The Fall (12 page)
Authors: Albert Camus
All right, all right, I’ll be quiet; don’t get upset! Don’t take my emotional outbursts or my ravings too seriously. They are controlled. Say, now that you are going to talk to me about yourself, I shall find out whether or not one of the objectives of my absorbing confession is achieved. 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.” For the rest—am I right?—no one can arrest me. But as for that theft, it falls within the provisions of the law and I have arranged everything so as to make myself an accomplice: I am harboring that painting and showing it to whoever wants to see it. You would arrest me then; that would be a good beginning. Perhaps the rest would be taken care of subsequently; I would be decapitated, for instance, and I’d have no more fear of death; I’d be saved. Above the gathered crowd, you would hold up my still warm head, so that they could recognize themselves in it and I could again dominate—an exemplar. All would be
consummated; I should have brought to a close, unseen and unknown, my career as a false prophet crying in the wilderness and refusing to come forth.
But of course you are not a policeman; that would be too easy. What? Ah, I suspected as much, you see. That strange affection I felt for you had sense to it then. In Paris you practice the noble profession of lawyer! I sensed that we were of the same species. Are we not all alike, constantly talking and to no one, forever up against the same questions although we know the answers in advance? Then please tell me what happened to you one night on the quays of the Seine and how you managed never to risk your life. You yourself utter the words that for years have never ceased echoing through my nights and that I shall at last say through your mouth: “O young woman, throw yourself into the water again so that I may a second time have the chance of saving both of us!” A second time, eh, what a risky suggestion! Just suppose,
cher maître
, that we should be taken literally? We’d have to go through with it. Brr …! The water’s so cold! But let’s not worry! It’s too late now. It will always be too late. Fortunately!
Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957
Notebooks
1942–1951
(
Carnets,
janvier 1942–mars 1951
) 1965
Notebooks
1935–1942
(
Carnets,
mai 1935–février 1942
) 1963
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (
Actuelles
–a selection) 1961
The Possessed (
Les Possédés
) 1960
Caligula and Three Other Plays (
Caligula, Le Malentendu, L’Etat de siège, Les Justes
) 1958
Exile and the Kingdom (
L’Exil et le Royaume
) 1958
The Fall (
La Chute
) 1957
The Myth of Sisyphus (
Le Mythe de Sisyphe
) and Other Essays 1955
The Rebel (
L’Homme Révolté
) 1954
The Plague (
La Peste
) 1948
The Stranger (
L’Etranger
) 1946
A
LBERT
C
AMUS
was born in Algeria in 1913. He spent the early years of his life in North Africa, where he became a journalist, and from 1935 to 1938 he ran the Théâtre de l’Équipe, a company that produced plays by Malraux, Gide, Synge, Dostoyevsky, and others. During World War II he was one of the leading writers of the French Resistance and editor of
Combat
, an underground newspaper he helped found. His fiction, including
The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall
, and
Exile and the Kingdom
; his philosophical essays,
The Myth of Sisyphus
and
The Rebel
; and his plays have assured his preeminent position in modern letters. In 1957, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Upon his untimely death in a road accident in 1960, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “Camus could never cease to be one of the principal forces in our cultural domain, nor to represent, in his own way, the history of France and this century.”
Albert Camus
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
THE FIRST MAN
In
The First Man
Albert Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like Camus’ own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds, and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a father’s death yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria and the boy’s attachment to his nearly deaf-mute mother. The result is a moving journey through the lost landscape of youth that also discloses the wellsprings of Camus’ aesthetic powers and moral vision. Published thirty-five years after its discovery amid the wreckage of the car accident that killed its author,
The First Man
is the brilliant consummation of the life and work of one of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists.
Fiction/Literature
EXILE AND THE KINGDOM
From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society’s expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, the stories in
Exile and the Kingdom
are probing portraits of spiritual exile and man’s perpetual search for an inner kingdom in which to be reborn. They display Camus at the height of his powers.
Fiction/Literature
THE FALL
Mordant, brilliant, elegantly styled, The Fall is a novel of the conscience of modern man in the face of evil. In a seedy bar in Amsterdam, Clamence, an expatriate Frenchman, indulges in a calculated confession. He recalls his past life as a respected Parisian lawyer, a champion of noble causes, and, privately, a libertine—yet one apparently immune to judgment. As his narrative unfolds, ambiguities amass; every triumph reveals a failure, every motive a hidden treachery. The irony of his recital anticipates his downfall—and implicates us all.
Fiction/Literature
A HAPPY DEATH
In his first novel,
A Happy Death
, written when he was in his early twenties and retrieved from his private papers following his death in 1960, Albert Camus laid the foundation for the
The Stranger
, focusing in both works on an Algerian clerk who kills a man in cold blood. But he also revealed himself to an extent that he never did in his later fiction. For if
A Happy Death
is the study of a rule-bound being shattering the fetters of his existence, it is also a remarkably candid portrait of its author as a young man.
Fiction/Literature
THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS AND OTHER ESSAYS
One of the most influential works of this century,
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
is a crucial exposition of existential thought. Influenced by works such as
Don Juan
and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide: the question of living or not living in a universe devoid of order or meaning. With lyric eloquence, Albert Camus brilliantly posits a way out of despair, reaffirming the value of personal existence, and the possibility of life lived with dignity and authenticity.
Nonfiction/Literature
THE PLAGUE
A gripping tale of unrelieved horror, of survival and resilience, and of the ways in which humankind confronts death,
The Plague
is at once a masterfully crafted novel, eloquently understated and epic in scope, and a parable of ageless moral resonance profoundly relevant to our times. In Oran, a coastal town in North Africa, the plague begins as a series of portents, unheeded by the people. It gradually becomes an omnipresent reality, obliterating all traces of the past and driving its victims to almost unearthly extremes of suffering, madness, and compassion.
Fiction/Literature
THE REBEL
For Albert Camus, the urge to revolt is one of the “essential dimensions” of human nature, manifested in man’s timeless Promethean struggle against the conditions of his existence, as well as the popular uprisings against established orders throughout history. And yet, with an eye toward the French Revolution and its regicides and deicides, he shows how inevitably the course of revolution leads to tyranny. As old regimes throughout the world collapse,
The Rebel
resonates as an ardent, eloquent, and supremely rational voice of conscience for our tumultuous times.
Nonfiction/Literature
RESISTANCE, REBELLION, AND DEATH
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death
displays Camus’ rigorous moral intelligence addressing issues that range from colonial warfare in Algeria to the social cancer of capital punishment. But this stirring book is above all a reflection on the problem of freedom, and, as such, belongs in the same tradition as the works that gave Camus his reputation as the conscience of our century:
The Stranger, The Rebel
, and
The Myth of Sisyphus
.
Fiction/Literature
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