Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > The Fall

I was at the St Louis City Museum with the fam, summer of 2017, taking a break, reading this edition of The Fall, and an employee noticed I was reading this, and a fifty-year-old copy I have owned all of my life. "Oh!" she said, "My favorite philosopher! And such an old book! Can I smell it?" I understood her fetish. And her admiration for Camus, which has been a lifelong thing for me.

I had decided to re-read the (sort of) trilogy from Camus this year, including The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall, though I never really related to the latter when I first read it. I began re-reading it in August, set it aside, and only finished it now, in December! The Stranger is sort of sensational, in a way, the story of an amoral murder, accomplished without guilt; The Plague, which I consider one of the great novels, features Dr. Rieux who commits to saving lives even as the plague advances and things seem hopeless. Another quick way of distinguishing them is that The Stranger is a portrait of an alienated, nihilist man; The Plague is almost the opposite, featuring a passionate commitment to social justice, and The Fall once again shows us that we have largely failed to learn from WWII. All three work together to make a philosophical case for a commitment to help others, for humanism, if you will.

The Fall is a first person account of a Parisian lawyer, Clemance, a self-satisfied hypocrite, making a kind of confession to another man in a bar. The confession pertains to something that happened one night a few years ago when the lawyer was walking by the Seine; he observes a woman flinging herself from the riverbank, a suicide. He hears the cries of the woman but he doesn’t move to help her (cf. The Stranger).

The character of Clemance represents modern man living post WWII, post-Holocaust. The woman’s fall, in short, triggers Clemance’s own moral fall. Camus said that the book represents a kind of confession, though one unaccompanied by a transformation. He said it was “a story of the confused spirit of the times.” It reminded me, in this reading, of Dostoevsky’s also first-person account of political and moral struggle, Notes from the Underground.

Clemance’s story begins with a mention of he Jewish Quarter in Amsterdam. That image is important to the story thematically. If The Plague is an inspiring story of resistance, The Fall is one of a failure to act, of knowing that bad things are happening (such as the Allies knowing of the Holocaust) and doing too little, too late about it. As Clemance says, “I have no friends; I only have accomplices. To make up for this the number has increased; they are the whole human race.” We are all morally culpable for the Holocaust (and subsequent genocides and atrocities).

Clemance, not penitent, is nevertheless haunted by his moral failure:

“Then I realized, calmly, as I resigned myself to an idea the truth of which I have long known, that that cry which had sounded over the Seine behind me years before, has never ceased.”

The Stranger and The Plague have always been great books for me, but I’ll admit, The Fall is chilling, as dark as The Stranger in many ways. (But since I have fifty year old paperback copies, they all have that same musty smell!)

Camus's Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life, from Maria Popova!

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/07...