Rereading the last novel Albert Camus published in his lifetime, I am left with two thoughts: first, that it’s still excellent, and second, that I’m glad I encountered it when I did, namely during adolescence.
It’s hard to imagine The Fall having the impact on someone in their 30s that it can on a teenager. Regarded from the 21st century, existentialism, with its trench-coated, smoke-veiled fixation on cosmic indifference, seems like the troubled adolescence of humankind: it was a phase we were going through. As a novelist, Camus was an ideas man, and the main idea driving The Fall – that altruism is covert self-gratification, while charm, social success, and sexual conquest belie a will to absolute dominion – stops feeling like news around age 20.
The Fall is set in Amsterdam, whose concentric canals remind the cultivated, loquacious, 40-year-old narrator, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, of the circles of hell. In a seedy sailors’ bar, he recounts his story to an unseen listener: how he attained a pinnacle of worldly success as a well-known lawyer in Paris, admiring his reflection in the gratitude of downtrodden clients who he served pro bono, not to mention in the submissive bodies and adoring smiles of the women he collected like medals. After a sinister confrontation with his own cowardice on the banks of the Seine, however, Clamence’s glowing self-appraisal begins to crumble: a strange disembodied laughter pursues him through the Paris streets. And so it is that he winds up in a dim Amsterdam bar, recasting himself as a “judge-penitent” who seduces unsuspecting listeners with his self-damning monologue, but only to force an equally nasty self-confrontation in the other, thereby affirming his own dominance.
Camus undoubtedly put a lot of himself into Clamence – his glory, his supreme self-confidence, his attractiveness. Clamence’s epigrammatic discourse on the despotic psychology of the womaniser is thus extra disquieting: “I loved women – which amounts to saying that I never loved any one of them.”
