[Warning: Contains spoilers and references to self-harm.
Read-on at your own discretion.]
Albert Camus's 1956 novel, La Chute[2], is an attempt to
weave into a narrative structure the ideas and opinions of the French
Existentialist movement. How well does it succeed in this attempt?
In order to begin, we must expand our definition. La Chute is better described as an
attempt to overlay the ideas and opinions of the French Existentialist movement
upon the general landscape of Dante's Inferno. The present-day action takes
place in Amsterdam, which here serves as a metaphor for the Inferno in three
distinct ways. The nested horseshoes of concentric canals encircling the centre
of Amsterdam represent the nine concentric circles that shape Dante's vision of
the underworld. Amsterdam can hardly be said to have the climate or average
annual temperature commensurate to being an apt stand-in for Hell. Yet Amsterdam
also represents a specific location within the Inferno:
"Ici, nous sommes
dans le dernier cercle. Le cercle de... Ah! Vous savez cela? Diable3,
vous devenez plus difficile à classer." (Here we are in the final
circle. The circle of... Ah! You know that. Damm it[3],
you become harder to classify.)
The ninth and final circle of Dante's Inferno is the circle
of traitors. Frozen to his waist at its centre is Satan, the ultimate traitor
in Christian mythology. His wings beat the air in torment, chilling the air
about them, turning the River Cocytus to ice and leaving him trapped, together
with all the other traitors to their kindred, country, guests, and lord that
inhabit the ninth circle.
In the eight circles above, everything is as hot, humid, and
hellish as popular culture tends to conjure in its collective imagination. The
ninth circle is Hell's dungeon; the place where are kept all those so beyond
hope or redemption that they aren't actively tortured. Rather their souls are encased
in the ice at varying levels of immobility and ignored. Virgil and Dante can discern
little more than vague shapes in the ice as they pass that way. They move on
down the legs of Satan and up onto the island of Purgatory.
Amsterdam, with its temperate climate, situated on the coast
of the North Sea, is an effective substitute for the cold of the ninth circle. Snow
is falling in the final chapter of La
Chute and settling on the "dark jade canals" and the 'little
snow-covered bridges". Our narrator idly speculates about second chances
and jumping into the water to save another soul. This would leave him trapped in
the icing over canal, like those frozen in the ninth circle. He goes back to
bed.
As with the ninth Circle, the characters of La Chute are anonymous and go unheard
and unseen. The novel's only voice is its narrator, one Jean-Baptiste Clamence.
Even this, he tells us, is not his real name. Clamence's narrative is told to
another man, principally in a bar near the red light district of Amsterdam. All
that we know of this other person's contribution to the conversation is in the
phrases that Clamence echoes back at him ("You are in business, no doubt?
In a way? Excellent reply! Judicious too."). The true nature of this
second presence is obscured until the novel's final page.
The third and final way in which Amsterdam serves as Hell in
La Chute is as a personal Hell for Jean-Baptiste
Clamence. At the centre of Clamence's narrative is his confession and profound
regret for a transgression committed when he was younger. For this he cannot
forgive himself, and for which he condemns himself to self-exile as a result.
Clamence had years before been a lawyer in Paris. One night,
crossing a bridge in the early hours of the morning, he passed the figure of a
woman contemplating the river from the middle of the bridge. He carried on to
the other side, but hadn't gone far down the bank when he heard a splash. This
splash was quickly followed by a scream. Clamence surmised that the woman had
jumped into the Seine to end her life, but changed her mind once in the river. He
had a second in which to take action and jump in and save her. He remained
frozen on the bank. The screams subsided. He carried on walking.
As Clamence tells it, the incident fades from his mind until
one night, crossing a different bridge in Paris, he hears a laugh that seems to
come from someone on the river, moving along its waters. The laugh haunts him,
as the facade of respectability of his life as a lawyer begins to unravel, like
Nekhlyudov in Tolstoy's Resurrection, faced as a magistrate with the woman he'd
condemned to prostitution by getting her pregnant and dismissed as a maid in the
household of a family friend. In failing to jump into the river and save her,
Clamence wonders what shame caused this woman to take her own life. He comes to
see himself as the last in a long line of men to have failed her.
Nekhlyudov sells his possessions and retreats from
respectable society, as Tolstoy himself did (Resurrection was Tolstoy's final
novel). Clamence closes his practice in Paris, and drifts by accident and by design
to places and situations that represent variations on the upper circles of Hell,
including their infernal heat. He is interned in a North African Prisoner of
War camp during the Second World War. He climbs the active volcano, Mount Etna,
on the Island of Sicily, to look into the heart of the volcano. He travels
around the Greek archipelago, where myths of the underworld were first written down,
becoming the bedrock for western literature for the next two and half thousand
years.
"[L]e hasard, la
commodité, l'ironie, et la nécessité aussi d'une certaine mortification, m'ont
fait choisir une capital d'eaux et de brume, corsetée de canaux,
particuliérement encombrée, et visitée par des hommes venus de monde entier."
(Chance, convenience, irony, and also the need for a certain mortification,
made me chose a capital of water and fog, corseted by canals, particularly
crowded, and visited by men from all over the world.)
In moving to Amsterdam, Jean-Baptiste Clamence finds the
ultimate representation of personal Hell, like Room 101 in Orwell's Nineteen
Eighty-Four, laid out across a city. Not only do the concentric canals and
climate of Amsterdam suggest the ninth circle of Hell, but with its innumerable
bridges, Amsterdam is shaped to remind Clamence of his failure in Paris any
time he wishes to travel across the city centre. To cross Amsterdam is to pay a
heavy psychological toll for his sins: So heavy that Clamence will not cross a
bridge after dark.
The dystopia of Hell is reflected in other ways within La Chute. Clamence draws his companion's
attention to the premises of a former Amsterdam slave trader, complete with
African heads carved into the woodwork. The bar in which much of the action
takes places is called Mexico-City. Its name recalls the Aztecs and their
ritual blood sacrifices on the killing floor. The bar itself is situated in the
old Jewish Quarter that existed before the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the
Nazis during the Second World War, and the deportation of its inhabitants to
the Hell-on-Earth that awaited them at Auschwitz, Belsen[4],
and Sobibor[5].
Dante also makes a personal appearance in La Chute:
"Connaissez-vous
Dante? Vraiment? Diable. Vous savez donc que Dante admet des anges neutral dans
le querelle entre Dieu et Satan. Et il les place dans les Limbes, une sorte a
vestibule de son enfer." (Do you know Dante? Really? Dammit. Then you
know that Dante admits there were neutral angels in the war between God and
Satan. And he places them in Limbo, a sort of vestibule in his Inferno.)
Here Camus, or Clamence, misspeaks. The Vestibule and Limbo
are very different places in Dante's Inferno, lying on opposite sides of the
River Acheron. Limbo is the first circle of the Inferno, where reside all the
virtuous pagan souls that existed before Christ and were therefore denied the opportunity
to convert to Christianity and be saved. The Vestibule, where we find the
neutral angels, is an anti-circle of hell, encountered before Charon and his
riverboat across the Acheron and into the Inferno proper.
The name Jean-Baptiste Clamence warrants examination. At
face value, the name is a play on John the Baptist, the pre-cursor to Christ in
Christian mythology. As John the Baptist carried out baptisms in the River
Jordan, Jean-Baptiste Clamence hears confessions near the River Amstel.
Clamence describes himself as a judge-penitent; a title of his own invention. His
method is to befriend the respectable men who come looking for the seedier
parts of Amsterdam. Then he compels them to confess their sins to him by going
through the charade of confessing his own sin, as if for the first time:
[J]e me tiens devant l'humanitié entiére, récapitulant mes
hontes, sans perdre de vue l'effect que je produis, et dissant: « J'étais le
dernier des derniers. » Alors, insensiblement je passe , dans mon discours, du
« je » au « nous ». Quand j'arrive au « voilà ce que nous sommes », le tour est
joué, je peux leur de leurs véritiés. (I stand before all of humanity,
recapitulating my shames, without losing sight of the effect that I produce, and
say: "I am the lowest of the low," Then brusquely I move from
"I" to "We". When I get to: "This is what we are."
the game is over and I can tell them some home truths.)
As well as allusions to John the Baptist, the name
Jean-Baptiste Clamence has more than a whiff of sulphur surrounding it. The
initials J.B.C. could be read to spell out some variation on Jesus Bleeding
Christ, or Jesus Bloody Christ[6].
The blasphemy inherent in this combination of words and letters once again
suggests the pit, and the inversion of a black mass, twisting Christ into the
Antichrist. During his time in the internment camp, Clamence's fellow prisoners
elect him a kind of mock Pope. The protestant reformer, Martin Luther,
considered Pope Leo X to be the Antichrist, as did Protestants for centuries
after Luther's death. Jean-Baptiste Clamence is as much Mephistopheles as he is
John the Baptist. Clamence collects confessions as Mephistopheles is said to
collect souls. Nightly, Clamence has his fill from the inexhaustible supply of budding
Fausts waiting to be consumed before the bar of Mexico-City.
What does any of this have to do with Existentialism?
The origins of the Existentialist movement can be traced to
the writings of the Danish philosopher, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard[7].
As noted in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy:
"Kierkegaard
rejected the claim, which he took (perhaps unfairly) to be Hegel's[8],
that we can look forward to a time when the different interests and concerns of
people can be satisfied through their comprehension within an all-embracing
objective understanding of the universe.[9]"
Whoever developed the idea, it stated that there will come a
time when individual intelligence and intellectual thought have reached such a
level of refinement and subtlety that all people will think in the same way and
come to the same conclusions. Everyone will work towards the same goals and
follow one path, once they realise what the right path is.
Kierkegaard rebuts this by noting that individual concern
will always be the overriding emotion in sentient beings. It might be possible,
through a high level of education and training, for everyone to see their place
within society (and the universe), and act according to some perceived norm, or
within society's agreed limits. Yet self is always nearer than society: Inner
thoughts always closer than the instruction of peer pressure or billboard
advertising. As such, human beings, and by extension human society, will never
achieve a level of equilibrium in thought or in desire. Hegel's idea of
'absolute consciousness' is unattainable in the real world, except through the liberal
use of eugenics, gulags, and concentration camps.
Kierkegaard's objection to Hegel, however, is religious
rather than metaphysical. Kierkegaard believes that true objectivity can only
be obtained through infinite subjectivity, the ability to see every individual
viewpoint simultaneously. The only entity capable of infinite subjectivity
would be God, by virtue of his being omnipresent, and therefore everywhere at
once. Kierkegaard's objection is not that absolute consciousness is
unobtainable, but that it is only knowable to God.
The true father of Existentialism is generally held to be
the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger[10],
with Kierkegaard considered its principal Godfather[11].
However, Heidegger's is a metaphysical Existentialism, largely dealing with
existing consciousness as an abstract concept. Heidegger has little advice on
the moral or ethical implications arising from Existentialist thought and its
consequences. The work moulding metaphysical Existentialism into an ethical
Existentialism would largely be conducted in France during the 1930s and 1940s.
Heidegger may have been its progenitor, but one philosopher contributed more to
the sum of Existentialist thought than any other: Jean-Paul Sartre.
Jean-Paul Sartre[12]
is to Existentialism what Karl Mark[13]
is to Communism. While Karl Mark did not invent Communism, he did with Capital
(1867), and The Communist Manifesto (1848 - co-written with Friedrich Engels)
contribute more to Communist thought, and have a farther reaching influence,
than any other Communist writer. Sartre's influence is not to the same
magnitude as Marx, but Sartre can likewise claim to have written
Existentialism's two most important treatises: L'Etre et le Neant (Being and
Nothingness: 1943), and L'existentialisme et un humanisme (Existentialism is
Humanism: 1946). For the purposes of the current thesis, we will concentrate on
the latter work.
L'existentialisme et un humanisme is based on a lecture Sartre
gave at the Club Maintenant, Paris in the months following the conclusion of
the Second World War[14].
Sartre posits an ethical Existentialism by drawing a line between two kinds of
Existentialists: Christian Existentialists (existentialistes chrétiens) and
Atheist Existentialists (existentialistes athécs). The difference between the
two essentially comes down to a belief in which came first: existence
(l'existence) or essence (l'essence). Do we come into this life with our
personality already decided upon and preloaded into the frontal lobe? Or are
personality and personal preference something that only emerge after we come
into being? It's a variation on the nature versus nurture debate. Is who we are
pre-existing, or is our essence shaped by the influence of circumstance and
environment?
The prosaic answer to the question is probably a combination
of the two. The work done on genetics in the seventy or more years since
L'existentialisme et un humanisme was published has revealed certain traits
that we find encoded in our genetic code. These traits set our susceptibility
to particular hereditary diseases, and determine our hair and eye colour and
sexual preference, amongst other things. Yet this is a small part of the
picture. Genetics set sexuality, yet everything else is a free choice and open
to individual interpretation. A person may be born pre-programmed to be a certain
sexuality, but how that sexuality manifests itself and the types of people that
that individual will be attracted to is determined by everything else that
happens to them after their birth. Genetics can only set the starting
conditions for how a person's life might proceed. Until that protean essence comes
into existence, we can no more pre-determine the outcome than we can predict the
path and position of a single elementary particle.
As an existentialiste
athéc, Sartre is firmly of the belief that existence precedes essence. He
goes to the trouble of rejecting the existence of God, but notes that belief in
a deity is not an answer or panacea to life's ills, as life seems to proceed
whether one believes in a god or not, with all the same risks of famine, disease,
and war. Those who hold to a particular faith get hit by cars and throw
themselves from bridges just the same as those who hold to no faith at all.
Sartre posits that by rejecting the existence or influence of God, all that
remains is oneself and one's actions. These are the only things for which or to
whom an individual can be held responsible ("je suis responsable pour
moi-méme et pour tous...").
Moreover, by rejecting the control of any greater power,
whether it be God, communism, or societal pressure to conform to a restrictive
role in society, we wrestle back control over our life choices. If one believes
that one's path in life is hindered by immigrants, or shadowy world cabals,
then one's path is unlikely to change, as immigration and global politics (real
and imagined) are beyond the range of most people's influence. It is possible
to advise others; nurture them; force our will upon them even, but the
rationalisation to act or not to act is an internal process and it can only be
affected by external influences up to a point. If one is restricted to blaming
others for past mistakes, there is little one can do to redress those mistakes
for the future. If, on the other hand, one takes ownership of past personal
mistakes and takes steps to redress them and prevent such errors occurring in
the future, then progress is made by the mere action. You can't change other
people. You can only change yourself. And this brings us back to Jean-Baptiste
Clamence and La Chute.
In the moment of his paralysis by the riverbank, Clamence
becomes Jean Paul Sartre's concept of existentialism made narrative flesh. Clamence
is a man alone, free from God (for whom he does not expresses a preference), or
the judgement of others. The decision to act or not to is his to make alone. He
cannot externalise the responsibility to anyone else. As Dante serves as an
avatar for all such pilgrims who make the journey towards Christian redemption,
so Clamence is an avatar for the existentialist faced with total autonomy.
Clamence would appear to be the classic model of an existentialiste athéc. He tells no one else
of what happened (not until the confessionals of his later years). He takes no steps
to ascertain if the woman survived, or her body was found. For a time he
forgets the incident, but when the memory returns, Clamence arranges his own series
of punishments. He seeks to blames no one else for his lack of activity.
Clamence does not offer an explanation for his inaction. Perhaps
it is a variation on the bystander effect, where large groups of people will
stand and watch a violent assault, because the presence of others leads
individuals to assume that someone else will step in. The more people that are
present, the less likely it is that any one person will take charge. As a
lawyer, Clamence will have spent a good part of his life receiving training and
instruction from others, as well as falling into their bad habits and
practices, which is the inevitable consequence of working in any profession of
high institutionalisation. In that instant at the riverbank, Clamence is the
king of his own domain, with power of life and death over this one person. Yet
autonomy is a concept so alien to most people that Clamence baulks at the
responsibility. No one else is compelling him to act through instruction, or
the simple fear of being thought a coward by society, and so he takes no
action. He condemns two people to their fate in doing so.
Considered in reference to its associations with Existentialism,
La Chute is a work of tragedy. Sartre
notes in L'existentialisme et un
humanisme that when faced with two choices, both of which are equally
unpleasant, or have unfortunate consequences, there is no right or wrong
answer:
"La seule chose
qui compte, c'est de savoir si l'invention qui se fait, se fait au nom de la
liberté." (The only thing that counts is knowing if the invention one
makes is made in the name of liberty.)
The tragedy in La
Chute comes not from Clamence's lack of action at the riverbank, but his
reaction to his inaction. Clamence embraces the basics of existentialisme athéc by accepting responsibility for what happened
and seeking personal penitence for his transgression. Yet the function of
punishment is to force the individual to accept the consequences of their
actions to reduce the risk of similar bad behaviour occurring in the future.
Once the individual has accepted responsibility for their actions, and
demonstrated sufficient remorse to the point where the probability of reoccurrence
is negligible, punishment moves on to rehabilitation. Clamence cannot give a
repeat performance of his act of cowardice, because he refuses to be placed in
that situation again by his prohibition on crossing water after dark, so in one
sense the chances of recidivism are slim. Yet this further cowardice only
compounds on the original act of treachery towards a fellow human being in
need. Clamence is sorry in thought, but not in action. This prevents him from
moving on from the punishment stage. He remains trapped in a cycle of
self-recrimination: An existentialiste
athéc manifestation of hell.
Clamence's remorse is manifest, yet he shows little interest
in redemption, unless in his acts of self-confession and contrition at Mexico-City.
His refusal to cross a bridge after dark demonstrates the extent to which the
event has marked and weakened him for evermore. By hanging around notorious
suicide spots and rescuing from the waters the next person that requested help,
Clamence would wipe away his guilt at a stroke. Further acts of kindness could
rescue something worthwhile from a scene of tragic self-destruction. France had
two volunteer lifeboat services at the time: Société Centrale de Sauvetage des
Naufragés, and Hospitaliers Sauveteurs Bretons[15].
Another path to redemption. Yet Clamence will not even visit the scene of his
perceived crime, only ossify in regret at its borders.
Dante's journey leads away from the ninth circle, towards
the ascension of the island of Purgatory and his emersion in the River Lethe,
which unaccountably flows out of the Garden of Eden[16],
and whose waters wash away the memory of sin from all penitent souls that pass
through their flow. Clamence stagnates, despite having less reason than anyone
in the Inferno to remain there. It is a free choice, but it's hardly a constructive
choice.
There is also the question of the woman on the bridge. What
about her free choices? We can of course never know what circumstances
motivated her to jump into the River Seine. Had she, as Clamence believes, been
ruined by a man, or ruined rather by her own malfunctioning psyche? Is she
Ophelia, compelled to drown herself by the actions of some rash Hamlet, or like
Virginia Woolf driven to desperation by mental illness and the impact she
thought she was having upon her loved ones:
"I
feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those
terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I
can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have
given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that
anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this
terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your
life, that without me you could work. And you will I know."
Clamence demonstrates a certain chauvinism by assuming the
woman can only have taken her life through the actions of a man. Virginia Woolf
had died fifteen years before La Chute
was published. Albert Camus had written his treatise on suicide, The Myth of
Sisyphus, only a year later in 1942. "There is but one truly serious
philosophical problem," Camus writes, "and that is suicide. Judging
whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental
question of philosophy." It could also be argued that suicide is
Existentialism taken to its extreme, where the individual assumes
responsibility for the their own termination. Although like the choices of
Jean-Baptiste Clamence, it hardly demonstrates Existentialism at its most
positive or proactive.
In Resurrection, Nekhlyudov is directly and actively
responsible for the destitution of the woman who comes before him as a
magistrate. Clamence, on the other hand, is a victim of chance. Ten minutes
later and he would have had no knowledge of the existence of the woman on the
bridge. He had no hand in her downfall and didn't compel her to jump. Yet he
carries the weight of her action for the rest of his life. Like Satan, if he
only stopped struggling for one moment and recognised that his own actions are
what's keeping him imprisoned, he might break free. If Satan stopped flapping
his wings, the ambient temperature from the circles above the ninth would melt
the River Cocytus beneath him[17].
If Clamence would only cross one bridge after dark, it would negate the need to
cross so many during the day.
One answer to why Clamence proceeds as he does might be
found in the personal life of Albert Camus. It is known that Camus's second wife,
Francine Faure, on at least two occasions jumped from the upper floor of buildings,
including the second floor of the psychiatric hospital in which she was being
treated for depression. These might have been suicide attempts, and Faure's
state is likely to have been exacerbated by Camus's various affairs.
We can therefore read Clamence as Camus, and the woman on
the bridge as Francine. La Chute is
Camus's partially veiled confession. It is also an act of scapegoating by
conjuration. Camus conjures Jean-Baptiste Clamence, attaches his sins to the
judge-penitent, and condemns him to eternal damnation. Camus, meanwhile, continued
with his life. Francine forgave him, and the couple are buried together in the
south of France.
Whether or not one considers its methods wholesome, one
can't deny fiction writing as a prime example of the industry of Existentialism.
Some people blame others for their mistakes. Writers take their mistakes and
turn them into literature, and cautionary tales for the instruction of others.
Clamence wants to be punished. In the final chapter his
companion visits him at home, where he is laid up in bed. In his bedroom is
displayed The Just Judges, a panel from a larger work painted by Hubert Van
Eyck, in real life stolen from Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium in 1934.
In La Chute it has been displayed at
Mexico-City, but Clamence has taken it home and is telling all and sundry that
he is in possession of the painting in the hope of being arrested for its
theft. There is a suspicion in the final chapter that Clamence is near the end
of his life and is desperate for some real world punishment because he does not
believe in anything after death. Perhaps this explains the true nature of the
companion to whom Clamence has been speaking all this time:
"Ne sommes-nous
pas tous semblables, parlant sans tréve et à personne... Alors, racontez-moi,
je vous prie, ce qui vous est arrivé un soir sur les quais de la Seine et
comment vous avez réussi à ne jamais risquer votre vie. Prononcez vous-meme les
mots qui, depus de années, n'ont cessé de rentir dans mes nuits, et que je dirai enfin par votre bouche: O
jeune fille, jette-toi encore dans l'eau pour que j'aie une seconde fois la
chance de nous sauver tous les deux." (Are we not the same? Always
talking, and to no-one... Then tell me, please, is it you that arrived one
night at the Seine, and how you managed to never risk your life? I say now the
words that throughout the years have not ceased echoing in my nights and that I say at last through your mouth: O
young women, throw yourself into the water one more time that I might have a
second chance to save us both.)
In the book's final moments, Clamence is revealed to be
talking to himself. Whether through idle day dream or hallucination, the person
to whom Jean-Baptiste Clamence tells his confession is the younger
Jean-Baptiste Clamence. Curiously, from the text quoted above, Clamence would
appear to be speaking to a postlapsarian version of himself; one who also
failed to prevent the women's fall. He also regrets his lack of action and
repeats the mantra to second chances. The only difference it seems is that the
mature Clamence has ceased to believe in second chances, despite the words still
echoing through his nights. A regret, which, as discussed, could easily be
remedied by facing the scene of his failure on any bridge after dark. To the
bitter end, he obstinately refuses the call:
"Supposez, cher maitre, qu'on nous prenne au mot? Il
faudrait s'exécuter. Brr...! l'eau est si froide." (Suppose, dear friend,
that someone took us at our word. It would have to be carried out. Brr...! The
water is so cold.)
Albert Camus's 1956 novel, La Chute, is an attempt to weave into a narrative structure the
ideas and opinions of the French Existentialist movement. How well does it
succeed in this attempt?
The character of Jean-Baptiste Clamence embodies and
embraces many of the elements of Existentialism. However, he is a man caught
between two camps. He adopts total autonomy for his failure to act at the
riverbank, rather than report the incident to the police, or confess and seek
forgiveness from a priest. Yet in deciding his own punishment, Clamence falls
back on Christian ideas of punishment imposed punitively for disobedience, and as
a deterrent to others who wish to challenge the current order. In the end he
embraces the worst from both camps, and becomes neither existentialiste
chrétien, or existentialiste athéc, but existentialiste tragique.
As well as perhaps being Camus's confession and act of
penitence for the impact that his infidelities had upon Francine, La Chute is a cautionary tale on the
dangers of living in the past. For one moment of inaction, Clamence lives a
lifetime of regret. He could, as discussed, look to mitigate the guilt he feels
by putting himself in a position where he can help others. He is stuck, fixated
on that one moment in time. So much so that he wishes or prays through all the
nights of his life for a chance to travel back and save the woman on the
bridge. It is a vicious circle, or time loop, both of which have become staple narrative
devices when referencing the Inferno since the death of Dante in 1321[18].
Clamence is an existentialiste tragique by stagnating in the
failures of the past, rather than seeking to learn from those mistakes. His
attitude towards women develops into something healthier than that of his
prelapsarian state, but he also gives up his practice in Paris, which he says
specialised in securing monies from estates for the widows and orphans of the
deceased intestate. One admires the partial progress Clamence makes in his
attitudes, but it only serves to underpin the tragedy of his character. For all
his hellish associations, perhaps it is the younger, not older, Clamence who is
Mephistopheles here, come to collect his own aged soul. Or like Virgil, come to
lead the dying Clamence down into the Inferno. In his imagined conversations with
his younger self, Clamence to the last embodies the essence of the
Existentialist struggling for their autonomy, principally concerned with
moderating their own actions. The tragedy is in how Clamence handles his
autonomy, and how he burdens himself with the responsibility for the autonomy
of a stranger.
Jean-Paul Sartre was Existentialism's last great
contributor, although a clutch of French philosophers that came after Sartre,
including Jacques Derrida and Michael Foucaut, could be considered
post-existentialists, like the post-punk bands that emerged out of the wreckage
of punk[19]
in the late 1970s. And yet, Existentialism, particularly Sartre's model, has
plenty to recommend it, especially in these days of increasing secularism, and
the rising popularity of social media, and the echo chambers of thought and
opinion that they create. Where we once lived in societies where we were forced
to believe in a single truth that benefited a handful of people, increasingly
we come to see our single truth, the one which places us at the centre of the
universe, as the only truth allowable,
and waste time and energy trying to impose that truth on total strangers in 280
characters or less.
Existentialism speaks to this. We are each one of seven
billion solutions that the planet Earth has found to the problem of
consciousness. We are ultimately only responsible to and for ourselves. If we
behaved in exactly the same manner as anyone else, we would be failing in the
one purpose for which we were created: to be unique. Some of those unique
solutions, of course, malfunction so that they are a danger to others or to
themselves. This is where society has (or should have) institutions in place to
provide remedy or to impose sanction. Individuals have a say in how these are
administered, but apart from a handful of people in positions of high power or super
celebrity, few people's influence extends far beyond the borders of their own fragile
bodies, or short time upon this planet. People seek to interfere in the lives
of others, or simply to find someone else to blame for every misfortune that
befalls them. Ironically, if we paid less attention to other people's failings,
and concentrated more on identifying and fixing our own, we might gain greater
influence beyond our borders. Then the outdated ideas, industries, and
institutions on which much of modern society is still based might give way to
something more beneficial and flexible to the general health of all.
We live in an increasingly decentralised world: Facebook,
Instagram,and Twitter are as much nation states as France, India, or Taiwan,
only financed by advertising revenue instead of taxation. Much of our
infrastructure is still highly centralised, the system of elected
representation perhaps the most egregious relic in an age when it is possible
to see and speak to someone on the other side of the world as if they were in
the next room. It should no longer be necessary for 600 or so individuals to
represent and vote on behalf of 6 million people, especially given the poor
record of elected representatives in accurately representing the wishes of the
electorate. Those 6 million people, the ones considered capable at the very least,
should by this stage in our technological evolution be able to vote for
themselves on matters before parliament, either through casting their vote
directly through secure electronic means, or by having some kind of proxy in
place that automatically casts a ballot based on the voter's preferences. The
more individual preferences recorded for as many individuals as possible, the
better regulated might society become to the wishes and needs of its individual
citizens.
“If there were a nation of Gods," wrote Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, the grandfather of all French philosophy since the time of the revolution,
"it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not
suited to men.” The existentialiste athéc of Jean Paul Sartre rejects God in
favour of making the individual God of their own life, reality, and realm. True
democracy is still unobtainable for now, so long as people are bickering over
trivial matters in a million places on line, and women are compelled to write
and rewrite every social media post they make for fear that some male will pipe
in to offer his unsolicited advice. One day we might be ready, and humanity might
come to rule itself not through democracy, but nephocracy: rule by the cloud
(from nephos, the Greek word for cloud). It would require a society of
Existentialists to make it possible. Then might La Chute transcend its place as a novel to become a teaching aid
and cautionary tale on the dangers and pitfalls of autonomous self-control.
Atheist, Christian, or any other types of Existentialism would all be welcome,
so long as they were able to give a better account of themselves than the example
set by Jean-Baptiste Clamence.
La Chute also
serves to remind us, like John Donne, that no one person is an island. We can
accept the mantle of Sartre's Existentialism to take responsibility for our
actions, but that is not the same as bearing the consequences of our actions
alone. Even a society of Existentialists is a society. You can't change others,
but neither can you move through life unaided. Society at its best spreads the
load, so that no one individual or group bears too much of the burden. In a top
down society, those on the bottom bear the load and so we see, as in Camus's
time, that there is a long way to go before we approach any kind of happy societal
medium that Existentialist thought might help to facilitate.
Albert Camus's 1956 novel, La Chute, is an attempt to weave into a narrative structure the
ideas and opinions of the French Existentialist movement. How well does it
succeed in this attempt?
Very nicely, thanks. Devilishly clever, one might say.
Et quand ils ont bien bu
Se plantent le nez au ciel
Se mouchent dans les étoiles
Et ils pissent comme je pleure
Sur les femmes infidèles
Dans le port d’Amsterdam,
Dans le port d’Amsterdam[20]
[1] La
Chute, Albert Camus, Editions Gallimard, 1956
[2]
Published in English translation as The Fall (1957)
[3]
Which my Penguin Modern Classics version curiously translates as "By
Heaven." I am not enough well versed in French or French Algerian idiom to
know if it is a usual to use the Devil's name as a vocative or ejaculatory
expression, but at face value Camus uses Diable here as both a vernacular
expression of surprise and to redouble the hellish overtones. Heaven is nowhere
to be found.
[4]
Most notably, Anne Frank.
[5] https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005434
[6] As
B is the voiced counterpart to unvoiced P, and where C can be pronounced as a K
or an S, the initials JPS, signifying Jean Paul Sartre can also be seen.
[7]
1813-1855
[8]
Georg Wilhelm Frederick Hegel (1770-1831)
[9]
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Ted Honderich (Editor), Oxford Universe
Press, 1995
[10]
1889 - 1976
[11]
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) to a lesser extent is also considered a
Godfather of Existentialism.
[12]
1905 - 1980
[13]
1818 - 1883
[14]
29 October 1945
[15]
They merged into Société Nationale de Sauvetage en Mer in 1967
[16]
Genesis cites four rivers flowing out of Eden: The Tigris, Euphrates, Gishon
and Pishon.
[17]
There is something wonderfully Greek about Satan's predicament in the Inferno. One
finds much of Tantalus and Sisyphus in the punishment chosen for him.
[18]
See the TV shows, Preacher and American Horror story, or James Joyce's Finnegans
Wake for variations on these techniques. Also, Groundhog Day, Doctor Who, Star
Trek or Stargate for variations on the basic theme.
[19]
The Fall and Joy Division to Sartre's Clash. Heidegger would be Joey Ramone in
this analogy. Kierkegaard: MC5
[20] "And
when they are too drunk, They plant their noses to the sky. They blow their
noses in the stars. And they piss like I cry, On unfaithful women. In the port
of Amsterdam. In the port of Amsterdam." - Amsterdam, Jacques Brel
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