in front of the crowd!
I would be decapitated, for instance, and I’d have no more fear of death; I’d be saved. Above the gathered crowd, you would hold up my still warm head, so that they could recognize themselves in it and I could again dominate – an exemplar. All would be consummated; I should have brought to a close, unseen and unknown, my career as a false prophet crying in the wilderness and refusing to
come forth. (p.107)
And only now, here on the last page, does his listener reveal that he too is a Paris lawyer. Aha, says Jean-Baptiste, that explains their secret sympathy. Did some woman once throw herself off a bridge as he passed by, did he hear her, did he do nothing and has he been haunted ever since?
And so – is this what the book has been about? Does it all boil down to Jean-Baptiste’s bad conscience about passing that woman who drowned herself? Was his entire psychological collapse, his inability to do his job any more, his sense of being judged by everyone, his flight into debauchery, then to the south, then to Tunisia and then to foggy Amsterdam and into this rather demented persona, into this role of the cackling judge-penitent, and even his mad death wish to be decapitated – is it all caused by his failure to act, to save the young woman? Is all this talk about God and repentance and salvation and Jesus and the rest of it all due to his unbearable guilt for that one failure of nerve?
Maybe to its original readers this came off as a bold and dramatic coup de théâtre, but I felt distinctly underwhelmed.
Commentary
Catholicism and Communism
Camus grew up in a French society where education, culture and society were dominated by the logical precision of Roman Catholicism. During the 1930s there was the steady rise of the French Commuinist Party espousing the supposedly ‘scientific laws’ of Marxist communism. And in the territory between camped out the fashionable existentialist philosophers, led by young Jean-Paul Sartre, the whizz-kid novelist, playwright and critic.
This dichotomy between Catholicism and Communism, both abundant in sweeping generalisations, mythic stories and zany paradoxes (as the works of Graham Greene amply demonstrate) – God, hell, heaven, the revolution, the working class, and so on – provided French writers of his time with a limitless supply of material with which to produce dazzling paradoxes and metaphorical pirouettes.
Whereas in our time, in England, neither the Catholic church nor communism are living presences. Communism has evaporated and there are more practicing Muslims in England than Roman Catholics. We live in different times. And this deadly duo were certainly never as important in English culture as on the Continent.
Thus to read Camus or Sartre is to witness, from the outside, an artist from an essentially alien culture performing tricks with material we don’t really understand or care about. When Jean-Baptiste Clamence makes yet another reference to hell or heaven or God or being damned, I feel as if someone has put great weights on my feet. I find it harder and harder to read on amid these dazzling conjuring tricks played with dead tokens form a defunct religion.
On pages 82 to 87 Jean-Baptiste confides in us what the real purpose of God is and why Jesus really died – hushed confidences breathed by nutcases all over Europe, and the material for hundreds of 20th century authors to concoct text out of.
But you can only write witty and subversive and ‘shocking’ interpretations of God or Jesus if anyone cares about God or Jesus. If no one these days cares about God or Jesus enough to be ‘shocked’ by your subversive interpretations, it is like dead air.
Do you know why he was crucified – the one you are perhaps thinking of at this moment?… The real reason is that he knew he was not altogether innocent. If he did not bear the weight of the crime he was accused of, he had committed others – even though he didn’t know which ones. Did he really not know them? He was at the source, after all; he must have heard of a certain Slaughter of the Innocents. The children of Judea massacred while his parents were taking him to a safe place – why did they die if not because of him? Those blood-spattered soldiers, those infants cut in two filled him with horror… Knowing what he knew, familiar with everything about man – ah, who would have believed that crime consists less in making others die than in not dying oneself! – brought face to face day and night with his innocent crime, he found it too hard for him to hold on and continue. It was better to have done with it, not to defend himself, to die, in order not to be the only one to live… (p.83)
It positively irritates me that both Camus and Sartre are avowed, loud atheists and yet both continue to invoke, at length, the metaphors and language of something they claim doesn’t exist. Their works are full of calls for men to be more consistent and logical but they themselves are howlingly inconsistent with regard to the Christian religion. If there is no God, heaven or hell then stop calling places heaven or hell or referring to God or writing scores of pages about sin and damnation and judgement and redemption and Jesus!
Just listing some of the references to hell in The Fall indicates how central religious metaphors are to this atheist author:
- Have you noticed that Amsterdam’s concentric canals resemble the circles of hell? The middle-class hell, of course, peopled with bad dreams.
- If everyone told all, displayed his true profession and identity, we shouldn’t know which way to turn! Imagine the visiting cards: Dupont, jittery philosopher, or Christian landowner, or adulterous humanist – indeed, there’s a wide choice. But it would be hell! Yes, hell must be like that: streets filled with shop signs and no way of explaining oneself.
- Do you know Dante? Really? The devil you say! Then you know that Dante accepts the idea of neutral angels in the quarrel between God and Satan. And he puts them in Limbo, a sort of vestibule of his Hell. We are in the vestibule, cher ami.
It’s a kind of cheating. It’s having your cake and eating it. It’s denouncing an entire value system and then using it lock stock and two smoking barrels as key elements of your own value system. But if there is no God, hell, heaven, sin, angels and all the rest of it – then by incorporating these dusty tokens so deeply into his own discourse, Camus condemns his own thought to irrelevance.
How intoxicating to feel like God the Father and to hand out definitive testimonials of bad character and habits. I sit enthroned among my bad angels at the summit of the Dutch heaven and I watch ascending toward me, as they issue from the fogs and the water, the multitude of the Last Judgment.
None of this exists. It is poetic fantasy.
Dubious aphorisms
Jean-Baptiste Clamence has kept the pompous self-importance which characterised his Parisian success, only now he is self-importantly ‘damned’ rather than one of the self-confessed élite. Either way, he is a handy mouthpiece for Camus’s enduring technique of building up his texts out of tiresome and often dubious aphorisms. Camus and his characters just love telling us pithy truths.
- Each of us tries to show up to advantage, even in solitude.
- The act of love is a confession. Selfishness screams aloud, vanity shows off, or else true generosity reveals itself.
- Every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. (p.42)
- Martyrs, cher ami, must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood – never! (p.56)
- People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves. (p.60)
- We rarely confide in those who are better than ourselves. (p.61)
- We lack the energy of evil as well as the energy of good. (p.62)
- What we call basic truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others. (p.62)
The aphorisms are like attractive flowers which grow out of some pretty murky roots. A lot of the text is persiflage which often don’t really make sense. The best roses grow out of ripe manure. In some places the text consists of a battery of dubious generalisations, one after the other.
But the question is not to remain logical. The question is to slip through and, above all – yes, above all, the question is to elude judgment. I’m not saying to avoid punishment, for punishment without judgment is bearable. It has a name, besides, that guarantees our innocence: it is called misfortune. No, on the contrary, it’s a matter of dodging judgment, of avoiding being forever judged without ever having a sentence pronounced. (p.57)
Like many passages in Camus, I read this and don’t understand it.
Punishment without judgement is bearable.
Really? Is it? Being beaten to death for no reason is bearable? But by ‘punishment without judgement’ he appears to mean ‘misfortune’, bad luck. Is that a workable definition of misfortune – ‘punishment without judgement’? I reread this passage carefully and suspect I am beginning to understand it, but it has been a lot of effort to decode something which seems, well, plain wrong. Is any of what he’s saying in the slightest bit applicable to my life, or even very illuminating?
Entire paragraphs are built up like this from shaky generalisations towards even shakier conclusions. Great swathes of text have the appearance and the sound of fine, rigorous logic – but crumple to dust when you pay real attention or think them through.
Is there any way out? Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched. (p.59)
I know plenty of people, from mums to social workers to carers to nurses, who are awe-inspiringly ‘concerned with others’ – and this brings them immense happiness. A moment’s reflection shows this generalisation, like so many of Camus’s stylish abstractions, to be false.
Women
So after a process of feeling more and more judged and got-at in the society he formerly dominated, Jean-Baptiste decides to run away. To a desert island? No, there are no more desert islands.
I simply took refuge among women. As you know, they don’t really condemn any weakness; they would be more inclined to try to humiliate or disarm our strength. This is why woman is the reward, not of the warrior, but of the criminal. She is his harbor, his haven; it is in a woman’s bed that he is generally arrested. Is she not all that remains to us of earthly paradise? (p.73)
I imagine feminists would not be too thrilled by this sort of generalisation. But I, a non-feminist, am also offended or just unimpressed.
I suppose it’s worth remembering that Jean-Baptiste is a fictional character and that his thoughts and generalisations are not Camus’s. And that if these aphorisms and apothegms are dubious, that is more a reflection on Jean-Baptiste’s preening character than Camus’s.
Except that Camus’s other books are, just like this one, made out of tessalations of pithy aphorisms. And that many of the quotes you come across from Camus are precisely this kind of wild generalisation, albeit taken out of all character and raised to the level of a general truth.
So much Camus sounds like wisdom, but a strangely redundant, irrelevant and often tiresome wisdom.
Credit
The Fall by Albert Camus was published in France in 1956. This translation by Justin O’Brien was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1957, and as a Penguin paperback in 1963. All quotes & references are to the Penguin paperback edition.
Related links
Reviews of other Camus books
Reviews of other Camus books
- Caligula (1939)
- L’Étranger (The Outsider) (1942)
- Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus ) (1942)
- Essays from The Myth of Sisyphus
- Le Malentendu (The Misunderstanding, or Cross Purpose) (1944)
- La Peste (The Plague) (1947)
- Camus’s style in The Plague
- Les Justes (The Just Assassins) (1949)
- L’Homme révolté (The Rebel) (1951)
- La Chute (The Fall) (1956)
- L’exil et le royaume (Exile and the Kingdom) (1957)
- Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1961)
- Camus by Conor Cruise O’Brien (1970)
- Edward Said on Albert Camus (1994)
Reviews of books by Jean-Paul Sartre
- The Age of Reason (1945)
- The Reprieve (1945)
- Existentialism is a Humanism (1945)
- Iron In The Soul (1949)
- The Last Chance (1)
- The Last Chance (2)
Books & Boots 