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Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality.
- Sales Rank: #33981 in Books
- Brand: Random House, Inc.
- Published on: 1991-05-07
- Released on: 1991-05-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.99" h x .41" w x 5.13" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 147 pages
- Vintage
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French
From the Inside Flap
Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality.
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
A Good Novel about "Bad Faith" "The Fall" is a short ...
By Robert Boyle
A Good Novel about "Bad Faith"
"The Fall" is a short book, written simply in language a high school student can understand, but it is not an easy book to read. For one, the main character is an "unreliable narrator" -- one must look past his egregious self-deception and intellectual dishonesty to see what is really going on. For another, understanding this book requires some versing in Existentialism (whether you agree with existentialist philosophy is not the issue; knowing its issues is). It also helps to see "The Fall" as the third tale in Camus' triptych: "The Plague", "The Stranger" and "The Fall" (which is his last written work). These three books explore different aspects of existential being: man against nature, man against his fellow man, man against himself. (familiar to all beginning literature students, but here they are given a sophsiticated twist). One may disagree with my following analysis, but I think interested readers bold enough to tackle "The Fall" will find it useful.
EXISTENTIALISM: This 20th century philosophy is still very controversial, but it has value as it addresses as no other philosophy does the "problem" of human being, of trying to make sense of an absurd world. We are not (merely) mechanical animals subject to scientific causal processes -- we have free will; yet we are not pure free spirits, able to do as we please -- we are subject to the travails of nature and our fellow humans, and our own frailties and contradictions.
There are key relevant premises in existentialism (I cannot hope to give a full account of existentialism here and will not try). One is that people are conscious and aware, and have attitudes (not merely objective sense-knowledge) towards things. The world and ourselves and others have meaning for us, and this meaning is largely of our own making. How you see the world will depend on what you think of things and believe in, what values you have and what matters to you and what you desire (or eschew). A fundamentalist Christian Republican, a gay socialist and a Muslim Kenyan will see the world differently, and act according to their respective world views.
The key premise (see Sartre, various essays and especially "Being and Nothingness") is our ability to respond freely to the "facticities" (matters of fact) of the world. There is no presumption that God has a 'plan' -- He may have, but that does not change the fact that we are free to follow it or choose to thwart it. Science may be a deterministic process, but we are in a very real sense "causes", and, as causes, we are capable of effecting how things will turn out to be. We can cut down forests or fed the poor, or get drunk or run a marathon as we choose. External forces may intervene -- the home you built may be destroyed by a tornado . . . and life is certainly not fair. (See the Book of Job, in which Job has everything torn from him, but he remains "his own man".) This is the key point: we cannot fully determine what life will dish out to us ("Man plans, and God laughs"), but we can always choose what we will do in response. Understanding this is the key to existentialist ethics: we may do what we like, but we can never say "I had no choice", or, more famously, "I was only following orders". You always have a choice, and if you follow orders (from God or your church elder or terrorist cell leader) that is *your* choice. The mistake many people make is in thinking that there must always be a *good* choice (i.e., making the assumption that life IS fair -- which it is not, though we do have the option and power to act fairly). (NB: John F Kennedy once said that when he took office as president that he would always do 'the right thing' and avoid doing 'the wrong thing', only to find (as in the Cuban Missile Crisis") that, alas, the choice was usually between doing this wrong thing and that wrong thing!)
"Bad Faith" is a concept critical to Camus' works. It is Sartre's term for a person's denial of his or her own free choice. Given a choice between obeying the Nazis or being killed, embezzling or going broke, lying or getting fired, put up with being oppressed and rioting or terrorizing, etc., people love to say by way of justification: "I had no choice". This is bad faith. In existentialist morality you may do whatever you choose, at the cost of having to take moral responsibilty for your choice. Thus one can argue that President Truman (on behalf of the USA) made the right (or wrong) choice in bombing Hiroshima, but one cannot say that he "had no choice" -- the decison was his and America's (in voting for him), and any blame (and any future nuclear decisions) are his and ours as well.
"THE PLAGUE": Briefly, this is a story of how people in a town in 1950s Algeria faced the onset of bubonic plague. The town is suddenly hit by plague, put under government quarantine, and the townspeople, who can neither escape nor protect themselves, must ride out this terrifying event. One man (a French tourist) is separated from his wife; he never sees her again; he is tragically the very last victim of the plague before it subsides. The point of the story is that he, and others, given the fact that they had no choice about falling into this situation, all have and make choices as to how they will respond to this catastrophe. Some are in denial, living as if they are immune, or fated to die. Some pray, others live in profligate indulgence. The tourist chooses to spend his last days helping the narrator (the town physician) treat and care for plague victims. In his final days he leads an exemplary life (if one accepts the notion of charity as a life-principle), but that is not the point; he does not do so because he "has to" -- he simply does what he does (always hoping he will live through this to see his wife again), and that makes him what he is. There is no "reward", conversely no "you are a chump, or an unlucky dog" judgment either. He simply chose to do what he did, and that is how he lived and how he died. He did not complain that life was unfair (as much as it was); he acted as he wanted to do, doing what he could with what he had.
"THE STRANGER": This is for many people a far more problematic book. Many readers judge the tourist of "The Plague" as good, a hero, because his choice conforms to their *own* morality. We all tend to judge people as "things like us" (friends) or not (i.e., enemies). This makes sense if you feel that your morals are how we are all fated to live (the Nazis, and ISIS feel this way, as do many people of any major faith or politics); but per existentialism the individual person (or group) is not determined (morally or otherwise) to be what someone else expects them to be. *I* do not determine *your* being -- that would be bad faith -- I may educate or advise or coerce you, but your being is your responsibility. This moral freedom upsets some people; they want to be told what they "should" do, when no such orders are forthcoming. Sartre wryly notes: "we are *condemned* to be free".
In "The Stranger", Mersault is a man who kills another man in a moment of anger, is brought to trial, and the issue is not whether he is guilty of the murder (he is) or whether he is legally justified (he is not) but how he should *feel* about his impulsive and unjust act. The conventional view is that he should show remorse, and repent and ask forgiveness. He does not, even when doing so (which would be insincere) would impress the court and mitigate his sentence. In fact he does not know how he feels. He is not an openly emotionally expressive or introspective man. (At the start of the story he is at his mother's funeral: "Maman died today . . ." and does not cry at the funeral parlor -- this is taken as "evidence" that he is a moral reprobate: he does not act "as he should". Ultimately, he is found guilty of murder because he did not cry at his mother's funeral; we are all "supposed" to act in a certain way no matter what; Mersault will not play along and "fake" social sentiment, and society is repulsed by this flouting of social conventions.
It is hard to like Mersault, yet there is an underlying tone of horror about a society that will condemn a man to death for his absence of *feelings*. Mersault is an existentialist hero (albeit an odd one) for being true to his being. We may be tempted to fault him for this: why not just "pay the two dollars" (to quote a line from an old vaudeville sketch). It is normal, even proper to fake social proprieties; it is a form of social control and obedience. Yet in that era (the 1940-50s) people toed the line with the Nazis, or the Soviets or in America the McCarthyites or other "mob" mentalities for the sake of conformity and safety, at the cost of supporting abominal social immorality. (Sartre hated his fellow Frenchmen for letting the Nazis cart French Jews off to the death camps with not as much as a word of protest.) For all his quirks, Mersault is an exemplary existientialist. We may fault him for his act of murder, but it does not seem right to fault him for his sincerity and authenticity.
"THE FALL": The title refers to a suicide who falls off a bridge overpass (she drowns), but this is not her story. The story is about the sole witness to this event, a cocky, nasty, self-assured bossy aloof man lacking any of Mersault's better qualities. At first glance the reader of "The Fall" is likely to think that the main character, a lawyer named Clamence (aka "clemency" -- "mercy or charity"), is another moral "maverick" like Mersault, and that Camus will be churning out yet another "loner against the system" story, but this is not the case. We see something new here.
Unlike Mersault, Clamence is guilty of bad faith. The trick for the reader is to see how this is the case. Clamence is a thoroughly unreliable narrator. A successful Parisian defense lawyer, he hangs out alone at a bar in a seedy section of Amsterdam and spends his nights seducing people into thinking he is a Mersulat -- morally Above It All. In his monologue, he sneeringly derides all of the moral chumps who kowtow to the social norm, and we are lead (at first) to believe he is sincerely unaffected by social norms -- a true moral iconoclast. But as the story of his life unfolds, he inexorably drifts back to the night the girl jumped off the bridge, and the fact that he did not intercede to save her. In the end it is revealed that this ugly fact about himself torments him. He cannot admit this to himself, and thus cannot forgive or exonerate himself or atone for his act, or even accpet (as Mersault might have) the fact of his act; he is not so tough after all, and thoroughly a man of bad faith, so he suffers.
This simple story is rich in its unfolding. (Why if he is a successful lawyer, is he hanging out alone in this Algiers bar? As the Wikipedia article on this book (which I highly recommend although I do not agree with all of its conclusions) points out, the bar and surrounding town resembles a concentric circle of hell in Dante's "Inferno" -- in this circle Clamence does penence for his sins.) Unfolding and cracking the "unreliable narrator" puzzle is one of the joys of reading this book -- it takes work, yes, but it has its definite rewards.
The larger question this book addresses is this: people who learn about Existentialsm often are repelled by its apparant (but not actual) "amorality", and demand: if you may do as you choose, then where are the moral limits? Doesn't existentialism's laissez-faire moral code sanction the Nazis, or more recemntly Putin, or ISIS, and any wanton reprobate? The answer to the question (a perfectly legitimate one, and often not answered well by profesional existentialist philsophers) is NO, and here is why. The downside of freedom is that you must live (as an individual or as a group) with the consequences of your acts. You may do as you please, but you may not avoid responsibility for the results. Cumulatively, what you do becomes what you are. (As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in "Mother Night" (about an American who goes under "deep cover" in the Nazi regime, only to be tried afterwards by the Israelis for war atrocities) "be very careful what you pretend to be, for you may one day wake up to find out that this is what you really are".)
The reality is, says the existentialist, that we are able to do what we please, because we are human (to deny this is bad faith; we are not moral puppets). The catch is that we make ourselves what we are by what we choose to do (to deny this is also bad faith). When we accept "God's law", or human constitutions or cultural values, gang creeds or our own personal rules, or live as a complete iconoclast or wanton, we are fully responsibile for our acts. To our credit, or discredit, our acts make us what we are. Clamence may reject all social and moral standards, but he still suffers for his arrogance, for he has a conscience (existentialists acknowledge that some people don't, and that society must deal with this "facticity" as with all others) that does not let him sleep at night.
I highly recommend the reader of "The Fall' to briefly review any short encyclopedia of philosophy (such as the Stanford online E of Phil) article on existentilism, and then read "The Plague", and then "The Stranger", first. This will make "The Fall" far easier to grasp and appreciate.
As I said, it is not an easy book, but it is a great book, rich in its complexity and its theses about human nature. (NB: some people reject existentialism as immoral and even "un-Christian" (or un-Jewish, un-Muslim, un-Buddhist, etc.). In fact there is a branch of religious philosophy -- Christian existentialism (and there are Jewish and Muslim couterparts) -- that sees both free will and God's grace in the context of the exasperatingly unrestrained freedom we have to be what we are. The story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, the Book of Job, the story of Jepthah (a tale of bad faith, found in Judges, as I recall), and other Biblical passages are deeply rooted in existentialist thought. Fundamentalist religion tends to sweep this problem under the rug with the dictum "it is all God's will, God's plan", ignoring the fact that the very texts they hold to be sacred raise the "existential problem" as a burden we humans must face (Muslims call it "jihad" (struggle); Jews acknowledge it in the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel (in his odd dream), and Christians have many examples of the "trials" of been a Christian. Philosopher Soren Kierkegard, a devout Lutheran wrote an entire book: "Fear and Trembling" on the dilemma raised yet not answered!) by the story of the Sacrifice of Abraham.)
Whatever your own world view, the Camus trilogy is thoughtful and provocative, and well worth the time to read.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
I strongly recommend that you read this book!
By avataress
This book is truly great to me although I've said most of the books I've read are great because I saw almost every person I've ever known written about in this book! I've read this book several times and have given at least one copy away. The only other book to match it in describing almost every person I've ever known my whole life is Toni Morrison's book entitled, The Bluest Eye. I would strongly recommend that you read both these books regardless of what race or nationality you may be! They're for all time! Both by Nobel Prize Winners, too!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
trip to self realization gone wrong.
By Wicho
Great essay on the vanity embedded at the core of the human and how even after a very thorough trip of self discovery a person can still manage to put himself before others as a means of self idealization.... I realized I am rotten, but having the realization makes me better than you who have not even realized it....
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