The last circle

In Albert Camus's The Fall, the last circle is the central geographical and metaphysical metaphor through which Jean-Baptiste Clamence frames his self-appointed role as judge-penitent. He explicitly identifies Amsterdam's concentric canals with the circles of hell, declaring that his city is "the last circle" — a middle-class hell, peopled with bad dreams, where life and its crimes become denser and darker as one penetrates inward. Clamence insists that "the center of things is here, although we stand at the tip of the continent," transforming a mundane Dutch port into the spiritual and moral terminus of Europe.

The Geography of the Last Circle

Clamence's Amsterdam is a landscape of negation. He describes the Zuider Zee as a "dead sea, or almost," with flat shores lost in fog, where there is "no saying where it begins or ends." The sea is the color of a weak lye-solution, the sky reflects the colorless waters, and everything is horizontal, without relief. "Is it not universal obliteration, everlasting nothingness made visible?" he asks. The city's canals, which he walks beside at night, are stagnant waters whose breath he forces himself to admire. The sky above Holland is filled with millions of invisible doves that wheel all year round, looking down, but finding "never a head on which to light." This is a soggy hell, a place where the newspaper readers and the fornicators of Europe come from the four corners of the continent, stop facing the inner sea on the drab strand, listen to the foghorns, vainly try to make out silhouettes of boats in the fog, then turn back over the canals and go home through the rain. Chilled to the bone, they ask for gin at Mexico City, where Clamence waits for them.

The Vertical Escape and the Horizontal Trap

The last circle is defined by its opposition to everything Clamence once loved. He was a man of heights, who felt comfortable only in lofty places — the top deck of a boat, a natural balcony fifteen hundred feet above the sea, the passes and plateaus of mountains. He preferred the bus to the subway, open carriages to taxis, terraces to closed-in places. He had a special loathing for speleologists and their underground exploits. His profession as a lawyer set him above the judge and the defendant, living aloft "like those gods that are brought down by machinery from time to time to transfigure the action." In the last circle, however, there is no elevation. The landscape is entirely horizontal: the gray dike on the right, the livid beach at the feet, the sea the color of weak lye-solution, the vast sky reflecting the colorless waters. "Everything horizontal, no relief; space is colorless, and life dead." The only verticality is the fog, compounded of neon, gin, and mint, in which the Dutch have their heads, dreaming of Java and the distant isle. Clamence himself, in his final state, lies in bed with a fever, treating it with gin, in a bare room that is like a coffin.

The Inhabitants of the Last Circle

The last circle is populated by the guilty who have come to the end of their journey. Clamence describes the Dutch as "double" — they are here and elsewhere, their heads in copper-colored clouds, dreaming, cycling in circles, praying like somnambulists in the fog's gilded incense. They have ceased to be here; they have gone thousands of miles away, toward Java, the distant isle, praying to grimacing gods of Indonesia. These are the people who, after listening to the foghorns, turn back over the canals and go home through the rain, chilled to the bone, to ask for gin at Mexico City. Clamence himself lives in the Jewish quarter, on the site of one of the greatest crimes in history — the deportation and assassination of seventy-five thousand Jews. He admires the "diligence, that methodical patience" of the cleanup, and it helps him understand the ape's distrust. The last circle is thus a place where the historical crimes of the twentieth century converge with the personal guilt of every individual.

The Last Circle as the Site of Judgment

It is in the last circle that Clamence practices his profession of judge-penitent. He has set up his office in a bar in the sailors' quarter, Mexico City, where he lies in wait for the bourgeois, especially the straying bourgeois. From them he draws his subtlest sounds, like a virtuoso with a rare violin. He accuses himself up and down, constructing a portrait which is the image of all and of no one, a mask that becomes a mirror. "Covered with ashes, tearing my hair, my face scored by clawing, but with piercing eyes, I stand before all humanity recapitulating my shames," he says. The more he accuses himself, the more he has the right to judge others. He sits enthroned among his bad angels at the summit of the Dutch heaven, watching the multitude of the Last Judgment ascend toward him from the fogs and the water. He pities without absolving, understands without forgiving, and feels at last that he is being adored. The last circle is thus not merely a place of punishment but the stage for Clamence's final performance, where he dominates forever, having found a height to which he is the only one to climb.

The Significance of the Last Circle

The last circle is the culmination of Clamence's spatial and moral cosmology. It is the place where the vertical aspirations of his former life — the summits, the upper decks, the natural balconies — are replaced by a horizontal, fog-bound, waterlogged existence. It is the site of the little-ease, the dungeon cell where one can neither stand nor lie down, and where the condemned man learns that he is guilty. It is also the place where Clamence, having accepted duplicity instead of being upset about it, has found the happiness that suits him. He permits himself everything again, and without the laughter this time. The last circle is the final circle of a hell that is not theological but human, a hell of judgment without law, where every man testifies to the crime of all the others, and where the Last Judgment takes place every day.