hypocrisy
Hypocrisy is the central psychological and moral condition of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the narrator of Albert Camus's The Fall. It is not merely a personal failing but the structural principle of his entire existence—a systematic duplicity that allows him to appear virtuous while serving his own vanity, power, and self-love. Clamence's eventual self-awareness of this hypocrisy, triggered by a laugh on the Pont des Arts and the memory of a woman's suicide, shatters his complacency and drives him to invent the profession of "judge-penitent," a role that transforms his hypocrisy into a method for dominating others.
The Architecture of Duplicity
Clamence's hypocrisy is built into the very fabric of his daily life. He describes himself as having "a double face, a charming Janus," with the motto "Don't rely on it" . His virtues are systematically inverted: "modesty helped me to shine, humility to conquer, and virtue to oppress" . He used to wage war by peaceful means and achieve through disinterested means everything he desired. The surface of all his virtues had a less imposing reverse side. For instance, he loved to help blind people cross streets, rushing forward to snatch them from any solicitude but his own, leading them gently but firmly to the refuge of the other sidewalk, where they would separate with mutual emotion . Yet he later admits that he used to spit daily in the face of all the blind, courteously and with a solidarity charged with emotion . His professional life was equally duplicitous: he defended noble murderers and felt an instinctive scorn for judges in general, yet he earned his living by carrying on a dialogue with people he scorned . He set himself above the judge whom he judged in turn, above the defendant whom he forced to gratitude, living with impunity, concerned in no judgment, somewhere in the flies like those gods brought down by machinery to transfigure the action .
The Collapse of the Hypocritical Self
The turning point comes on the Pont des Arts, where Clamence hears a laugh behind him that seems to come from nowhere . This laugh, which he later realizes had never ceased, carried by the river to the waters of the Channel and across the ocean, waiting for him until the day he encountered it , shatters his self-satisfaction. He begins to see that his fellows ceased to be the respectful public to which he was accustomed; the circle of which he was the center broke and they lined up in a row as on the judge's bench . He realized that there was something to judge in him, and that there was in them an irresistible vocation for judgment. The whole universe then began to laugh at him . This awareness forces him to confront the fundamental duplicity of the human being. He discovers that he was always bursting with vanity, that "I, I, I" is the refrain of his whole life . He had dreamed of being a complete man who managed to make himself respected in his person as well as in his profession—half Cerdan, half de Gaulle—but after being struck in public without reacting, it was no longer possible for him to cherish that fine picture of himself . He learned that he was on the side of the guilty, the accused, only in exactly so far as their crime caused him no harm; when he was threatened, he became not only a judge in turn but even more: an irascible master who wanted to strike down the offender and get him on his knees .
The Memory of the Drowning Woman
The deepest source of Clamence's hypocrisy is revealed in his memory of a young woman's suicide on the Pont Royal. One night in November, two or three years before the evening when he thought he heard laughter behind him, he was returning to the Left Bank and passed behind a slim young woman dressed in black, leaning over the railing and seeming to stare at the river . The back of her neck, cool and damp between her dark hair and coat collar, stirred him, but he went on after a moment's hesitation. At the end of the bridge he heard the sound of a body striking the water, then a cry repeated several times going downstream, then silence. He wanted to run and yet didn't stir; he felt an irresistible weakness steal over him. He told himself that he had to be quick, but he thought "Too late, too far..." or something of the sort. He stood motionless, listening, then slowly under the rain he went away. He informed no one . This failure to act—to save a drowning woman—becomes the unacknowledged guilt that his entire hypocritical edifice was built to conceal. Years later, on an ocean liner, he perceived a black speck on the steel-gray ocean and thought at once of a drowning person, realizing that that cry had never ceased and had waited for him there .
The Judge-Penitent as Institutionalized Hypocrisy
Clamence's response to his discovery of his own hypocrisy is not to abandon it but to perfect it into a system. He becomes a judge-penitent, a profession that consists in indulging in public confession as often as possible, accusing himself up and down, but not crudely—he navigates skillfully, multiplying distinctions and digressions, adapting his words to his listener and leading him to go him one better . He mingles what concerns him and what concerns others, choosing the features they have in common, the failings they share, and constructs a portrait which is the image of all and of no one—a mask, like those carnival masks which are both lifelike and stylized, so that they make people say: "Why, surely I've met him!" . When the portrait is finished, he shows it with great sorrow: "This, alas, is what I am!" But at the same time the portrait he holds out to his contemporaries becomes a mirror . The more he accuses himself, the more he has a right to judge others; he provokes them into judging themselves, which relieves him of that much of the burden . He has accepted duplicity instead of being upset about it, settled into it, and found there the comfort he was looking for throughout life . He permits himself everything again, and without the laughter this time; he continues to love himself and to make use of others, but the confession of his crimes allows him to begin again lighter in heart and to taste a double enjoyment, first of his nature and secondly of a charming repentance .
The Universalization of Guilt
Clamence's hypocrisy ultimately becomes a tool for universal condemnation. He denies the good intention, the respectable mistake, the indiscretion, the extenuating circumstance; with him there is no giving of absolution or blessing . Everything is simply totted up. He is for any theory that refuses to grant man innocence and for any practice that treats him as guilty. He sees himself as an enlightened advocate of slavery. The keenest of human torments, he declares, is to be judged without a law . Yet he himself has become a law unto himself, a false prophet crying in the wilderness, an empty prophet for shabby times, Elijah without a messiah, choked with fever and alcohol, his back up against a moldy door, his finger raised toward a threatening sky, showering imprecations on lawless men who cannot endure any judgment . He sits enthroned among his bad angels at the summit of the Dutch heaven and watches ascending toward him the multitude of the Last Judgment; he pities without absolving, understands without forgiving, and above all feels at last that he is being adored . His hypocrisy has become a throne.
