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Sport 29: Spring 2002
One must be sincere. Sincere at any price, even to our own detriment12
One must be sincere. Sincere at any price, even to our own detriment12
‘Above all do not believe your friends when they ask you to be sincere with them … If you should find yourself in this situation, do not hesitate: promise to be truthful and lie as best you can.’13 So says the former Parisian lawyer, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, whose revelatory monologue is Albert Camus' short novel The Fall (La Chute). While awaiting trial, Romand copied eight pages of excerpts from the book, including the sentence above, and sent them from prison to a friend,14 saying that they expressed his thoughts very well.
‘Perhaps French murderers are exceptionally better read than ours,’ writes American Laura Miller, ‘or perhaps 18 years of killing time while you're pretending to be at the office gives a guy lots of time to catch up on the classics.’15 Whichever is the case, Romand's quoting from the novel is deeply unsettling.
As an element of his endless self-mythologising, Romand's attempt to align himself with a canonical figure in French literature and thought—not to mention a hero of the French Resistance—is page 219 abhorrent. It is as if the suave moral vacuum who is the protagonist of The Fall has stepped from its pages and declared: yes, that Camus was a clever fellow all right, he has struck the nail quite on the head. Camus wrote an indictment: Romand found a résumé.16
The Fall begins in an Amsterdam bar. Its protagonist and narrator, ‘judge-penitent’ Jean-Baptiste Clamence, was once, by his own account, a man of no ordinary virtue. Seeing a blind person on the street he would race, literally sprint, to their assistance. Giving alms was his greatest pleasure, particularly when he could do so secretly. He acted pro-bono for widows and orphans, evading their thanks and pooh-poohing the praise of his peers.
Eventually Clamence reveals that these were the actions of a man for whom all was a show, a performance in which he was both actor and audience. ‘In a way, moreover,’ he remarks, ‘I believed what I said … it is not surprising that my partners likewise began to tread the boards enthusiastically.’17
His decision not to rescue a woman who has jumped into the Seine throws Clamence off his stride. His life of disingenuous virtue begins to collapse and he becomes subject to a secret terror: ‘A ridiculous fear pursued me, in fact: one could die without having confessed all one's lies.’18
Published in the 1950s, The Fall is widely read as a condemnation of those who ‘allowed’ the holocaust to happen. An over-simplified reading might be that just as Clamence ignores the cries from the river, Europe ignored the cries from the camps, and so lost the illusion of its humanity.
I read it as a more universal tale, and see Clamence's failure as one page 220 of sincerity. He is simply not genuine, not in his virtue, his vice, nor his narrativising of the journey from one to the other. The Fall is a condemnation of a man who is willfully alienated not from society, but from himself. His alienation is shown by Camus not as a misfortune, a failure of will, or even a mental illness, but as a moral crime for which there can be no genuine confession, and hence no forgiveness.
Romand, then, has not merely missed the point of the novel, he is himself the living embodiment of the moral insincerity that so horrified Camus. Indeed, Romand is worse than Clamence, for he is both the horror itself, and the moral coward who turns away from the horror. One feels that The Fall should be an anathema to Romand, it should sizzle in his hands. Like holy water to a vampire it should be his nemesis. Instead, it is his apologia.