“earned his living carrying on a dialogue with people [he] scorned” (F, 24,18). Respectability and self-indulgence were two sides of the same coin with which he preyed upon his victims in the name of defending them. “It was enough for me to sniff the slightest scent of victim on a defendant,” he observes, “for me to swing into action. . . . My heart was on my sleeve. You would really have thought that justice slept with me every night” (F, 17).
The prostitution of values in the name of personal advancement emerges as the core of his character. All actions are modes of self-presentation. They are strategies by which to dominate.
“Buoyed up by two sincere feelings: the satisfaction of being on the right side of the bar and an instinctive scorn for judges in general,” my profession “set me above the judge whom I judged in turn, above the defendant whom I forced to gratitude” (F, 18, 25). Thus able to achieve “more than the vulgar ambitious man” (F, 23), he could satisfy his need “to feel above,”
“like a king’s son, or a burning bush” (F, 23, 29) ?
But, one day, while “about to light. . . the cigarette of satisfaction … a laugh burst out behind” him, shattering the “vast feeling of power and . . . of completion” that he had “felt rising within” him, as he “dominated the island” in the Seine upon which he was gazing (F, 39, 38).
At first it is but a passing thought, a nagging sense that he is not what he has pretended to be, and that this “duplicity” is probably evident to “The Other.” For what is conscience but The Other installed within us? And what is our sense of ourselves but a subtle and modified reflex of how we may be “for The Other”? The fall begins as a crack, ultimately widening into a fissure that rends the self in two. No more that edenic innocence by which Clamence had felt completely natural, “without intermediary between life and me” (F, 27). Realizing that his “smile was double” (F, 40), he now admires the lost simplicity of primates “who are all of a piece.” It now becomes clear that “the surface of all my virtues had a less imposing reverse side” (F, 85).
“Modesty helped me to shine, humility to conquer, and virtue to oppress” (F, 84). As
for being concerned with others, “I was so out of pure condescension, in utter freedom, and all the credit went to me: my self-esteem would go up a degree” (F, 48).
A dramatic scenario had been orchestrated in which he was at the center of the regard of all others—and slightly above. His life was the staging of this drama. “I could live happily only on condition that all the individuals on earth, or the greatest 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” (F, 68).
Incarnating an absolutized individualism, of which the Christian God is in part an idealized projection, he sought always to obligate others without himself being obligated in turn (F, 25). “Do you know why we are always more just and more generous toward the dead? The reason is simple. With them there is no obligation” (F, 33). Free and unencumbered, able to allow oneself everything, without commitments or limitations, is this not the implicit ideal of bourgeois individualism? Like the quintessential modern bourgeois figure, the salesperson, his way of being for the other is always but a strategy to gain his predetermined end. “I had principles, to be sure,” observes Clamence, “such that the wife of a friend is sacred. But I simply ceased quite sincerely, a few days before, to feel any friendship for the husband” (F, 58—9). It is not true, he insists, that he had never loved. “I conceived at least one great love in my life, of which I was always the object” (F, 58). Values, even emotions, are just tools to be used in order to better dominate the surrounding world. “I kept all my affections within reach to make use of them when I wanted” (F, 68).
Before the fall he “lived consequently without any other continuity than that… of I, I, I … the refrain of [his] whole life” (F, 50, 48). He would be whatever he thought it best to be in order to get The Other to respond to him as he wished. His sense of himself was simply mat of the being who he managed to be in the manipulated gaze of The Other. He was “for himself” as he was
“for The Other,” after having staged himself to be what The Other’s idealized values dictate that he ought to be. At this point, it is no longer clear who is who, and for what reasons. We arc in a hall of mirrors where contrived image molds contrived reality and nothing is what it seems, where simplicity is reduced to naivete and sincerity is simply a more sophisticated strategy of domination.
In a sense, we are in the world so graphically dissected by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness, a Hobbesian universe of isolated egos in fundamental conflict, seeking to reduce others to objects in their world. Our gaze is a way of fixing others into their being-for-me, thus robbing them of their ability to determine themselves and their relations to me freely. Relations between people are thus conflicts oriented toward personal domination. Love between such beings is reduced to an uncertain equilibrium among contending egos. As for the sensitive opening out to another that is a prerequisite for truly sharing, that would entail letting our guard down, leaving us vulnerable to The Other’s onslaught. As for joining together in a common effort out of which community might emerge—as do the main characters in The Plague— that can be no more than a short-term tactical maneuver. Here we are in the modern corporate world, which David Riesman so aptly defined as one of antagonistic cooperation.
All of this comes crashing down upon Clamence once he “had collapsed in public.” His self-satisfaction had been predicated on his being above reproach, invulnerable to the critical scrutiny of others. Once that faith is broken, he begins to realize that his “vocation for summits” was sustained by the endless prosecution of others. How else can the self dominate if not through the subordination of others? “I learned . . . that I was on the side of the guilty, the accused, only in exacdy so far as their crime caused me no harm. Their guilt made me more eloquent because I was not its victim. When I was threatened, I became not only a judge in turn but even more: an irascible master who wanted, regardless of all laws, to strike down the offender and get him on his knees” (F, 53, 55—6). How then can one maintain a sense of moral superiority, having once glimpsed its hypocritical underside? Now “I felt vulnerable and open to public accusation. . . . The circle of which I was the center broke and [my fellows] lined up in a row as on a judge’s bench.” One might recall Meursault’s sense of the mourners at his mother’s funeral, or of the audience at the trial. “The moment I grasped that there was something in me to judge, I realized that there was in them an irresistible vocation for judgment” (F, 78).
That is, they are the mirror image of him. “One attributes to the rival the nasty thoughts one had oneself in the same circumstances” (F, 105).3 Polite society functions like “those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil that attack the unwary swimmer by thousands and with swift little nibbles clean him up in a few minutes. . . . The little teeth attack the flesh, right down to the bone. But I am unjust. I shouldn’t say their organization. It is ours, after all: it’s a question of which will clean up the other” (F, 7-8). “I realized this all at once the moment I had the suspicion that maybe I wasn’t so admirable.” “Mow cher ami, let’s not give them any pretext, no matter how small, for judging us!! Otherwise, we’ll be left in shreds” (F, 77).
But of course that is not possible. We may dream of innocence, of perfection, of freedom from the critical judgment of others. But we would have to be saints, like Tarrou. We would have to commit ourselves to the long and painful process of self-transformation, of being willing to suffer in order to bear witness to the unjust suffering of others. Is he capable of “sleeping on the floor” for another, he is asked. “Look, I’d like to be capable and I
shall be. Yes, we shall all be capable of it one day, and that will be salvation” (F, 32). But that is a dream, like the Greek Isles, not a strategy or even a commitment. In reality, “we don’t want to improve ourselves or be bettered, for we should first have to be judged in default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen.. . . We should like … to cease being guilty and yet not to make the effort of cleansing ourselves. . . . We lack the energy of evil as well as the energy of good” (F, 83).