Having lost his original innocence—and “God’s sole usefulness would be to guarantee innocence” (F, 110)—his only concern is to protect himself from the critical scrutiny of others in order to continue to dominate them. Being slightly more insightful and perceptive than others, perhaps, or more sensitive, he is haunted by his fall from innocence and the realization of his vulnerability to their judgment. His life becomes a struggle to deflect that judgment. It is here that we must situate the strategy embodied in the new profession of judge-penitent. “The essential is being able to permit oneself everything, even if, from time to time, one has to profess vociferously one’s own infamy. I permit myself everything again, and without laughter this time. I haven’t changed my life; I continue to love myself and to make use of others” (F, 141-2).
But I have run ahead of my story. How does this need “from time to time” “to profess one’s infamy” get rid of the laughter? How does this newfound profession serve at least as a provisional strategy? And what does he really long for? In order to address these questions we need a better understanding of the inner dynamics of his character and its historical significance.
OPPRESSIVE SPEECH
What kind of personal relations are possible for one whose life is oriented around the struggle to dominate? Mastery and servitude are the names of this game in which manipulative object relations define the power struggle over prestige. “I have no more friends; I have only accomplices,” observes Clamence (F, 73; TRN, 1511). Fraternity and equality are impossible. Freedom is mine or yours; it cannot be both. Nor can it emerge from a “we” that is a concerned sharing of feelings and actions. Community is the complicity of slaves in a common humiliation. “In the kingdom of humanity, men are bound by ties of affection, in the Empire of objects, men are unified by mutual accusation” (R, 239). Such enslavement appears as a continual temptation to one whose only experience of freedom is this power struggle among egos.
The inner logic of his character, as well as the political significance of its theoretical development, is made quite clear by Clamence. “One can’t get along without domineering or being served. Every man needs slaves as he
needs fresh air. Commanding is breathing. . . . And even the most desperate manage to breathe. 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” (F, 44— 5). One might think here of Salamano and his dog in The Stranger. Of course, the right to talk back is essential to the existence of the rebel. The implicit ideological conflict becomes even clearer as Clamence draws out the philosophical significance of his position.
“One doesn’t talk back to one’s father”—you know the expression? In one way it is very odd. To whom should one talk back in this world if not to whom one loves? In another way, it is convincing. 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. Power, on the other hand settles everything. . . . You must have noticed that our old Europe at last philosophizes in the right way. We no longer say as in simple times: “This is the way I think. What are your objections?”
We have become lucid. For the dialogue we have substituted the communique: “This is the truth,” we say. “You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren’t interested. But in a few years there’ll be the police who will show you we are right” (F, 45; TRN, 1495-6).
It is this problem of the communique that Camus studies in “The State of Siege,” “The Just,” and The Rebel.
And why “the communique? Because otherwise there would never be an end to discussion and the interchange of reasons that is the very fabric of dialogic human interaction. It is precisely this open-ended, always partial engagement of equals in a shared endeavor that Clamence finds instinctively unbearable. “Dialogue and personal relations,” observed Camus in The Rebel,
“have been replaced by propaganda or polemic, which are two kinds of monologue” (R, 239-40). The communique is a third.
From freedom to slavery, therefore, Clamence suggests the dialectical inversion by which the individualism of the bourgeois character nurtures the soil that breeds the will to domination and oppression. Here lies the theoretical significance of The Fall. For Camus was deeply concerned, even perplexed, by the ease with which liberally educated Western humanists became apologists for oppression. If The Rebel explores the logic by which the demand for justice may become the justification for oppression, The Fall seeks to portray the characterological roots of that perversion.
A HERO OF OUR TIME
To appreciate the theoretical significance of The Fall, therefore, we must more firmly anchor its appearance in the stormy waters of the postwar era. If this hero of our time is indeed Camus’s collective portrait of “the aggregate of the vices of our whole generation in their fullest expression,” this is a generation with which Camus felt “tout a fait solidaire,” sharing its vices as well as its hopes. “Nothing authorizes me to judge from above an epoque with which I am in complete solidarity. I judge it from within, merging myself with it” (A/II, 83). For judge it we must, if we are to prepare the way for the renaissance in human living that was ever the center of Camus’s theoretical and practical concerns. Revolt was clearly called for by all humane considerations, and yet recent history had sharply called into question its liberatory possibilities.
Confronting a world seemingly gone mad in the chaos engendered by nihilism, the response of many on the left, the traditional defenders of the rights and liberties of the oppressed, has been to embrace a new theology by which they have become apologists for a scientific despotism. Camus, himself a man of the left, is perplexed and tormented by this depressing turn of events. We must understand them if we are to find our way out of this historical dead end.
Speaking of the destroyed cities of postwar Europe, he observes:
They offer the image of this emaciated world, wasted by pride, in which phantoms wander, accompanied by an apocalyptic monotone, in search of a lost friendship with nature and other beings. The great drama of Western Man is that neither the forces of nature nor those of friendship interpose themselves any longer between him and his historical becoming (A/I, 261-2).
People in the West turned first to fascism and national socialism, then to Marxism-Leninism and Soviet communism, and most recently to religious fundamentalism in their search for this lost friendship. In a civilization whose foundations had burst asunder, with personal relations and belief systems in disarray, the tradition of revolt bequeathed by the French Revolution and its enlightenment faith in progress was increasingly succumbing to the temptation of replacing a dying Christianity with a reborn messianism, whether of the blood or of science. Whatever the conceptual forms offered, the psychic base had been well laid over centuries. So well laid, in fact, as to be felt, at least unconsciously, as absolutely essential. Without such a belief system how could anyone feel at one with life and destiny?
Out of the unbearable solitude that was the felt meaning of the death of God, revolt in the West often turned into an apocalyptic monotone in the vain hope of enforcing a solidarity that might alleviate the pangs of metaphysical solitude. Such are the metaphysical sources of the revolutionary pathology Camus seeks to define in The Rebel. His remarks there on the deeper significance of terror make the connection.
Terror and concentration camps are the drastic means used by man to escape solitude. The thirst for unity must be assuaged, even in the common grave. . . . The creature needs happiness, and when he is unhappy, he needs another creature. Those who reject the agony of living and dying wish to dominate. Solitude is power, said Sade. Power, today, for thousands of solitary individuals, because it signifies the suffering of others, bears witness to the need for others. Terror is the homage that the malignant recluse finally pays to the brotherhood of man (R, 247-8; L’HR, 649-50).
Germaine Bree suggests the immediate historical background of the novel.
The hero of La Chute, the “penitent judge,” represents . . . the post-war Europe of the erstwhile humanitarians, morally shaken, guilt-ridden, and in search of a dubious justification.
Contemporaneous with the penitent judge, the renegade missionary [in the collection of short stories of which The Fall was originally to have been a part] voices the intellectual confusion and frustrated anguish of an idealistic, Christian “left” upon which Marxism exercises a perpetual fascination (Bree, 92).