The Fall, by Albert Camus

+
This short book is a monologue by a Paris barrister, who used to be very successful in his professional and sexual exploits. He seemed to be the epitome of good citizenship and decent behaviour – for instance he likes to defend the weaker members of society in court and he likes to assist blind people across the road. However, at the opening of the book he is hanging around in an Amsterdam bar close to the foggy waterfront, having thrown over his career and exiled himself from his circle of society.

Now he inhabits an innermost circle of hell, echoing Dante’s ‘Inferno’. The canals of Amsterdam around him are the circles of hell. He has fallen from his high and blessed condition, echoing Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’. He notes that part of the city’s wealth was built on the slave trade, but also suggests that all of us in modern society are enslaved in some sense. He takes a melancholy pleasure in his surroundings: “I like the breath of stagnant waters, the smell of dead leaves soaking in the canal, and the funeral scent rising from the barges loaded with flowers”.

Why did he fall from his ‘Eden’ of Paris, and why does he describe himself as a ‘Judge Penitent’? This is the complex theme of the monologues to a stranger he met in the waterfront bar. The reasons grow out of his growing sense of his own hypocrisy, and reflect an existentialist ‘nausea’ (to use Sartre’s word). The explanation is the drama of the book, and its epigrammatic style its beauty. Camus artfully draws of the legacy of Franz Kafka and Oscar Wilde. The book has many echoes of the themes of ‘The outsider’, especially in the protagonist’s desire to be judged and desecrated.

The theme of judgement reaches a climax when he asks his listener to open a cupboard, to reveal the original painting of ‘The just judges’. This panel from the Van Eyck altarpiece ‘The adoration of the Lamb’ was stolen from the Cathedral in Ghent in 1934, and never recovered. Camus cleverly and smoothly inserts this real event into his story. This painting embodies the falseness that is an obsession of the book. Visitors to the Cathedral would never know that the replica replacement is not original. So the ‘Just’ judges are the ‘false’ judges. Who has a right to judge others and condemn them? First we have to judge and condemn ourselves.

Camus injects much of his own tortured thoughts about life into the book, but does it in an elegant and controlled manner. It is a book of philosophy, in literary form. It also appears to me to be a strangely, deeply religious book.

The Outsider, by Albert Camus

+
“Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure”. That is the laconic opening (as translated by Stuart Gilbert) of this short novel by Albert Camus. It illustrates the cool, detached, matter-of-fact style of writing, and the central character of the story.

In fact, the death of his mother, or, rather, the cool, apparently uncaring reaction of the son, becomes a key factor at the end of the book, when the narrator, Meursault, is on trial for murder. The prosecutor uses witnesses to the funeral of the mother to besmirch his character, instead of just the clear facts of the callous murder of a native Algerian on a beach. Meursault does not deny the murder and cannot explain his motives. It is an absurd, existential act.

Camus is feted as a central figure of the philosophy of ‘Existentialism’, and I personally find him miles ahead of that nauseous, selfish, puffed-up figure Sartre. Camus is best as a novelist. His more philosophical works, such as ‘The myth of Sisyphus’ are far less successful. I think he was adversely influenced by Sartre. ‘The outsider’ is 95% novel, and the 5% of philosophy is successfully embedded in the story in a non-didactic way. In fact the lack of didacticism or overt ‘message’ is one of the charms of the book.

The flow against conventional morality is startling, as exemplified by the last sentence of the novel: “For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained was to hope that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.”

The story and the location is drawn from the author’s person experience living in Algeria. There is an atmosphere of hedonism, relaxing in the sun. It also reveals the embedded prejudices and colonial mentality that prevailed amongst white people there at the time, before the 2nd World War. The lack of sympathy evoked by the murderer and the court for the Algerian victim is symptomatic of the prevailing racist frame of mind. I remember such attitudes in Africa, and of course have read about them in history books. The central character does not hate the non-white. He just does not care.

Meursault is so cool and detached that he almost exists in a void of nothingness. When offered a job in Paris by his boss, this is his reaction: “I told him I was quite prepared to go; but really I didn’t care much one way or the other.” When his girlfriend asks him to marry her, he responds: “I said I didn’t mind; if she was keen on it, we’d get married.”

Camus has created an elegant portrait of an existentialist crisis where (in the words of Freddy Mercury) ‘nothing really matters’.