It’s such a pleasure to be visited by friends you haven’t seen for years.
We’ve known Christiane and Jean, French friends who live near Marseille, for twenty years or so, though we hadn’t seen them for ages. With good friends like these, though, when you meet up again, it’s as though you’d never been apart. The conversation virtually picks up where you’d left it off.
One of the subjects that came up during this visit was the novelist and philosopher Albert Camus. You know, the man best known for his short but powerful novel, The Outsider. I recently re-read one of his books, The Plague, but after listening to Jean’s tribute to his remarkable compatriot, I felt it was time to go back to another I’d liked while I was studying French literature, oh, way back there in prehistory.
That novel was The Fall. The Outsider and The Plague are set in Camus’s native Algeria, with the Mediterranean lapping at its shores. Sea bathing is one of the central symbols of the novels, whether you stay out – refusing communion with nature – or go in – communing with nature and other people (in The Plague, a night swim by the two protagonists is a key moment).
The Fall is different. It’s set in Amsterdam and the sea is grey and cold. Far from being an inviting place for communion, it’s alien, unattractive, awash with “the bitter water of my baptism”. The book is unusual, as it’s a second person narrative: all those references to ‘you’ can feel like a direct reference to us, the readers. And it’s about how we create barriers between ourselves and the rest of mankind, about cold alienation from other people, about a deliberate indifference or even hostility towards the possibility of communion.
But then, while I was re-reading the novel, or rather listening to the audible version, one passage struck me particularly hard.
The truth is that every intelligent man, as you well know, dreams of being a gangster and ruling over society by violence alone. Since that isn’t as easy as reading specialist novels might lead you to believe, one generally turns to politics and runs towards the cruellest of the parties.
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| Orwell (left) and Camus Outstanding writers with more than that in common |
‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’
Winston thought.
‘By making him suffer,’ he said.
‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain…
Later, the interrogator concludes:
There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. … But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.’
Not a feel-good vision of the future, but then as anyone knows who’s read 1984, it’s nobody’s idea of a feel-good book.
What struck me most, however, was the way that it presents, in a more extensive form, the same vision of the world that the speaker in Camus’ The Fall describes. There is a certain kind of man who seeks power through violence, who wants to plant a boot on a human face. It’s a pretty bleak view of power and how it’s likely to be used, and it seems to be shared by these two novelists.
That’s not surprising in writers who’d not that long before emerged from the stress of particularly vicious wars.
Orwell had served for a time in the Spanish Civil War, an experience he chronicles compellingly in Homage to Catalonia. Then he’d lived through the Second World War in Britain.
Camus had lived through the Nazi occupation of France. He edited, at huge danger to himself, the resistance newspaper Combat. Despite Gestapo oppression, at its height the paper was printing nearly 200,000 copies daily.
1984 was published in 1949. The Fall came out just seven years later.
Both authors were tubercular. Both died depressingly young, coincidentally both at 46 years of age. In Orwell’s case, it was the TB that killed him; Camus died in a still more senseless way, in a car accident.
War, tuberculosis, the totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union (which was continuing) and in Germany (only recently defeated) might seem like the source of the shared bleakness of the books. That’s a conclusion too far, since there is a far more optimistic tone in Camus’s work overall: he does see an alternative attitude to life that can counteract the inclination to stamp a boot on a human face. The Fall is a denunciation of a man who represents the antithesis of the pursuit of communion Camus promotes in the other novels.
In any case, I’m not sure that the negativity both books portray merely reflects the times in which they were written. I mean, have the overthrow of Nazi Germany and the collapse of Soviet Russia, really dealt a massive, potentially fatal, blow to the regimes that want to crush through violence?
Vladimir Putin seems to embody the attitudes of the interrogator in Orwell’s 1984. What can Putin hope for in his war on Ukraine? He can’t be after money. He’s spent years corruptly amassing a huge personal fortune, but that’s surely just a safety net, in case he ever has to get out, isn’t it? While he stays in power, he can have anything he would otherwise have to buy, simply by announcing his desire. Not just his needs but his wants are fully catered for. The cruelty of his regime is surely just the naked exercise of power. He can’t think it’s good for anyone inside or outside Russia.
And what about Donald Trump? When he talked recently about the need to suspend items of the US constitution to enable him to continue to exercise power, what was he expressing but the would-be autocrat’s resentment at being denied the right to rule as his will dictates?
Camus and Orwell were superb authors. That’s a good enough reason to read these books. We should, however, avoid thinking that they’re addressed only to their contemporaries.
They express warnings we’d do well to heed today.
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