Coetzee and Camus present the precarious predicament of human in modern age which presents a conflict between the individual and history, judge and the victim and civilization and so called barbarianism .
Camus’s novel The Fall was an impressive monologue of Clamence, a Parisian lawyer about guilt, alienation and hypocrisy experienced by the middle class in the ‘bourgeois hell ‘ of Amsterdam. It is written in deceptively simple language which dissects the loneliness of the hero modeled on the writer and Sartre . Camus has experienced intense loneliness after the publication of the Rebel when the intellectual left including Sartre isolated him.
In Waiting For The Barbarians written by Coetzee, the magistrate of a border town sees the torment of innocents in the name of barbarians in the hands of the military representatives of the Empire. When he rescues a barbarian girl who he loves and helps her reunite with her people, he is sent to jail as a traitor , suffers humiliation and gradually understands the nature of the oppressive system.
The Fall is a godless but not amoral universe. It doesn’t offer the comfort of optimism like The Plague. The hero is caught between his search for absolute freedom and an obsession with authenticity. The novel reflects the writer’s effort to attain objective perspective in the ambience of ideological polarization between left and the right which doesn’t give any quarter for the people in the middle. Clamence reveals “the pain of twentieth-century mankind” and the knowledge of collective guilt felt by the intellectuals who bought the arguments of the right or the left uncritically. The Fall validates all experiences, the execution of innocence and the inevitable inequality and Robin Buss calls it as “one of the great philosophical fables in world literature “ on par with Voltaire’s Candide, Kafka’s the Trail and Animal Farm by George Orwell ( xiv).
Coetzee’s novel shows how a magistrate sympathizes with the plight of the barbarians, feels guilty in abetting the crimes by the Empire. He , the judge turns in to the penitent and switches sides and suffers disgrace as a prisoner. Coetzee’s magistrate and Camus’s Clamence fall prey to sexual desires. When the magistrate sees the colonel Joll who returns defeated from his expedition against barbarians , he sees both of them as the two faces—lie and truth of the empire. He doesn’t give up his power , reoccupies his apartment but still haunted by the vision of his severed head” wearing a look of hurt and guilty surprise at the irruption of history into the static time of oasis” (157).
In relation to women, Calmence enjoyed more success than happiness. He charmed, exalted and exploited them. He has been obsessed with himself and seduced his friends’ wives after maintaining a respectful distance from friends prior to it. Camus makes the narrator a spokesman for hypocrisy of the middle class. He says, “I should have exchanged ten meetings with Einstein for a first encounter with a pretty chorus girl” (38). He was obsessed with possessing them and rejection attracted and challenged him. If he didn’t wish the death of others , it’s so because of his moral stance but not naturalness. He finds no sincere friends but accomplices in the collective guilt of judgment and punishing others .
The narrator in the novel is a Parisian lawyer who calls himself a judge-penitent and has settled down in Amsterdam. His narration goes on in a confessional mode to another lawyer with similar middle class culture from Paris. The narrator Jean Baptiste- Clamence hails from a Jewish quarter( that has been site of the historical crime holocaust) of Mexico city. He has taken up the cause of rescuing widows and orphans and confesses to having an ‘instinctive contempt’ for judges as a class. He used to enjoy a sense of ease born out of a sense of legality , the satisfaction of being right and the self-esteem. He has represented good murderers, spurned flattery and collected no money from the poor. Camus’s sense of irony comes out when he makes Clamence relate his nature and activities in a cool tone. Clamence has thrives on altruism and refers to the incidents how he helped the blind to cross the road , given lift to the people waiting in the bus stands, the needy wives of the accused believing that virtue is its own reward. He put himself above the judge as well as the accused. ‘ Judges punished the crime, the accused atoned for it, and I, free of all responsibility , beyond judgment or punishment , reigned at liberty , bathed in prelapsarian glow”(18). In spite of his success, he laments his restlessness and lack of friendship. if he has attended the funerals of the concierge and a court clerk , it has been to retain his sense of enjoyment of life. He refers to the complacency and boredom permeating the life of a middle-class professional. “ something’s got to happen , even if it’s slavery without love, or war, or death” ( 24). Power settles quarrels between parents and children, husband and wife and old Europe has been offering communiqué instead of debate and the police are arbiter of truths.
Clamence also refers to his egoism and vanity. He says ” I have always considered myself more intelligent than anyone, as I told you, but also more sensitive and more skilled, a crack shot, a peerless driver, the best lover. Even in areas where I could easily recognize my inferiority , such as tennis , it was hard for me to believe that, if I had time to train, I should not outclass the top seeds. I saw only superiority in myself, which explained my benevolence and peace of mind.” ( 31). He refers to an incident when he was slapped by a motor cyclist out of road rage and this memory of humiliation remained with him . The innate desire for violence make an intelligent man support the cruelest party in politics.
When Clamence realizes his propensity to judge and punish in case of personal harm, that has sense of justice and altruism.
Camus’s sense of isolation comes out clearly through Clamence who says that he has noticed an irresistible urge to judge in his friends and those suffering from boredom and emptiness felt hostile ‘ people prefer to call them innocent ant criticize the human race or even heaven. They attribute their guilt to nature or conditions and their virtues to the divine grace of their birth. They want to escape judgment by getting reprieve from wealth. They rarely confide in better people but in inferiors in order to change themselves. Bereft of energy to do good or bad , they live in limbo.
Clamence imputes the harshness of judgment to duality of mind and lack of conviction. The middle class virtues such as modesty, humility and virtue are used to shine among, triumph over and oppress others. He says that though he appeared hard, energetic and loyal, he yielded to women or drink, lethargy and betrayal. He has ambiguous feelings towards justice. He turns against the blind and the workers and would like to shout about their oppression of the decent people.
Clamence refers to the ‘transference of guilt’ as a defensive tactic. Modern inquisition makes a honest man responsible for the crime of a thief. Clamence wants to defend the thief by bringing out the crimes of honest man, in the event, the lawyer. In his defense of a murderer, he call himself as a vicarious murderer who hasn’t killed anyone but left many deserving creatures die.
Calmence also searches for rewarding love in vainly and foolishly. The press romanticizes it. The narrator says that after loving a parrot , he had to sleep with a snake. So he looked for bookish love which he could come across nowhere. To him,” physical jealousy is an effect of imagination at the some time as a judgment against oneself”(69).
Regarding jail life, he says that innocence cese is joyful stretching of one’s life. Humans have turns very innovative in human suffering and there is no need for God to create guilt or to punish when there are fellow humans . according to Clamence , the great secret is, “Don’t wait for the judgment, it takes place every day”( 71). Judges of Christ and antichrist are hovering over the corpse of innocence. “ we are all judges, we are guilty before each other”(73). The greatest of human torment is to be judged without law. The law proposed by Clamence is truth.
Clamence divides the people into three categories--- those who are open, those who need to lie to hide something, and those who prefer lies to openness. He thinks that truth dazzles like light whereas untruth is a beautiful dusk that enhances everything. During the war time , Clamence is elected Pope by his jail for his honesty in acknowledging himself as the weakest. But soon there appeared factions among inmates, Calmence has shown bias towards the sick or the overburdened . One day he has denied water to a dying man considering is own life as more important and worth preserving. Here Camus has been lampooning the idea of absolute equality. Some men or animals are more equal than others as it appears in The Animal Farm.
Clamence says that self-condemnation extends to condemnation of others. He admits that he uses freedom to get his desired fulfilled and power. He says that he didn’t know that freedom is the loneliness of as long distance-runner without fans or cheers but an unbearable sentence at the end when one remains sick or sad or loveless. He refers to contradictions like a praying atheist, brutal alliance and spurning of God to be slavish to a knave greater than oneself.
Clamence says at the end that the main thing was to have total freedom to do anything and declaring one’s innocence from time to time. He has become his old self again He’s prepared to be executed if he could capture people’s imagination. ‘The Fall’ shows the utter helplessness of one who can’t rescue the others in their fall to death. While talking to his listener, another Parisian lawyer , Clamence tells him that one has to make a choice in rescuing others. Thus Camus describes the universal human condition ridden with ironies and the irresistible loss of human innocence .
Coetzee’s magistrate says that he wants to live outside history which the Empire imposes on its loyal subjects and freedom for barbarians. He hope of the imitation by barbarians of the ways of the Empire. He also thinks that a blacksmith who suffers from anger and woe would be a better historian. He is stunned on seeing children making a snowman on the beach on a specific day. Is the building of empire as childish and ephemeral as the building of a snowman by children?
