The Fall: How Camus Turns Confession into Control

Part of: The Deep Reader

This essay discusses the novel in full, including its ending.

How do we challenge someone who has already supplied the harshest accusations against himself? To add another fault may seem ungenerous; to admire his candor may give him exactly what he wants. Albert Camus turns this predicament into a contest over who may judge whom in The Fall, where a stranger's willingness to listen gradually becomes something the speaker believes he can use.

Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a former Parisian lawyer, approaches a fellow Frenchman in an Amsterdam bar. Across several encounters, his stories of his former success, his vanity and the failures that have unsettled his favorable opinion of himself occupies almost all the conversation. Questions, corrections and gestures reach the page through his replies, so that the man who needs to be heard also controls our access to the person hearing him. We take pleasure in his eloquence even as its monopoly on the exchange begins to trouble us.

A conversation with one printed voice

The opening service is small enough to accept without much thought. The barman speaks Dutch; Clamence offers to help the visitor order a drink. His choice of language already brings the transaction into his professional sphere: he will “plead your case.” Before the first paragraph ends, he has interpreted the barman's nod, completed the order, apparently withdrawn, acknowledged an invitation and placed his glass beside the stranger's. Each movement sounds considerate. Together they make a remarkably efficient introduction for a man who intends to speak at length.

We never hear the invitation that permits him to sit down; we infer it from his answer, just as an adjustment in his tone suggests something in the listener's expression. Camus removes the second voice keeping the exchange, giving Clamence's prose an irregular conversational rhythm in which a question or a revised estimate may interrupt an elaborate sentence. We have to imagine enough of the other man to keep the conversation moving, while accepting Clamence as the intermediary who tells us what that man has said.

Flattery refines this control when Clamence turns to language itself. Clamence uses an imperfect subjunctive, notices the listener's reaction and confesses his weakness for elegant speech. A little later he makes the reaction flattering: to catch the grammatical form is a sign of cultivation, and to resent it is another. Whether pleased or irritated, the stranger qualifies for admission to the cultivated company Clamence claims to represent. The listener acquires an attractive identity inside someone else's sentence.

The French keeps these small acts audible through its changing forms of address. Formal courtesy develops into the familiarity of a compatriot, then a friend; his continual requests for permission lend his persistence the air of deference. An assumed answer can supply the reason to continue. The effect depends on the combination of cultivated clauses with abrupt questions, asides and invitations. Uninterrupted grandeur would announce a performance too readily. These interruptions give the performance the responsiveness of conversation.

Nor does Camus require Clamence to hide his vanity successfully. His complaints about his own speech can be amusing, and because his perception of other people's self-importance is often exact, we may enjoy the diagnosis while missing the privilege it establishes. A man who notices his own pretensions as quickly as we do can begin to seem uniquely qualified to notice ours.

The advantage of accusing yourself

That privilege grows through the order in which the past is disclosed. Clamence remembers helping blind people across the street, surrendering his seat and defending the poor sans payment. His pleasure in these actions is expansive, almost infectious. Later he returns to the crossing and adds the gesture with which he used to leave the person he had helped: a courteous salute, visible to the spectators and useless to its supposed recipient. The new detail redirects our attention toward the audience for his goodness.

We have already pictured a successful act of assistance before we discover the flourish intended for everyone watching. The man he helped did reach the other sidewalk, and Clamence occasionally grants this coexistence of usefulness and vanity himself, although his explanation presses toward a verdict on his whole character. The delay lets us credit the help given before vanity becomes grounds for discrediting the helper altogether.

His recollections of seduction bring the procedure closer to the present encounter. He describes a practiced declaration of his own inadequacy: attachment to him would be unwise, ordinary happiness had become impossible, the reasons remained obscure. Some women undertook to fathom him, and their concern advanced his seduction. We are listening to another intimate explanation of inadequacy, also interrupted by hints of things still to be explained. The story gives us grounds for asking what our sympathetic attention is accomplishing for its teller.

After an especially brutal confession of how he treated a woman who had criticized his sexual performance, Clamence supplies a judgment on behalf of the man beside him. He acknowledges the other's “courteous silence,” accepts that his conduct was disgraceful and immediately asks the listener to search his own memory for something similar. Within a few sentences, Clamence turns harm done to a woman into an invitation for one man to confide in another. The woman disappears from consideration while the listener is invited to produce a matching disclosure.

A cramped punishment cell supplies Clamence with his most coercive image of universal guilt, and also the objection his argument cannot accommodate. Clamence imagines a prisoner unable either to stand upright or to lie down, learning guilt through the forced position of his body. An objection becomes audible in his reply: could an innocent person be imprisoned there? He refuses to consider the possibility because it would upset his reasoning. The confinement has supplied the sensation he wants; the innocence of a possible occupant would sever the connection he has made between suffering and guilt.

An objection precise enough to interrupt the argument reaches us, although Clamence keeps possession of the page and proceeds to condemn everyone. Camus makes the physical description persuasive before the unheard question exposes the flaw in its use as proof. We can feel the cramped position and still dispute what it proves. The missing reply resists the accusation from within a speech that had seemed to command the whole exchange.

What the listener can still refuse

Near the end, Clamence explains the practice he calls that of a judge-penitent. He begins with his own offenses, chooses the traits likely to be shared, adapts the story to his audience and gradually changes the grammatical subject from I to we. The confession establishes a likeness, and the likeness is then treated as permission to accuse. He reserves a special position within the resulting company: he knew the truth first and can therefore speak for everyone else.

This explanation sends us back to the opening exchanges. Flattery had identified the listener as cultivated; the listener's interest had authorized further speech; the recounting of cruelty had requested a reciprocal admission. Clamence has been choosing which responses count as evidence of resemblance. The late account of his procedure implicates the confession itself: his treatment of the listener now invites the scrutiny he has lavished on his former conduct.

The late explanation begins to stifle the exchange by spelling out almost everything the earlier encounters had taught us to hear, and Clamence even claims that explaining his method helps him win over an intelligent audience. Awareness of the manipulation is thus allotted a place within it. For a stretch, the book's capacity to anticipate objections reduces the pleasure of forming one: the dramatic situation becomes a worked demonstration whose instructor has already prepared our next response. The earlier salute and grammatical compliment achieved more with less explanation, because they left us to make the connection between the words and the person being addressed.

The visitor's laughter interrupts this confidence. Immediately after Clamence offers to hear his confession with brotherly feeling, he has to tell him, “Don't laugh!” H. Allen Whartenby's reading of the interlocutor's resistance takes this response as evidence that the speaker's intended conquest has failed. Against this laughter, Clamence's assurance of eventual submission sounds premature. We hear the laughter only through the man trying to stop it, however, and the novel gives the listener no final speech in which to explain himself. We can hear an opening for refusal, while we are deprived of the refusal's full terms.

The visitor’s partly withheld identity also prevents him from serving as a transparent surrogate for us. He has an occupation, a manner and a history we can only partly reconstruct; when his own profession as a Parisian lawyer is finally disclosed, Clamence gains a specific resemblance he can treat as proof of a shared moral identity. We need not accept that inference simply because Camus has made the act of listening so absorbing.

In the last paragraph, Clamence tries to prescribe the visitor's words. Earlier he has recalled walking away after hearing a body strike the Seine and a woman's cries fading along the river, without returning or alerting anyone. Now he asks his fellow lawyer to appeal for a second chance to save her, and says that he will finally speak “through your mouth.” The imagined confession is already furnished before the other man can make it, and Camus supplies no reply to the request.

Camus ends with Clamence canceling even this imagined opportunity: another chance would demand action, and the cold water gives him pause. He is relieved that it is too late. After all the invitations to speak, the visitor has been offered a part in someone else's rehearsal, complete with words, feelings and an excuse for doing nothing. The freedom left to us is to hear how carefully the part has been written. Mistaking its availability for our obligation to play it, is not an option.

Sources

Albert Camus, The Fall (La Chute, 1956), French text, Ebooks libres et gratuits electronic edition, June 2011. Quotations are translated directly from French for this article.

H. Allen Whartenby, “The Interlocutor in La Chute: A Key to Its Meaning”, PMLA 83, no. 5 (1968), 1326–1333. The study’s published abstract supplies the counterreading of the listener’s resistance.