The Fall

A Guilt in Search of Its Crime

“Strictly speaking, guilt is not an emotion, though shame is. Guilt is the breach of standards of conduct. Shame is the subjective reaction to the breach or non-fulfilment of standards, moral, intellectual, or aesthetic, which we recognize as valid, which we desire to live up to.” (‘The Unforgivable Sin: An Interpretation of Albert Camus’ The Fall’) This is Gerald Stourzh near the beginning of his essay on Camus’ The Fall, and it is easy to view two key scenes in the book that allow us to distinguish one from the other. In the first scene, the book’s monologing central character talks to the silent narrator about an incident some years earlier in Paris, where he worked as a defence lawyer and always saw himself as the good guy helping others, not only in his work but even on the street, in the theatre, on a train. He would help a woman cross the road, give up his seat so a couple could sit together in the auditorium; would help a girl with her suitcase in a compartment. He is proud of such behaviour, but one day he becomes ashamed of himself. Jean-Baptiste Clamence is waiting at a red light when a small, bespectacled man on a motorcycle pulls up in front of him. The bike stalls and the man tries to get it started. Clamence proposes he moves off the road so that his car and other cars will get to pass, and the man responds rudely. Clamence calmly asks again and receives further insults. He then gets out of the car after the man indicates he will give him a beating but Clamence, though the bigger and stronger man, doesn’t get the chance to take him on. A crowd gathers around Clamence and tells him they will not allow him to fight someone with a motorcycle between his legs. The bike then starts up, the man administers a clip to Clamence’s ear, and Jean-Baptiste, getting into his car, now has a tail of vehicles behind him blowing their horns telling him to get a move on. 

   It is a shameful moment that he cannot easily forget and recalls for many years, but it needn’t be a guilty one. What would be is a moment when he was passing along a bridge and made out a slender young woman dressed in black leaning over the railing. He keeps walking but after fifty yards hears a loud splash. He hears, too, a cry travelling downstream and then nothing. He makes no attempt to save her and tells no one what has happened. Presumably, the woman wanted to die; why should he have tried to save her? Yet those cries suggested she did want to be saved. And perhaps someone who managed to rescue her would not only have saved her life but given her some faith in living thanks to the rescue. What seems clear is that Clamence’s failure to act contributes a little to a lack of faith in himself and in life more generally: as if he needed save her life to save a soul he cannot save by continuing to be a barrister. Rene Girard describes it thus: “one day he [Clamence] discovers that moral heroism is not so easily achieved in deeds as it is in words and a process of soul searching begins which leads the ‘generous lawyer’ to abandon his successful career and take refuge in Amsterdam.” (‘Camus’s Strange Retrial’) Girard also says that Jean-Baptiste’s desire to act well in numerous social situations is merely professional purpose expanded into the broader sphere: “…we may note his boy-scoutish behaviour is presented to us as nothing more than an extension of the lawyer’s professional attitude. Clemence has become so engrossed in his legal self that he also plays the part of the generous layer outside the court; the comedy gradually takes over even the most ordinary circumstances of daily life.” The shame he feels at the traffic lights can fit into the comedic, no matter how undermined he may have felt afterwards. He was pretty sure if it had come to a fight he would have bested the other man. One could imagine him telling others of this incident and managing to laugh it off, seeing in it a farcical scenario that leaves him the one who the cars are hooting at after he has tried to persuade the motorcyclist to get out of the way so he and others will be able to pass. This may have shown him professionally weak in the eyes of those onlookers who thought he was going to beat a man up (a barrister all but committing a crime!) but nothing more. It is an act of shame, but if shame is often situational, is guilt much more personal, and consequently embeds itself into the structure of personality much more firmly?

    There are other passages in the book that seemcaught between shame and guilt,  explaining how he has affairs with friends’ wives by no longer believing they are friends. “I had principles, to be sure, such as the fact the wife of a friend is sacred. But I simply ceased quite sincerely, a few days before, to feel any friendship for the husband.” With one woman he deemed too passive, he discovers after they break up that she “related my deficiencies to a third person. At once I felt as if I had been deceived; she wasn’t as passive as I thought and she didn’t lack judgement.” Both these instances, and the one at the traffic lights, could fall under the comedic. The woman he fails to save in the Seine is a tragedy if we define the tragic as centrally about the irrevocable. It would be possible that Clamence might laugh about the little man on the motorcycle years later, and so he might with the woman who betrayed him and even with the husband whose wife he slept with. But he wouldn’t ever be able to joke about failing to save a drowning woman. While the incidents with the motorcyclist, the wife and her husband and the lover involve others, the woman in the Seine need only concern him. There were after all no witnesses.   

        Of the four incidents, three can feel unequivocally shameful and one without doubt an issue of guilt. But while it would seem silly for Clamence to say he felt guilty about the incident with the motorcyclist (it is clearly shameful), shame or guilt could apply to the friend he betrays and to the woman he finds passive. After all, of the latter, he says “I would give her up and take her back, force her to give herself at inappropriate times and in inappropriate places, treat her so brutally, in every respect, that I attached myself to her as I imagine the jailer is bound to a prisoner.” He might feel guilt but we could still call it a shameful episode. However, the incident where he fails to save the woman who drowns is an issue of guilt even if we could retouch it in a way that would have indicated instead shame. Clamence could have been walking along the Seine, sees a woman who then jumps into the water and he stands there doing nothing about it. A couple come running towards him, shocked by his inaction, and they jump in and save the woman. He wouldn’t then feel guilt over her demise but shame at having done nothing to save her while others did. He would also have witnesses bearing witness to his shame. 

     While it may be Camus here who is illustrating the intricacies of shame and guilt in fictional form, few more than Jean-Paul Sartre addressed the question philosophically. Laura Dolezal notes that “first, he discusses shame as a moral emotion; it is an experience, akin to guilt, where the judgement of others can teach me that I have transgressed some rule or norm. Second, shame is a mode of self-evaluation; through shame I can see and judge myself. Third, and most significantly for this analysis, shame is an ontological structure of subjectivity and intersubjectivity; it is because of our ‘’original shame’, for Sartre, that we have the capacity for reflective self-consciousness.” (‘Shame, Vulnerability and Belonging: Reconsidering Sartre’s Account of Shame') Dolezal later says it is important to note that shame and guilt are distinguishable. "While, in fact, it is often difficult to clearly delineate shame from guilt in ordinary experience, as the two are often experienced together, most psychologists and philosophers would agree that shame is structurally different from guilt in a significant way.” She differentiates between the action behind guilt and the feeling behind shame, reckoning that: “guilt arises where one feels bad about an action or something that one has done, shame is about the person that one is … In short, shame is connected to one’s core self and identity, it concerns a transgression, fault or flaw that will lead others to think less of who one is (rather than merely what one has done).” It is true, we may be ashamed of our bodies but we are unlikely to say we feel guilty over them, while one might feel guilty over how we have treated a friend: that we talked to them sharply and they were left feeling hurt. 

             Yet if Clamence feels that of all his potential regrets the greatest is failing to save the woman, this indicates that while he feels guilt over it, the incident has also transformed the nature of his personality. He makes much of himself as a changed man — someone who has lost his looks, has chosen to give up his law practice, and moved out of Paris. However, he doesn’t do this after his failure to help the drowning woman — the drowning comes years before his shameful moment with the cyclist. Does this mean the latter incident shatters the core of his self and leaves him to become the destroyed man in Amsterdam? Yes and no, as if he needed the shameful episode to recognise the full significance of the guilty one. If Jean-Baptiste was only feeling guilt over the woman, why didn’t he leave Paris after it? He seemed to have accepted the incident as insignificant and two or three years after the event he says, “I was happy…I felt rising within me a vast feeling of power and — I don’t know how to express it  — of completion which cheered my heart.”  He is on the Pont des Arts bridge when he hears a laugh burst out behind him and sees no one there. He steps towards the railing and there is no barge or boat. He says “the sound of the laughter was decreasing, but I could still hear the laughter behind me, a little further off as if were going downstream. I stood there motionless” as he finds his heart beating rapidly. The passage has an echo of the earlier moment in time (if later in the narrative telling) with the woman on the bridge. Then too, he stood motionless: “I wanted to run but didn’t move an inch.” On the earlier occasion, he was trembling. But most decisively the comparison resides in the actual cry that has become a virtual laugh. After the woman jumped, he “heard a cry, repeated several times, which was going downstream…” For a time, he avoided the Seine after the incident of the laughter, and it is a while after this that he suffers the indignity of the motorcycle incident.  

    It would seem that the moment of laughter on the Pont des Arts was the earlier incident on the Port Royal coming back to haunt him, but it appears also to have needed a mixture of shame and humiliation to make him realise the magnitude of an incident that he managed somehow to laugh off, before laughter came back and made him confront it. For Stourzh, “…gradually laughter pursues him until he feels the universe laughing at him. Indeed, the gates of hell resoundingly shut behind Clamence with the sound of laughter; there ensues the decline of his career as a brilliant and respected Paris lawyer.” (‘The Unforgivable Sin: An Interpretation of Albert Camus’ The Fall’ ) He becomes a ridiculous man in his own eyes but this rests partly on recognising that he has devoted himself to good deeds as self-aggrandising acts, but slowly has to accept that when offered a moment to test his values, without anybody looking, he failed. 

         This leads us to the title and the various manifestations of the fall that can be implied in it. It is the woman’s fall as she jumps into the water, yet it's also about a man who fails to fall in love except for self-love,and who falls from grace when he is forced to confront himself. Those biblically inclined will see the fall within the context of Adam and Eve, as Eve is tempted by the serpent. They fall from innocence as they are expelled from the Garden of Eden  - and obliged to put some clothes on. No doubt Camus will be invoking the book of Genesis but, within the context of a modern being, who can rely on God to judge an act good or bad? Clamence is not expelled; he chooses his own exile, and he is not a sinner in the eyes of God, but a weak individual who acknowledges this when his own eyes eventually rest on him unfavourably. When at the end of the book we discover that the person he is speaking to is also a lawyer, the novella seems to have created a mirror image, one between Jean-Baptiste and his interlocutor, all the better to propose that the book is less a confession in the religious sense, but an inquiry into how one possesses or loses faith in oneself. 

         Clamence loses it not because he lacks faith but because he had been practising, for years, bad faith, believing himself to be a better person than he was. In traditional faith a person needs to live up to God; in bad faith, a person needs to live up to themselves. In faith, the person follows more closely the commandments, in bad faith a person may or may not live with greater respect for traditional morality. But to start acting in good faith needs at least a reckoning with oneself. Consequently, Clamence moves from the sanctimonious to the self-lacerating, a reversal of his previous auto-appraisal but perhaps no more useful as the self-aggrandizing pity towards others becomes instead a self-pitying monologue. He hyperbolises his earlier bad faith without finding much of a resolution, which could itself be another form of bad faith. John Kaag says, “at its core, bad faith is a form of self-deception that attempts to hide the unruly remainders of human freedom in acceptable cultural roles. The classic example that Sartre gives is the Parisian waiter who is obviously just playing at serving patrons at a café: his motions are forced and exaggerated; he smiles too broadly and bows too deeply; he embraces a phoney role rather than a form of authentic personhood.” (Aeon)

       Girard, meanwhile, sees similarities between Camus and Clamence, well aware that he may fall into the horror of “biographical fallacy” but at the same time doesn’t want “…to evade the truly significant problems raised by literary creation.” (All Desire is a Desire for Being) One way of looking at this is seeing a conundrum the author wishes to pursue as readily as a story the writer wishes to tell. It may have been Sartre more than Camus who made much of bad faith, though it is an idea any loosely existentially-inclined figure is going to have to face. They cannot rely on the sort of morality found in scriptures, nor even on social contract or utilitarian models that accept the possible absence of God and find value in the social expectations and demands of collectives. The existentialist is faced with choices and must choose without falling back onto a broader claim than the personal. This is where feelings matter and how they interact with time to generate a deeper sense of responsibility than one initially claimed for a deed. It is also partly what makes existential choice complicated, and why it made sense that Sartre and Camus would seek to comprehend the problem not through logic but through aesthetics, through narratives which could highlight temporality and affect. To do or not to do, that is the question, but once having done it this may not be the end of it. Clamence walks away from the suicide attempt and feels fine, continues his work and believes himself to be an honourable man. Nobody witnessed his cowardice and no shame attached itself to the inaction. Yet there he is, a couple of years later hearing laughter and the moment returns it seems in another form. Nobody is laughing but it’s as if his mind is playing tricks on him as it becomes a disquieting incident that not only doesn’t have a witness -it doesn’t even have a reality. He has imagined the laughter, but on the next occasion the scorn of others is real, and thus the little man and the motorcycle. 

     What Camus explores is the problem of acting not chiefly or only as a moral being but as a temporal one, as someone who is layered by acts and deeds to become the person they happen to be. It wouldn’t be enough to act well or badly in the present, in the company or absence of others, we must act too with the awareness of what this act today will mean tomorrow, and how minor future deeds will echo back to major ones apparently easily assimilated. From a certain point of view, Clamence doesn’t act badly. Why should he get himself wet if a woman wants to take her life? Wouldn’t you then end up with a ruined suit and a person angry that their attempt to die has been curtailed? This could be argued, cynically no doubt, but with the right amount of humour, in a particularly cruel environment, and others may nod their heads sagely. But what if you don’t find yourself in that environment, and these environs include most importantly the thoughts going through your mind? Not only the ridicule of a humiliating instance haunts you, but also others that you didn’t only laugh off yet may have viewed as a source of pride: cheating on what quickly became an ex-friend’s wife; using women rather than serving them despite claiming they were on a pedestal. Clamence would see himself as more intelligent than anyone else, and there he is no longer the master of his own feelings, let alone other people’s. 

       Writing on the novel through Derrida, Kafka and questions of the law, Caroline Sheaffer-Jones says, “Camus describes the protagonist, who delivers himself in ‘a calculated confession’ but who, like modern man, cannot bear to be judged. This man’s rush to carry out his own trial is in fact in order better to judge others; he looks at himself in the mirror, which he finally holds up to others.” (Derrida Today) This may be true but more interesting is that nobody can easily escape judgement not just because of others but also because of the temporal complexity of the self. Sheaffer-Jones is chiefly focused on the law over the self, saying “the paradox is that one is always at once subject to the law and outside the law, on both sides of the limit, concurrently a doorkeeper and a countryman.” (Derrida Today) In some countries, this is very obviously the case and especially in those under or influenced by British law — Canada, Australia, Ireland and the US, while France since the French Revolution has had juries only for serious criminal cases. In such instances, in the Anglosphere and in major criminal trials in France, the individual is very much a subject of and subject to legal proceedings: potentially judge and victim. But Derrida proposes this on a level beyond pragmatics and Kafka becomes the exemplary figure for this abstraction. In the story, embedded in The Trial, the person keeps trying to gain entrance to the Law. Again and again, he tries, with the doorkeeper saying there is door after door he would need to pass through and each one more terrible than the next. The doorkeeper gives him a seat and the man sits there for many years and finally wonders why nobody else is waiting. The doorkeeper says that no one else could have gained entrance there as the door was made only for him, and now he will shut it. In our pragmatic take, the law is both man-made and judged by man. In Kafka’s the human is at the mercy of its unknowability. In The Fall, the law contains both the pragmatic and the unknowable, yet the latter isn’t a metaphysical abstraction but a psychologically complex approach to how events are processed within the context of guilt and shame. Much of Camus’ work has been preoccupied with the law: in The Outsider, Meursault stands accused under a combination of an arbitrary action and accumulated judgement, in The Plague, the character of Tarrou talks about his lawyer-father seeking the death penalty for one man and how Tarrou witnessed the execution, and then there is the essay ‘Reflections on the Guillotine’. But The Fall is about its internalisation as a man who believes he is a law unto himself, and at the same time an exemplary instance of it, finds that his self is more complicated than he might wish. The Fall can seem like The Outsider turned inside out: the earlier book is a first-person examination of a man’s exteriority, someone who has been found guilty by others. In The Fall, first-person Clamence is condemned by a self-reckoning. He gives up his business, moves to Amsterdam and garrulously explains all to his interlocutor.

      The book’s form is monologic all the better to try to understand the mechanism taking place that leads someone, who can assume innocence over a deed, becoming guilty without any new information. When someone’s guilt is uncovered it rests on a gun being found, a body discovered, a DNA test processed. New facts bear on the case, but Clamence is found guilty of an uncanny incident and a shameful episode. Instead of the chronology of actual circumstances, it is explored through the mind as Clamence speaks of the laughter he thinks he hears on the Pont des Arts, talks about the traffic anecdote and then speaks about what happened a couple of years before either of them: the woman’s death. It is as if Jean-Baptiste is trying to reconstruct his identity by reconstructing the mental arrangement of events that led to his downfall, with the accumulation of pride, in this instance, coming before a fall. He can no longer believe in himself or perhaps must accept that he needs a new self to believe. He is no longer a man functioning off self-denial but self-abnegation. Yet this might not be much of an improvement, since a hyperbolized approach to guilt can appear as supercilious as its absence. Clamence has told this story many times before: “it consists to begin with, as you know from experience, in indulging in public confession as often as possible. I accuse myself up hill and down dale. It's not hard, for now I have acquired a memory.” But he also says that he navigates skilfully, with many distinctions and digressions. “In short, I adapt my words to my listener and lead him to me one better. I mingle what concerns me and what concerns others. I choose the features we have in common…” 

      Instead of the innocent priest who receives a confession, Clamence is the guilty lawyer who insists on offering a disclosure but expects too that it will reveal, in the listener, perhaps, their bad faith. Meursault is the guilty man who has pride, while Clamence is the innocent one without it. He has been on the right side of the law and now condemns himself and who subsequently can condemn others within the nebulous. While Meursault accepts his destiny and will die having lived one way and not another, Clamence lives as though he wished he had lived differently, and his confession is the space between those two lives. Near the end of the book, he offers another detail about his existence, in some ways worse than the suicide attempt he ignored. In charge of distributing water amongst other prisoners, while captured by the Germans during WWII in Africa, Clamence says that he drank the water of a dying man, “…convincing myself that the others needed me more than this fellow who was going to die anyway and that I had a duty to keep myself alive for them.” The earlier life that managed time and again to practice self-preservation within the justificatory, becomes the monologue representing the accumulation of his bad faith. If Kierkegaard insisted that “life can only be understood backwards; but…it must be lived forwards” (Papers and Journals), how does one know in the present what the future will make of the past? Jean-Baptiste wasn’t greatly perturbed taking the other man’s water — he had a ready-made justification, going on to become the successful lawyer he describes later in time but earlier in the book.   

      If the novella is more than an ironic account of a man realising late in life he has lived badly, and offers embellished and amplified stories about that failure, it rests on complexity over irony. It isn’t so much letting he is without sin cast the first stone, but potentially that he who sins realises that he has gathered enough stones to pass for an incarcerated dwelling. He is a man who would not have avoided sinning because his disposition would have been unhappy with the deed; more that when his disposition starts to change the deeds are seen in a new context and become ineradicable — they have become the man’s identity through a combination of these past demeanours that could have seemed of little consequence when young and handsome, but increasingly take on a different hue as he no longer looks as he once did and has plenty time for reflection. This doesn’t mean he would act any differently. As he says, “I haven’t changed my way of life; I continue to love myself and to make use of others. Only, the confession my crimes allows me to be again lighter in heart and to taste a double enjoyment, first of my nature and secondly of a charming repentance.” From youthful and exuberant self-denial he has moved to ageing self-abasement, but Camus doesn’t suggest it is much of an improvement, though undeniably a different type of failure. 

          Girard reckons “…the confession of Clamence is Camus’ own, in a broad literary and spiritual sense,” saying later that “the world in which we live is one of perpetual judgement” and that Camus, with humour, addresses this fact. Perhaps. But equally, it is a book about the absence of judgement and its reappearance much more forcefully partly due to its earlier eschewal. This may often rest on the absence of a crime, as if guilt and shame without criminality leave space for certain acts (betrayals, lies and ruthless self-advancement) which ought to be judged, escaping judgement, only for the person themselves much later, dispositionally damaged, offering a vicious appraisal of the earlier event. At the beginning of the book, Clamence points out the absence of a painting on the wall in a bar, where a mark remains, and at the end he tells us more about this painting, which is in Clamence’s possession. It is the Just Judges by the Van Eycks — apposite given the book’s subject. But he also notes that “I always hope, in fact, that my interlocutor will be a policeman and that he will arrest me for the theft of the Just Judges", as if he can be held responsible for an actual crime even if the theft might seem weak next to his other offences. After all, “for the rest — am I right — nobody can arrest me?”  If Girard is correct that we all live in a state of perpetual judgement, then the best thing to do is not to escape punishment but instead to seek it — to commit a deed which can externalise the problem of guilt into a categorical act of criminality, one that can in turn lead to an act of punishment. Better this it seems than a life lived forward that creates perverse and terrible torments of constantly recollecting it backwards. This might be a paradox too far, but we might wonder if Meursault is finally a happier man than Clamence here. 

© Tony McKibbin