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Article Excerpt
Two features of Camus's La chute have received critical attention: its status as a long-delayed response to Jean-Paul Sartre's criticisms of The Rebel and the influence of Dante's Inferno. However, the extent to which these two features of La chute are interconnected and the way in which Camus's intertextual dialogue with Inferno is integral to that interconnection remains unexplored. This essay seeks to repair that omission.
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Albert Camus's last completed work, La chute (The Fall), has frequently been regarded as an earnest, yet tongue-in-cheek, response to the scathingly personal criticisms leveled at the Nobel-prize-winning author by his one-time friend and compatriot, Jean-Paul Sartre. In May of 1952, nearly one year after a chapter of L'homme revolte (The Rebel) was published in Sartre's journal, Les temps modernes, it was subjected to a harsh review by critic Francis Jeanson. Startled by the appearance of such extensive criticism in a publication edited by fellow intellectuals whom he also considered his friends, Camus replied to Jeanson: the result was a firefight between Sartre and Camus, publicly waged in the pages of Les temps modernes and not limited to politics, philosophy, and ideology. In fact, Sartre used the August 1952 issue of his journal not only to record his disagreements with his fellow existentialist, but also to announce the dissolution of their (admittedly tenuous) friendship. Sartre thus announced:
Notre amitie n'etait pas facile mais je la regretterai. Si vous la rompez aujourd'hui, c'est sans doute qu'elle devait se rompre. Beaucoup de choses nous rapprochaient, peu nous separaient. Mais ce peu etait encore trop: l'amitie, elle aussi, tend a devenir totalitaire; il faut l'accord en tout ou la brouille, et les sans- parti eux-memes se comportent en militants de partis imaginaires. [...] Je repondrai done: sans aucune colere mais, pour las premiere fois depuis que je vous connais, sans menagements. Un melange de suffisance sombre et de vulnerabilite a toujours decourage de vous dire des verites entieres. Le resultat c'est que vous etes devenu la proie d'une morne demesure qui masque vos difficultes interieures et que vous nommez, je crois, mesure mediterraneenne. Tot ou tard, quelqu'un vous l'eut dit: autant que ce soit moi. (90, 91)
Four years later, Camus would publish his last, and perhaps most complex and personal recit, La chute. Marking the end of a long period of writer's block, La chute "was quickly seen as a time bomb, a long-delayed reply to Sartre's August 1952 Temps modernes attack" (Lottman 593). Perhaps more important to Camus's sense of literary well-being, however, was the fact that "after [...] years of pained silence, it was a creative triumph, a victory of the spirit--simultaneously revenge, self-understanding, and a modern vision of damnation" (Aronson 200). Thus, as Olivier Todd suggests in Albert Camus: Une vie, "La Chute n'est pas une autobiographie. [...] Mais Camus fut-il jamais aussi profondement et subtilement autobiographique que derriere le masque de Clamence?" (637). Consequently, Todd concludes, "avec ce recit peut-etre le plus etincelant et accidentel de tous, Camus resume, survole et rassemble sa vie, lui donnant comme malgre lui, apres coup, une unite" (647).
Equally apparent to subsequent critics of the novel has been the influence of Dante's Inferno on its organizing structure and imagery: repeatedly marked by overt references to the first cantica of this fourteenth-century epic, La chute's monologue seems to represent an oblique, intertextual dialogue between Camus and Dante. Nevertheless, most scholars seem content to regard the references to Inferno in La chute as pedestrian observations and superficial invocations designed primarily to showcase the erudition of the novel's verbose and pompous protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Clamence.
And yet, the function of Dante's Inferno in Camus's La chute may be both more subtle and more sophisticated. It is hardly surprising that, in a novel that scrutinizes issues of judgment, guilt, exile, and indifference, Camus invokes the spectre of Dante's famous poem; in fact, his protagonist's pseudonym recalls the poet's birthplace and, like Dante, Jean-Baptiste Clamence tells his story while in exile. Moreover, in an entry written in one of his notebooks in 1944, a little over ten years prior to the publication of La chute, Camus identifies the overarching "meaning" of his oeuvre: "Sens de mon oeuvre: Tant d'hommes sont prives de la grace. Comment vivre sans la grace? II faut bien s'y mettre et faire ce que le Christianisme n'a jamais fait: s'occuper des damnes" (Carnets II 129-30).
After 1952, it would seem that this desire to "take care of the damned"--an impulse that is easily recognizable as the fundamental premise of Dante's Inferno--is curiously linked to the public rupture with Sartre: thus, in a journal entry written shortly after the Temps modernes controversy, Camus initially muses, "Temps modernes. Ils admettent le peche et refusent la grace. Soif du martyre" (Carnets III 62), and then, in the two brief entries that immediately follow this observation, he reflects upon the nature of "l'Enfer" or "Hell" itself: "L'enfer, c'est le paradis plus la mort" and "L'enfer est ici, a vivre. Seuls echappent ceux qui s'extraient de la vie" (62). Given that he is initially disposed to consider Sartre's attack in these terms, it is, perhaps, not surprising that, when he came to write his response--to detonate the "time-bomb" that was his "long-delayed reply" to Sartre--Camus would draw upon a text full of figures who, by definition, "admit sin and refuse grace" and who can trace their subsequent suffering and universal condemnation to precisely this attitude of defiance. The fact that the text of Dante's Inferno concerns itself with those who are deprived of "grace," and thus, constitutes an aesthetic and philosophical meditation on the self-proclaimed "meaning" of Camus's work as a whole, makes it a particularly relevant and provocative point of contrast for La chute, a text that reflects upon his career both as an artist and as a public figure. Ultimately, however, La chute's references to Dante's Inferno go beyond a mere duplication of its essential philosophical dilemmas and paradoxes: by reconfiguring its organizing imagery of bridges, crossing, and falling, Camus's recit offers a twentieth-century alternative to the version of Hell represented in the first cantica of Dante's Commedia--an intertextual exchange designed to probe the ethical implications of staying "middle of the road" and to exorcise the demons of (self-imposed) exile.
In Dante's Commedia, the problem of "beginnings" figures prominently in the poet's mind. As Teodolinda Barolini argues in The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante, the beginning of the journey that is Dante's Inferno "is distended and immaterialized to the point of becoming nonlocatable, a nonevent" (21);...
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