CONFESSIONS OF A VIRTUE SIGNALER

REREADING ALBERT CAMUS' THE FALL

                                    

Narcissists who are also their own worst critics and burn to share their secrets with perfect strangers are rare in life. I’m not sure I’ve ever met one. I’ve certainly never met one on the Internet. Moral crusaders on Twitter who sally forth to challenge bigotry and backwardness don’t turn and out themselves as hypocrites by publishing ugly jottings from their journals. Proud homeowners who parade their rooms on Instagram don’t also post photos of their exhausted maids. People online who cherish being seen doing good and looking good, calibrating their words and images to maximize “likes” and “upvotes” and such encouragements, tend never to get real about their acts, perhaps because most of them don’t know they’re acting and the introspective few who do face web-wide ruin if they admit it. Nor do they dare expose themselves in private, because there is no private realm these days, only the realm of the not-quite-yet online. 

Things were different in the 1950s, when Albert Camus wrote his great short novel The Fall and hushed conversations on dark and damning matters could be counted on to stay hushed. It was still a world of lonesome intimacies, of heart-to-heart talks that only God could hear -- assuming, of course, that God was there and further assuming that he listened, both of which possibilities seemed doubtful given what had just happened in the war. The Amsterdam barroom where The Fall is set, dim and seedy and hidden in the mist, lies not far from the city’s Jewish quarter -- its historic Jewish quarter. Its traditional residents are gone, killed by the schemes of strutting secret keepers whose orderly outsides masked savage insides. Their masks finally slipped, but alas not soon enough, and removing them required force. 

One might call The Fall, in contemporary terms, The Confessions of a Virtue Signaler. Its narrator, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, is a broken-down criminal lawyer and ladies’ man who fled his home city of Paris, where he was once esteemed for his good character by friends and colleagues who didn’t fully know him and may not have wished to be fully known themselves, for the obscurity of the foggy seaside. He tells his story to an unnamed man whose luck was to sit down beside him on the next barstool and who seldom gets a word in edgewise, much like a reader of a novel but unlike a reader on the internet, where we’re expected to “interact,” speak up, and compete for attention with the main event. The silence of this patient reader-confessor is another telling sign of how much the network has changed our social selves. The listener desists in interrupting out of some old-world code of etiquette that feels mysterious and quaint now. His mighty attention span is also impressive, something we now have to pay for in our therapists. Yet this fellow gives away his receptivity, politely accepting a couple of free drinks but otherwise making no demands. No wonder ours isn’t an age of coming clean. No one has the time to lend an ear.

Clamence was once a “giver,” as we now put it. He specialized in defending luckless clients whose purses were empty and cases grim. Widows. Wastrels. People on the margins. He came from a privileged background and he knew it. He he also made sure that others knew it by placing himself in the service of his inferiors, though he would never call them that. His altruism was egotism inverted. He stooped to conquer, to show his height. He liked helping blind people across the street – indeed he rushed to do so, he admits, brushing other Samaritans aside – and once he’d done them this favor, he’d tip his hat to them. Being blind, they couldn’t see this gesture, but others noticed, of course, and that’s what mattered. “After I playing my part, I took the bow. Not bad, eh?” If he were an American today, he might have stuck a lawn sign in his yard advertising his cosmopolitan tolerance. Though maybe not; too obvious. The old Clamence was cunning in his mercies, shrugging them off when they drew recognition. The least I could do. You would have done the same. I try, but I assure you I’m no saint. Conspicuous saintliness, he understood in a manner that we seem to be forgetting, invites suspicion. One should act humble the moment it’s observed. 

This is how skilled seducers think, advancing and withdrawing with perfect timing, and Clamence in his heyday was one of those as well. Much of his self-accusatory monologue describes his tactics for winning love, which, once he won it, invariably bored him and stirred him to go back on the hunt. I happened to meet once the author of a book on so-called “pick-up artists.” He told me The Fall was a playbook for their tribe and Clamence their literary hero. The cynical essence of his technique is keeping the target off balance. The champion charmer must also play the jerk. “As a result of not being romantic, I gave romance something to work on,” Clamence reveals. “Our feminine friends have in common with Bonaparte the belief that they can succeed where everyone else has failed.” Also crucial to his douche bag creed is cultivating emotional inequality. Coax the object of desire to show her cards but always keep yours close. “I maintained secrecy, knowing that is always better to go to bed with a mystery.” Cruel truth. If Clamence in his Parisian prime had kept a social media account it would have consisted, very likely, of links to other folks’ Go Fund Mes, quotes from enlightened op-eds in the best papers, and philosophical musings on the law.  But it would have been light on personal stuff. No lists of food allergies, no grooming secrets, no health complaints. No pets. 

But that was the former Clamence, before he broke. Before he cancelled himself out of contempt for his own deceptions and cowardice. He always knew deep down he was a monster, his selflessness a gambit to gain applause, his love for the law that of one who feels above it but enjoys how tightly it binds other, but then a came a crisis that forced him to confess this, night after night, to stranger after stranger, compulsively, unendingly. He was tested one night on a bridge across the Seine – a test of his courage and moral reflexes that he disastrously failed, though no one was around to see it. (To learn the details, read the book.) He became what he calls a “judge-penitent” afterward, condemning himself to the limbo of death row while postponing a cathartic execution. 

If you wonder what existentialism means, at least as Camus defined it, there it is: guilt without the prospect of relief, not in this world, and there is no other. It’s a misery to be endured not healed, and Clamence, not quite cured of his narcissistic tendencies, endures it by transmitting it to others, telling his story with such infectious candor that they behold in it their own hypocrisy. Camus’s Clamence is a virtue devastator operating out of sight, offline, incrementally, at the speed of literature. His goal is not make others feel his pain – the current motive for most confessions – but to them make them feel their own more keenly. He comes on like a friend, but he’s actually a stalker. Camus, who wore a trench coat after Bogart and also held his cigarettes like Bogart, was a sort of film noir intellectual. His ideas tend to lurk in the alleys of the mind, elusive, haunting, forever on our trail.

They track us still. Our egos are enormous and travel swiftly, spreading and multiplying across the network, but Clamence, Camus’ assassin of pretensions, is shadowing us, and eventually he’ll catch us. He’ll catch us in a weak moment, with our guards down, and maybe our pants down, too. We’ll stand exposed. And who knows, it may feel like freedom when we do. 

It’s a form of imprisonment, having to look good, even for those who believe they really are.