A SARTREAN WORLD
Despite the French Revolution’s trumpeting of liberty, equality, and fraternity, there was, in reality, no place in the market calculations of bourgeois society for an equality that would infringe on the capacity of profit-maximizing egos to take advantage of available opportunities or individuals. Similarly, fraternity has no real exchange value except as an imaginary goal to be manipulated in the pursuit of material advantage. Practical steps toward its realization, on the other hand, would clearly impede the “free” flow of capital and labor. This was also true of any concern with the achievement of specific end results. Bourgeois idealism thus tends to reduce practically to two increasingly empty formal ideals fabricated in the image of an increasingly crass materialized one. The “cash value” of bourgeois freedom becomes the demand that the “sovereign” individual be granted free reign to pursue a relatively unfettered self-interest. Even the formal virtues are swallowed up in this all-inclusive freedom. Thus equality becomes the freedom to pursue and to possess, while fraternity reduces to the freedom to associate and disassociate with whomever one chooses—subject to the obligation to respect contracts voluntarily entered into. Bourgeois individualism reduces to the free exercise of accumulated power and wealth by those who can. It is, of course, helpful, though not necessary, for such individuals to appear to be living by the formal rules and values that society makes such a fuss about. Duplicity is the modus operandi, and sincerity but a more clever strategy of domination.
Is this not the world depicted by Sartre in Being and Nothingness? A world of pervasive “bad faith,” in which even the sincere man is inauthentic. Is Clamence sincere? Or is his confession but a more clever way of hiding himself? Is he truly suffering? Or does he simply want our pity? Is he agonizing about what is the right thing to do? Or does his profession of guilt serve only to undermine our faith in ourselves? Similarly with Sartre. Shall we read Being and. Nothingness as Sartre’s attempt to work out the possibilities for authenticity? Or shall we see in it but a very sophisticated strategy by which character and self-identity are undermined, and innocence is disfigured, while Sartre builds a fortress inscribed with his name from which he may lord it over others—immortalized in words? “Too many people now climb onto the cross merely to be seen from a greater distance,” observes Clamence (F, 114). What are we to make of this monumental depiction of depravity, which masks as ontology and glosses itself as a search for authenticity? The ambiguity has been so pervasive that many commentators schooled in existentialism have been tempted to see in Clamence an existential hero, as did Thomas Hanna, for instance.6 This may be taken as more than a commentary on the moral ambiguity of Sartrean existentialism. It may suggest that, lacking the necessary critical distance, we may so easily identify with Clamence that we take our unfortunate traits as models after which to aspire. The commentators may thus be making an unintentionally significant statement about a more-general cultural depravity, in a sense confirming Sartre’s depiction.
CLAMENCE AND MEURSAULT
Beyond the question of Sartre’s own character, Clamence can be taken as .1 personification of Sartrean humanity. The Fall is true of the experiential world of the bourgeoisie, locked in the depths of their own inauthenticity. Where
Sartre concludes that for the “Pour-Soi,” love reduces to sado-masochism, Camus agrees, within, that is, the confines of a certain “existence sphere,” to borrow a Kierkegaardian phrase.
Where Sartre talks in a footnote about the possibility of “good faith” requiring a different fundamental orientation, of “a recovery of being that has been corrupted by itself,” Clamence evokes “the Greek archipelago” where he “felt as if we were scudding along . . . on the crest of the short, cool waves in a race full of spray and laughter. Since then, Greece itself drifts somewhere within me, on the edge of my memory” (F, 96), a repressed dream that Clamence is incapable of seeking or denying, not totally unlike that “desire to be God” that Sartre presents as the ontological truth of human character, which we can neither deny nor authentically affirm—in short, by which we are condemned. Neither Clamence nor the Sartrean individual seems capable of being other than the inauthentic character from which each dreams of being free. While one strives to be the impossible union of the “In-Itself-For-Itself,” the other proudly announces his arrival: “I am the end and the beginning; I announce the law.” Before considering the new law that Clamence announces, a few words of comparison of The Fall with The Stranger will help to better situate this volume within the frame of Camus’s work.
Roger Quilliot observes that the two works, although essentially monologues, are stylistically opposites.
The Stranger owes its rhythm to the indirect style, the isolated expression, rhe desired complexities of speech. The Fall is nothing if not directness of style, facility of expression, fold upon fold of the word to the point of vertigo. In turn, lyrical, bawdy, insinuating, sarcastic, the judge-penitent imposes his heavy breathing and his whims upon everyone. Feigned friendship . . .
hellish poetry, a fever of domination, whispers and sudden outbursts, everything there is in disorder (TRN, 2004).
With one, indirectness is a means of more directly presenting the speaker’s world. With the other, the direct, and even personal accent is only a pose designed to hide the truth in question.
Quilliot again: “Meursault was simplicity, nakedness, innocence incarnated; Clamence is duplicity, masks and dissimulation. One was reduced to a thick transparency; the other plays with mirrors, recognizing its face in the face of its interlocutor and of all its readers” (TRN, 2004).
Meursault is like a pane of glass through which we can observe reality, but at a distance, without personal involvement or ulterior motive. Clamence is a somewhat disfigured mirror that contrives to present itself to you in order better to gain advantage over you. The one is condemned for not playing the game; the other played the game only too well. If Mersault is “the only Christ we deserve” today, Clamence is the false pope who stole his dying comrade’s water. Whereas Jesus is supposed to have taken the Suffering of Others upon himself, out of love, Clamence spreads his guilt to all out of contempt— “in order to thin . . . out” the condemnation. This modern-day John the Baptist, having stolen “The Just Judges,”
proclaims the definitive separation of justice from innocence: the reign of the new “Grand Inquisitor.” Only the sense of innocence incarnated by Meursault makes revolt possible, while “on dead innocence the judges swarm” (F, 116). No wonder that Clamence wanders amid the foggy waters and indistinct outlines of this modern urban hell, whereas Meursault’s world has the crisp moral contours of that Greek archipelago where new islands constantly loomed on the horizon. “Their treeless backbone marked the limit of the sky and their rocky shore contrasted sharply with the sea. No confusion possible; in the sharp light everything was a landmark” (F, 97).
Clearly, two different moral universes are at issue here. The contrast in character could not be more extreme, nor the personal goals and emerging social vision. I have spoken of Meursault. I must now draw out the implications of that monologue, which, as “dictated from the top of a lonely mountain” (R, 284), seeks to “impose [its] heavy breathing . . . upon everyone.” By so completing my portrait of Clamence, I will have depicted the characterological roots of that political cynicism that constitutes the moral climate conducive to the emergence of totalitarianism.
Like the fisherman in “The State of Siege,” working people are being denied their right to live simply and freely without a “certificate of existence.” They are being engulfed in a bureaucratic and ideological web of “objective culpability” which threatens to make spontaneous and free daily living impossible. Meanwhile, the intellectuals of the left, who traditionally speak for the disinherited, suffering a pervasive guilt whose roots are but intimated, have made common cause with the advocates of total revolution in search of a “dubious justification.” “Against this objective and collective culpability in which they are trying to ensnare man, Camus rebels,” writes Quilliot. ” ‘Each revolt involves nostalgia for innocence and the call of being'” (TRN, 2000).
Speaking of those intellectuals in his introduction to Algerian Chronicles, he wrote, “It seemed disgusting to me to bare our sins by castigating others, as do our judge-penitents” (A/III, 23).
A PROVISIONAL SOLUTION
What, then, is this “provisional solution” to the problems of our time of which Clamence is the prophet? The problem, it should be recalled, is, How can this prototypical bourgeois dominate in a hypocritical world where, God being dead, we no longer believe in anything but ourselves? With each of us looking out for number one, but with each acting in accord with the rules of the game and professing a morality we no longer believe in, how can we