The Fall

“Haven’t you noticed that our society is organized for this kind of liquidation? You have heard, of course, of those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil that attack the unwary swimmer by thousands and with swift little nibbles clean him up in a few minutes, leaving only an immaculate skeleton? What, that’s what their organization is. ‘Do you want a clean life? Like everybody else?’ […] ‘O.K. You’ll be cleaned up. Here’s a job, a family, and organized leisure activities.” And the little teeth attack the flesh, right down to the bone.”

Clamence and his friend are both middle-class and cultured. Clamence is speaking directly to the expectations with which they were both raised. The metaphor of the piranhas makes the expectations of middle-class life look violent and murderous.

“I live in the Jewish quarter or what was called so until our Hitlerian brethren made room. What a cleanup! Seventy-five thousand Jews deported or assassinated; that’s real vacuum-cleaning. I admire that diligence, that methodical patience! When one has no character one has to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in history. Perhaps that’s what helps me understand the ape and his distrust.”

Clamence delights in the Holocaust’s atrocities. He takes it as a personal lesson to help him understand “the ape” bartender. Clamence is characterized as a man who sees the worst atrocities of history as entertaining anecdotes to share with strangers.

“Have you noticed that Amsterdam’s concentric canals resemble the circles of hell? The middle-class hell, of course, peopled with bad dreams. When one comes from the outside, as one gradually goes through those circles, life—and hence its crimes—become denser, darker. Here we are in the last circle.”

The allusion to Dante’s hell shapes the narrative after its introduction. Clamence frequently references it, and his cher ami’s preexisting knowledge of Dante marks him as a cultured man.

“I also liked—and this is harder to say—I liked to give alms. A very Christian friend of mine admitted that one’s initial feeling on seeing a beggar approach one’s house is unpleasant. Well, with me it was worse: I used to exult.”

Clamence finds it “harder to say” that he took pleasure in giving money to impoverished people. He acknowledges his exultation is worse than being disgusted by impoverished people because it is self-serving.

“Yes, I have never felt comfortable except in lofty places. Even in the details of daily life, I needed to feel above.”

Clamence craves high places, literally and metaphorically. High places as a metaphor mean morally superior stances and the ability to judge others. Clamence’s profession as a lawyer gave him a lofty position.

“But just imagine, I beg you, a man at the height of his powers, in perfect health, generously gifted, skilled in bodily exercises as in those of the mind, neither rich nor poor, sleeping well, and fundamentally pleased with himself without showing this otherwise than by a felicitous sociability. You will readily see how I can speak, without immodesty, of a successful life. […] I was made to have a body.”

Clamence is the perfect middle-class man: He is virtuous, athletic, well-read, humble, well-liked, and has the perfect amount of money. This is considered the height of success for men in Clamence’s time. Consequently, this opens him and his cher ami to worshipping power and slavery as a societal good.

“But do you know why we are always more just and more generous toward the dead? The reason is simple. With them there is no obligation.”

Clamence believes society values displays of love and generosity without obligations to follow up on them. Clamence himself attended funerals just to be seen, experience big emotions, and increase his social standing.

“In a general way, I like all islands. It is easier to dominate them. […] I am well aware that one can’t get along without domineering or being served. Every man needs slaves as he needs fresh air.”

Clamence’s need for domination shapes his entire experience of life. No part of his life is untouched by his desire for domination. His relationship with the Earth itself is shaped by it. His voluntary residence in the lowest circle of hell implies that this outlook is a major reason why he lives in hell.

“Likewise, I always refused to eat in Chinese restaurants. Why? Because Orientals when they are silent and in the presence of whites often look scornful. Naturally they keep that look when serving. How then can you enjoy the glazed chicken? And, above all, how can you look at them and think you are right?”

People of color do not conform to Clamence’s desire for domination. His complete avoidance of certain restaurants because he is not treated like royalty makes his claims of being a “master” who rules over enslaved people absurd and empty.

“When I was threatened, I became not only a judge in turn but even more: an irascible master who wanted, regardless of all laws, to strike down the offender and get him on his knees. After that, mon cher compatriote, it is very hard to continue seriously believing one has a vocation for justice and is the predestined defender of the widow and orphan.”

Clamence’s true nature comes out when he feels threatened. Clamence never experienced this as a lawyer, where he was aloof toward the crime and human feelings involved in his cases. A single encounter with an annoyed stranger decimating Clamence’s worldview is an absurd and humorous idea.

“On my own admission, I could live happily only on condition that all the individuals on earth, or the greatest possible number, were turned toward me, eternally in suspense, devoid of independent life and ready to answer my call at any moment, doomed in short to sterility until the day I should deign to favor them.”

Clamence truly does not see other people as people. They are props in his own life, which are to be arranged and act in a way that is only beneficial to him. This desire is at the heart of Clamence’s preaching and desire for power.

“I had always thought […] that those who didn’t know me couldn’t resist liking me if they came to know me. Not at all! […] Doubtless they suspected me of living fully, given up completely to happiness; and that cannot be forgiven. The look of success, when it is worn in a certain way, would infuriate a jackass.”

Clamence explains away any dislike of him as simple jealousy over his success. The fact that the laughter of his colleagues and the dying woman haunt him shows that he is bluffing. If he truly believed that others were jealous of him, he would not constantly worry that others were mocking him.

“Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue. We lack the energy of evil as well as the energy of good. Do you know Dante? Really? The devil you say! Then you know that Dante accepts the idea of neutral angels in the quarrel between God and Satan. And he puts them in Limbo, a sort of vestibule of his Hell. We are in the vestibule, cher ami.”

Humans as “neutral angels” incapable of good or evil is part of Nietzsche’s “master and slave” moralities. “Masters” are the ones who view morality as a split between good and bad, instead of good and evil. This indicates that Clamence views himself as a “master,” and Nietzsche’s “master and slave” moralities are both tools for him to use. Camus contradicts Nietzsche by making “slave morality,” as he defines it, a tool for “masters” to abuse instead of a directly opposing morality system.

“I always looked with amazement, and a certain suspicion, on those strange creatures who died for money, fell into despair over the loss of a ‘position,’ or sacrificed themselves with a high and mighty manner for the prosperity of their family. I could better understand that friend who made up his mind to stop smoking and through sheer will had succeeded. One morning he opened the paper, read that the first H-bomb had been exploded, learned about its wonderful effects, and hastened to a tobacco shop.”

Clamence cannot take life seriously. It is a game or a play for him to act in. Any genuine show of emotion unsettles him. The anecdote about the H-bomb implies that recognizing the absurdity and cruel nature of the world destroys the ability to hold strong convictions since the friend breaks his vows after reading about the bomb.

“Even now, the Sunday matches in an over-flowing stadium, and the theater, which I loved with the greatest passion, are the only places in the world where I feel innocent.”

Clamence associates acting and being recognized as an actor with his only feelings of innocence. The real world, for Clamence, is a sham where his acting is not recognized as such. The stage gives him direct permission to put on emotions and personas, which is paradoxically his only genuine connection to humanity. The ability to be anybody but a middle-class lawyer lets him feel at ease.

“Thus I developed a deceptive passion for a charming fool of a woman who had so thoroughly read ‘true love’ stories that she spoke of love with the assurance and conviction of an intellectual announcing the classless society. Such conviction, as you must know, is contagious.”

Clamence’s use of “deceptive” and “contagious” make the passion feel disingenuous and dangerous, like a disease. Clamence is alienated even from his feelings, which he treats as dangerous.

“Then you’ll see that debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself; hence it remains the favorite pastime of the great lovers of their own person. It is a jungle without past or future, without any promise above all, nor any immediate penalty.”

Clamence invokes jungle imagery to exoticize his debauchery. If debauchery has no past or future, it has no obligations and thus is perfect for self-love and control, much like going to funerals.

“Then I realized, calmly as you resign yourself to an idea the truth of which you have long known, that that cry which had sounded over the Seine behind me years before had never ceased, carried by the river to the waters of the Channel, to travel throughout the world, across the limitless expanse of the ocean, and that it had waited for me there until the day I had encountered it. I realized likewise that it would continue to await me on the seas and rivers, everywhere, in short, where lies the bitter water of my baptism.”

There is a sense of predestination in Clamence’s encounter with the woman who died by suicide. He was bound to have his bubble shattered. The water that killed the woman being compared to baptismal water makes the imagery religious. Clamence was “baptized” by the waters and brought into a new faith, one where he preaches slavery and judges everybody.

“Every day through the unchanging restriction that stiffened his body, the condemned man learned that he was guilty and that innocence consists in stretching joyously. Can you imagine in that cell a frequenter of summits and upper decks? What? One could live in those cells and still be innocent? Improbable! Highly improbable! Or else my reasoning would collapse.”

Acting on the theater stage allowed Clamence to “stretch joyously.” Clamence’s cher ami only pushes back against this one idea, and Clamence cannot stand it. If he could be submitted to such torture yet still be innocent, he would be unanchored again in an absurd world. The idea of being without an explanation is more terrifying than being wrong.

“Wherefore, since we are all judges, we are all guilty before one another, all Christs in our mean manner, one by one crucified, always without knowing.”

Camus invokes Nietzsche’s description of Christianity as the inventor of democracy. Nietzsche claims this happens because Christianity turns everyone into “slaves” who worship being crucified and want to be crucified themselves. Camus complicates this by showing that such a self-giving nature can be used to bludgeon others from a position of power as a judge.

“He who clings to a law does not fear the judgment that reinstates him in an order he believes in. But the keenest of human torments is to be judged without a law. Yet we are in that torment. Deprived of their natural curb, the judges, loosed at random, are racing through their job. Hence we have to try to go faster than they, don’t we? And it’s a real madhouse. Prophets and quacks multiply; they hasten to get there with a good law or a flawless organization before the world is deserted.”

Clamence sees the world crumbling as Europe scrambles to fill the place of God after his “death.” Clamence depicts society as falling from grace into lawlessness without an authoritative figurehead to organize European lives.

“Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.”

Clamence finds lies comforting. His love of acting informs this position, as he could only live in the Garden of Eden when he played the role of a virtuous man.

“No excuses ever, for anyone; that’s my principle at the outset. I deny the good intention, the respectable mistake, the indiscretion, the extenuating circumstance. With me there is no giving of absolution or blessing. Everything is simply totted up […]. Just like that. Just as flatly. In philosophy as in politics, I am for any theory that refuses to grant man innocence and for any practice that treats him as guilty. You see in me, très cher, an enlightened advocate of slavery.”

Clamence’s judgment of humans as always guilty mirrors the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. Camus echoes Nietzsche again, implying that such beliefs lend themselves to supporting slavery.