I Don’t Know 3: Camus’ The Fall
Having read the fall thrice now (it’s tiny, dense and confusing) I’m pretty confident to say that it is a novel that discusses the silent hypocrisies on which society founds itself. The narrative is delivered in the form of a long monologue from Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a once-revered lawyer, fallen from grace. As a result of “the fall”, Clamence is painfully aware of the hypocrisies of his former existence, and is filled with stories and analogies to deconstruct them: they are wonderfully dark and never without their share of humour, which makes the novel just as daring and illuminating when read today.
On our deceptive appearances
“I once knew a manufacturer who had a perfect wife, admired by all, and yet he deceived her. That man was literally furious to be in the wrong, to be blocked from receiving, or granting himself, a certificate of virtue. The more virtues his wife manifested, the more vexed he became. Eventually, living in the wrong became unbearable to him. What do you think he did then? He gave up deceiving her? Not at all. He killed her. That is how I entered into relations with him.” Jean-Baptiste enters relations with a man because the man killed his own wife out of frustration for his own lack of virtuosity. J-B holds an unwavering admiration for those who decry their own hypocrisies. J-B goes on to say “I had no chance of killing my wife, being a bachelor.” He believes that only not having a wife guarantees you won’t kill your wife, not any kind of self-restraint or good character: as explained later, J-B believes that we live in a constant grey area of morality that we can choose to navigate across whenever, but that we love to deny this. As a result, he shows, on more than one occasion, admiration for even the basest people whose appearance reflects their character. “You think he looks like a killer? Rest assured that his actions conform to his looks.”
“You are in business, no doubt? In a way? Excellent reply! Judicious too: in all things we are merely “in a way.” Now, allow me to play the detective. You are my age in a way, with the sophisticated eye of the man in his forties who has seen everything, in a way; you are well dressed in a way, that is as people are in our country; and your hands are smooth. Hence a bourgeois, in a way!” Everyone is only something “in a way.” Civilisation is preserved with categories. Everyone is in fact a little of everything, undefinable and uncategorisable, forever evolving.
“We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself. You won’t delight a man by complimenting him on the efforts by which he has become intelligent or generous. On the other hand, he will beam if you admire his natural generosity. Inversely, if you tell a criminal that his crime is not due to his nature or his character but to unfortunate circumstances, he will be extravagantly grateful to you.” J-B believes that we hate to acknowledge the effort that goes into moving us across the moral spectrum: we are too scared to think of its existence, that we may lack virtuosity and have to go about remedying that. If we appear to be good, we must be inherently good; if we appear to be bad, our circumstances must simply be inescapably unfortunate.
On relationships
“I used to put [women] in the refrigerator, so to speak.” [Digression] In the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode “The D.E.N.N.I.S System”, Dennis reveals his system for picking up women that allows him to sleep with them and leave them, yet pick them up again whenever he wants to. The actor has said that Dennis is the embodiment of his own worst behaviour, attitudes and habits. [End digression.] “No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures”, says Jean-Baptiste.
“The moment I was loved and my partner again forgotten, I shone, I was at the top of my form, I became likable. Be it said, moreover, that as soon as I had re-won that affection I became aware of its weight. In my moments of irritation I told myself that the ideal solution would have been the death of the person I was interested in. Her death would, on the one hand, have definitively fixed our relationship and, on the other, removed its compulsion. But one cannot long for the death of everyone or, in the extreme, depopulate the planet in order to enjoy a freedom that cannot be imagined otherwise. My sensibility was opposed to this, and my love of mankind.” Only “the death of the person [we are] interested in” will cement in place the constant flux of our interactions and re-evaluations of each other and what we want- this can indeed become unbearable at times.
“I am well aware that one can’t get along without domineering or being served. Every man needs slaves as he needs fresh air… The lowest man in the social scale still has his wife or his child. If he’s unmarried, a dog. The essential thing, after all, is being able to get angry with someone who has no right to talk back… Somebody has to have the last word. Otherwise, every reason can be answered with another one and there would never be an end to it.” Oppression is a necessary tool to cut short constant discourse and the flux of life’s ambiguity. Eventually we need to decide right and wrong to move forward, even although it has been explained that this is not really possible.
On life’s constant flux
J-B recounts an incident where he hears a woman falling into the water, perhaps to her doom (perhaps mirroring the ambiguity of Ophelia’s death in Hamlet? Did Ophelia try to drown herself, or did she just fall?) “I had already gone some fifty yards when I heard the sound—which, despite the distance, seemed dreadfully loud in the midnight silence—of a body striking the water. I stopped short, but without turning around. Almost at once I heard a cry, repeated several times, which was going downstream; then it suddenly ceased. The silence that followed, as the night suddenly stood still, seemed interminable. I wanted to run and yet didn’t stir. I was trembling, I believe from cold and shock. I told myself that I had to be quick and I felt an irresistible weakness steal over me. I have forgotten what I thought then. “Too late, too far …” or something of the sort. I was still listening as I stood motionless. Then, slowly under the rain, I went away. I informed no one… What? That woman? Oh, I don’t know. Really I don’t know. The next day, and the days following, I didn’t read the papers.”
J-B doesn’t know what happened to the girl. Other incidents mentioned in the novel allude to the notion that the conclusions he tries to draw from his own past rest on incomplete information. And, having informed no one about this incident, this besmirching of his character is not available for others to judge him upon. But what if the woman was okay? Or does it matter either way, given that he didn’t help? Did he really have any obligation? Maybe she wanted to fall in… This one event, a couple of confusing minutes one evening, demonstrates the incomplete informationwe have to go off when it comes to our judgement of others, or ourselves. There’s no possible way to follow up our impact on everyone we’ve met, nor is there any way for anyone to reach a definite conclusion about the impact we’ve had on them either- and even so, that impact evolves as we try to draw conclusions!
“If I had been able to commit suicide and then see [the] reaction [at the funeral], why, then the game would have been worth the candle.” If we were able to “cement in place” our relationships with others, to “finalise” our interactions with others, and see the effect it had, and how they added it all up, it would be worth it. But we cannot live and know the whole of our effect on the world at the same time, ever! The absurdity of existence, the unknowability. “In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that’s all.” Doubt is the order of our lives, flux and greyness, no true black and white, even if this is the artifice that holds us in place. Only death will end the absurd, but it’s not worth it either, because you’ll never hear your own final judgement. People from your life will happily crawl back out the woodwork to come to your funeral and apply labels to you that they came up with that are almost guaranteed not to capture who you really are. While we are alive, and not conceivably able to have the relief of everyone else around us dead (and thus all our relationships set in stone), the jury is constantly out on all of us, and so does our moral status fluctuate in unknowable ways.
Life is all middle, all confusion, with too much information in the air for us to make reasonable sense out of it: “a dead sea, or almost. With its flat shores, lost in the fog, there’s no saying where it begins or ends. So we are steaming along without any landmark; we can’t gauge our speed. We are making progress and yet nothing is changing. It’s not navigation but dreaming.”
Conclusion
In The Fall, Camus identifies and addresses a number of false truths that we assume to be true, and skilfully negates them using some wonderfully dark and daring stories and analogies. The consistent dark humour doesn’t “soften the blow” of these truths so much as affirm life in spite of them. Camus rallies for us to live honestly- right? Is that possible? Or do we live in a world so rife with hypocrisy and does civilisation need lies to survive? Uh…
