On Reading Albert Camus' The Fall , 8-3-2010

 The Volunteers of America's paperback collection included among the Tom Clancy books Albert Camus' The Fall. I read The Stranger in high school, The Rebel after I started college (a book I think needs to be more widely read), his translation of The Possessed, and a book of essays whose title I forget (but not his essay on capital punishment). Like Gore Vidal and Kurt Vonnegut, I came to appreciate Camus' essays more than his novels. I have no idea how Camus interloped into a halfway house's version of a library.

It was good to see him. My mind finds new writers uncomfortable. I find this odd since I find memories of life prior top incarceration vague and disjointed; too often I think I have been here all my lie.

I find myself puzzling over The Fall. Stylistically, the book differs from The Plague and The Stranger – the novel has only one character performing a monologue. (I suppose one could say Amsterdam and Paris might be characters, if so they are minor ones.) That probably makes it a hard one to teach. That it has little plot, would also make it difficult to teach. What plot exists is a confession. Students like brevity.

I imagined seeing the novel performed on the stage. No, not read onstage – performed as an actual play. The audience being the unheard audience and some time interlocutor. in the same way, the book could be filmed with the camera as the companion. Camus uses – creates – the phrase judge-penitent for his novel's speaker. He does not designate the unheard companion as a confessor. I assume alluding to this entity (so hard to think of it as a person, as would be typical for most characters), would then imply the possibility of absolution for the speaker. Camus ruled out absolution in The Rebel and The Stranger, and none less appears less open to the possibility of absolution than The Fall. That quality appears to my mind at this time:

But of course, you are not a policeman, that would be too easy. What? Ah, I suspected as much, you see. Taht strange affection I felt for you had sense to it then. In Paris you practice the noble profession of lawyer! I sensed we were of the same species. Are we not all alike, constantly talking and to no one, forever up against the same questions although we know the answers in advance? Then please tell me what happened to you one night on the quays of the Seine and how you managed nver to trisk your life. You yourself utter the wods that for years have never ceased echoing through my nights and I shall at last say through your mouth: "O young woman, throw yourself intot he water again so taht i may a second time have the chance of savng both of us!" A second time, eh, what a srisky suggestion.!Just suppose, cher maitre, that we should be taken literally? We'd ahve to go through with it. Br....! The water's so cold! But let's mpt worry! It's too late now. It will always be too late! Fortunately!

Does anyone else get a taste of The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel? 

 I find myself unimpressed by the blurb Vintage put on the back cover:

Albert Camus in The FAll created a magnificent work...which secured its author place as a great moralist as well as a great writer of its time.

I find myself troubled by the suggestion that this book alone made Camus a great moralist. Substitute “confirmed” for “secured” and I would heartily agree with the change.

As much as morality thunders through the book, the action which raises the character's morality seems rather obscure. Then, as with The Stranger, comes the ambiguity of acts and intentions but without that novel's emotional impact.

I think the novel exists as an interesting view into the morality of judging. I thought that the novel might be too concerned with morality and ideas of post-war France. I was wrong there. Again, the back cover blurb might have led me astray with these words:

... a subject eminently worthy of his supreme gifts: the conscience o fmodern man in the face of evil....

That brought to mind plays by Jean-Paul Sartre I read in college, and then to the Sartre/Camus split. I would not be surprised if The Fall caused the rift. [It was not. Thank you, Google and Aeon. sch 2/27/23.] I do not recall Sartre having the felicitous style of Camus (I am thinking of Sartre's No Exit.) The Fall has such a inviting style, that it makes too subtle the act of evil forming the crux of the book.

How often does evil reach the heights of an Auschwitz or a Rwanda? Those wishing to turn the small-time psychotics of al Quaeda into the equivalent of the Khmer Rouge or the Nazis, need to double-check their numbers. They need to check on their language. These types try to turn the villains of reality into the overblown ones o four adventure movies. This overkill does no good, except for the evil ones.

I only now realize the novel predates Hannah Arendt's observation about the banality of evil. Camus strikes at the same territory. I suggest the novel both for those all too ready to judge others and for those with real concerns with evil coming more frequently on cat's feet than on tank treads.

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[Continued in On Reading Albert Camus' The Fall (Part 2), 8-3-2010. sch 2/27/23.]