Special Edition: France - Le Rayon-Vert

Another piece that was originally published on my other blog (with slight edits), The Eponymist: 

History, as historian, Howard Zinn, noted, is an infinite series of events. In order to tell any story, real or imagined, one must cherry pick from those individual moments to form a coherent narrative. How one decides which events to depict and which to omit is ultimately a choice based on demographics and the background noise of commonly held mythologies in which our tribe is placed at the very centre of things. There are no objective voices. All of human existence and experience is subjective (something Kierkegaard recognised). Or as Zinn reflected in the title of his memoir: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.

Yet as Douglas Adams remind us in one of his typical aphorisms masquerading as comic wit: if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.  Or perspective. In a chaotic, non-deterministic world, it takes a sentient mind to find patterns amongst the randomness. We create meaning in the meaningless. We find shapes in signal noise like faces seen in clouds.

Such cherry picking can bring purpose or it can send us chasing shadows of conspiracy. All of us at some time lose our sense of proportion and our sense of perspective. It can be humiliating and disheartening when a long held belief is shown to be erroneous: When the fleeting cloud-face deforms into a new shape, or the grotesque in the shadows resolves into something benign and mundane: To realise that the Universe never thinks about us and will neither mourn or even notice our passing. Our relevance is limited to the time in which we exist. It is fleeting and when it is over it quickly fades, like an afterimage of the sun.

Yet what can we do? We must find meaning in order to thrive; in order to survive. The following history (apt, given the double meaning of histoire in French) is of no significance or importance to anyone but me. Which is exactly the thing that gives it meaning.

I grew up on naval estates. Eight of the first twelve years of my life were spent living in and around Helensburgh in the west of Scotland, down the coast from the Faslane Naval Base where my father was stationed. We lived there on three separate occasions, as well as stints in Plymouth, Birmingham and Barrow in Furness, where my brother was born.

Helensburgh

I began my life in this area, born in the Vale of Leven hospital in Alexandria by the banks of Loch Lomond. Years later in Balloch, next to Alexandria, we would take our dog, Boomer, for long walks in the park where he could tire himself out. And, inevitably, throw himself into the waters of the loch at every opportunity.

This is where many of my formative experiences took place. I first read the Hobbit here. I first heard Queen here. Owned my first computer here (a Spectrum 48k+). Here I watched Live Aid. I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark at one friend’s house and saw pirated copies of Ghostbusters and Gremlins at another’s. I learned about new films from watching Film ’84, Film ’85 and all of its subsequent incarnations.

At the beginning of 1986, my father left the Navy after more than twenty years and we found ourselves in Eastbourne, on the south west coast of England. More formative experiences. Sea Cadets. Sailing. Visiting Herstmonceux Observatory with Astronomy Club. Seeing the Hobbit play at the local theatre. Discovering the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for the first time. Also discovering Jules Verne.

It happened because of watching Film ’86 or Film ’87: Barry Norman’s review for a film called, Le Rayon Vert. The film came out in 1986, but it might not have been released in the UK until the following year. The film itself was of little interest to me. What did interest me was the background details. The film was named after the Jules Verne novel of the same name.

The title was what fascinated me. Le Rayon Vert. Translated as, The Green Ray, it refers to the very final particles of light that radiate out from the sun at sunset. The phenomenon is rare and can only be seen under certain conditions and in certain parts of the world. On very calm stretches of ocean or incredibly flat stretches of desert. From high and dry mountain planes or in flight with no cloud cover obscuring the view.

There is an old legend that anyone who sees the green ray will start to make sense of their life. The idea beguiled me. I went to the library to try and find a copy of the book, but it is not regarded as a major work from the dozens Jules Verne wrote and our small, local library was unlikely to carry a copy. What I did find was a copy of Five Weeks in a Ballon, which I withdrew and took home.

Jules Verne has been with me from that time until now. I don’t remember if I even finished Five Weeks in a Balloon. The text was small and in a book that fitted easily in my squat palm. I remember struggling through it and the memory is clouded as to whether I finished it or not. I think it’s likely that I kept renewing the loan period in the hope of completing it, but gave up at some point and returned it to the library in favour of something less challenging.

What I did have was a collection of abridged versions of the classics, cut down for adolescent readers. The Old Curiosity Shop. Tom Brown’s School Days. Ivanhoe. There were many others, as well as what are perhaps Jules Verne’s three most famous novels: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Around the World in Eighty Days.

These books I did complete. There was a sponsored reading week or fortnight in which they formed the core of the books I read in that time. It was a struggle. I was not a natural reader at that time. Amazing when you consider that as an adult I read three or four books a week across a breadth of genres. But if any writer laid the foundations on that long journey from faltering to accomplished reader, it was Jules Verne.

Verne was for a long time considered a children’s writer in the English speaking world. This is mainly the fault of terrible translations from the French in which he wrote. Yet if one considers for instance, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, there is much scientific detail included. It doesn’t quite go to the extent of Moby Dick, where Melville was essentially copying out, verbatim, oceanic and biological passages from textbooks, but it’s not far off. The abridged, children’s edition I read in Eastbourne obviously excised much of these technical passages. Which is probably for the best. They’re hard enough to understand as an adult.

I guess the light soon faded on my interest in Jules Verne, as do all such fleeting childhood obsessions. It was only as an adult, inspired by Michael Palin’s Around the World in Eighty Days TV series, that I returned to Jules Verne. Yet by this point in my life, I had become a literary magpie, fascinated by every new shiny object. Graham Greene novels. George Orwell’s fiction and non-fiction. Maya Anjou's autobiography. Frankenstein. His Dark Materials. Jane Eyre. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books read again and again and again.

As such, my re-acquaintance and deep dive into Jules Verne’s novels has been slow. I reread 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Around the World in Eighty Days in their unabridged versions. I read From Earth to Moon and Around the Moon in a single edition. I struggled through the overlong The Mysterious Island. But there wasn’t much else to choose from. Despite writing many novels during his lifetime, very few are commonly available in English translation. Even once popular books like Une Ville Flottante, or A Floating City, are these days hard to find. So I did the only thing I could do. I turned to versions in their original French.

Actually, it was the other way around. My French has always been middling, despite studying it on and off since Eastbourne. But I had started trying to read more in French, having hoarded second hand Folio editions since university. Satre. Camus. Zola. All far above my level, but you can’t expect to go any higher unless you’re prepared to climb. So I read them. And reread them. And looked up the words I didn’t know. Which in the modern world, with access to resources like Wiktionary, is easier than ever.

In the meantime, I acquired other French language editions. Flaubert. Simone de Beauvoir. More Zola (I love Zola). A translation of Ulysses (difficulty level: God) brought back for me from France. I found online resources. I recommend ebooksgratuits.com, which has open source copies of many copyright expired books, including Verne, Zola, George Sand, Alexander Dumas and many others in a number of different formats.

Somewhere online I found a download of more than fifty Jules Verne novels and short stories and dove in. At the beginning I decided to go though them in order of publication. Which meant the first book on the list was, ironically, Cinq Semaines en Ballon, or Five Weeks in a Balloon. Nearly twenty five years later, I finally finished reading it. And in French too.
 

Jules Verne

Along with the next book in the series, Voyages et Adventures du Capitaine Hatteras, you find a key feature of Verne’s writing in Cinq Semaines en Ballon. As much as his novels are about the adventure or voyage being depicted, they are also about the history of adventure and exploration. Cinq Semaines en Ballon is about travelling across Africa in a balloon, but it is also a history of European exploration in Africa (with the destructive consequences of colonial exploration glossed over with depressing predictability).  Voyages et Adventures du Capitaine Hatteras is about the journey to reach the North Pole, but is also about Arctic and Antarctic exploration in general.

I soon abandoned the chronological reading order. Many of Verne’s earlier novels were serialised in magazine form and are long books as a result. My French remains middling and I need shorter books to retain the concentration levels. So I read some of his shorter novels in between Madame Bovary and Le Deuxième Sexe and a couple of books by Senegalese writer, Fatou Diome. At some point I remembered Le Rayon Vert and routed through the download folder but couldn’t find it. It is such a minor story in the canon that it wasn’t even included with fifty nine others freely available for download.

Yet Le Rayon Vert is out there. I found a .pdf copy of the book and downloaded it. I knew I would get around to it, but opened the file to check it wasn’t corrupted. And what did I find on the very first page, but reference to Helensburgh! The damned book that stared my interest in Jules Verne, that paved the way to my love of reading, takes place in the place where I began.

Why I didn’t abandon everything I was doing and read the book there and then, I don’t know. I was reading too much as it was. I was probably already reading something else by Jules Verne. So I closed the file down and forgot about it for a year or two.

When I did read it, a week ago as I write, the book featured so much more than Helensburgh. The bulk of the story takes places in and around Oban and the Hebrides. Yet it opens and ends on the outskirts of Helensburgh, close to Faslane. But more than that, Verne makes reference to Leven, when I was born, and Balloch, where we took Boomer to run himself ragged. Clearly Verne visited the area. People living in Glasgow, twenty miles away, are barely aware of these places. To think Jules Verne came to these places and was inspired to write a novel, even a minor one, is of great significance to me, even, and because, it means so little to anyone else.

The book itself is fine. It contains scattered references to the works of Sir Walter Scott and it seems to be a pastiche of Scott and other early 19^th century romantic novelists. Scott was at one time the most famous novelist in the world, although his influence had declined by the end of the century. He had a huge influence on the likes of Alexander Dumas, who was a contemporary and good friend of Jules Verne.

Le Rayon-Vert is the age old tale of a woman, Helena Campbell, being compelled to marry one man, but the man is a prize tool. She won’t agree to marry him until she has seen the green ray, which is a bit like wanting to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. She sets off in the direction of Oban, where conditions might be right to witness the phenomenon. On the journey from Helensburgh, she meets the man who she will actually marry. When the green ray finally appears at the end of the novel, the couple are instead looking at each other, the faint reflection seen in each other’s eyes. They are each other’s green ray, where meaning has been found all by itself.

Le Rayon-Vert is a very different novel from most of the others that Verne wrote (certainly of the ones I have read). Perhaps that’s why it’s not included with his common cannon. There is no race across the world, or balloon ride over Africa, or journey into the bowels of the Earth. There are no futuristic submarines or space rockets shot out of a giant cannon. The journey Helena Campbell makes from Helensburgh to Oban is one that can be made by anyone today. Although Le Rayon-Vert is included in Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires series, it is as much a romance as it is an adventure novel. The voyage is commonplace rather than being in any way extraordinary.

Moreover, Le Rayon-Vert is rarely mentioned in reference to Helensburgh. The town’s website makes no mention of Jules Verne. Neither does its Wikipedia page. None of the people I know who have lived in Helensburgh or been there had even heard of Le Rayon-Vert until I mentioned it.

Where Le Rayon-Vert is mentioned is in the film of the same name. I did watch it ten years ago by renting it from Love Film during that brief period when receiving DVD rentals through the post was a thing. I watched it again after finishing the novel. 

 

It’s an odd film. Largely made up of scenes of improvised dialogue. It was apparently shot using a crew of four. In several scenes, the actors are caught glancing at the camera, which is impossible to conceal or style out. I haven’t seen any other films by director, Eric Rohmer, but it appears to be typical of his style. Glacial storytelling. Little in the way of scored music but lots of ambient noise. From what little I have read, Rohmer is a love-him-or-hate-him director. Le Rayon-Vert is one of a series of films he made in the 1980s that are similar, thematically. I’d like to watch the others in the series.

Film and book have little in common narratively speaking, but share some of the same themes. Both feature women as their main characters with Delphine the analogue to Helena Campbell. Yet while Helena is a force of nature, Delphine is introverted and defensive against the efforts by her friends to talk with her. She spends the whole film on her own, even as scuzzy men follow her down the street. At Biarritz train station she meets Jacques,  who’s only marginally less sleazy, but the two end the film sat on a hilltop at sunset, waiting for the green ray. Unlike Helena, she sees the ray for herself (a terrible post-production effect), which suggest Jacques will be a fleeting acquaintance.

I’d forgotten the scene where Delphine happens upon a book club sat on a wall, discussing Verne’s Le Rayon-Vert and the phenomenon in general. She sits on a bench beneath them to listen. It might have even been one of the clips Barry Norman showed on Film ’86 or Film ’87. It’s a patchy film, but somewhat beguiling. Ten years after seeing it for the first time, there was much I remembered and even anticipated. It’s one of those films where you look up the actors on IMDB to see where you know them from and it turns out where you know them from is this film.

I prefer the book to the film, but it’s not a fair contest. The film doesn’t feature even one scene set in Helensburgh. Yet without the film, I would never have arrived at the novel. I would certainly have turned to Jules Verne eventually. I am too much of a sci-fi nerd not to have done so. But Le Rayon-Vert would have been a long way down the line. I might have stumbled upon it eventually, having finished all the other Jules Verne novels. Which would have meant missing a novel that is minor to the world, but more significant than the sum of its parts. The film is an essential link in a chain that leads back to the book and into personal history.

We find meaning in meaninglessness. Find patterns among the randomness. There is nothing mystical about Verne’s Le Rayon-Vert beginning and ending in Helensburgh, nor a chance reference in a Barry Norman program setting me on my literary way. I have witnessed the green ray in two different incarnations, but nothing has been brought into focus or the meaning of the universe revealed.

As with in English, I have become a magpie of French language novels. I will continue to plough through forty or fifty more Jules Verne stories, in between books by Zola, Sand, Rousseau, Camus, Irène Némirovsky, Stendhal, Dumas and a dozen other authors besides. Perhaps the path was always laid out before me. If it hadn’t been La rue Jules Verne, another route would have led me in the same direction. Yet in a world of such complexity, we cannot afford to think about roads not taken. This is where we find ourselves. This is where I am. Le Rayon-Vert has been my guiding star.

 

Mauritius - Eve Out of Her Ruins

Country: Mauritius
Book: Eve Out of Her Ruins (Eve de ses décombres)
Author: Ananda Devi (translator: Jeffrey Zuckerman)
Publication Year: 2016 (2006)
Genre: Fiction

Mauritius is another of those places, like Iceland (see: Iceland) or Morocco (see: Morocco) that straddles the line between two continents. Technically part of the continent of Africa, the tiny island lies a thousand miles east of Mozambique, out beyond the much larger island of Madagascar.  While it is closer to Africa than any other land mass, it could just as well be described as a halfway house between Africa and Asia.

For such a small country (790 square miles) in the middle of the Indian Ocean, Mauritius has ingrained itself into the western consciousness more than other territories in the region. It was here the dodo lived, until the first Dutch explorers arrived and hunted the bird to extinction in six short decades. It is questionable whether such an unremarkable bird would be so famous if it had survived. As it is, it’s destruction has become a cautionary tale about ecology and preservation (one we have stubbornly refused to heed). It has turned up in the writing of everyone from Lewis Carroll to Douglas Adams and Jasper Fforde.

Alice meets the Dodo

Even before the Dutch, Arab records mention the island all the way back in the 10^th century. The Portuguese were the next to arrive at the beginning of the 16^th, but they saw little of interest and the island remained uninhabited until the Dutch arrived at the end of the century. They were the first to transport slaves to harvest sugar and coffee and all of the usual cash crops of European colonialism.

France took over the island in 1715 (nearby Réunion is still a French dependency), but it was captured by the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. It remained a British colony until independence in 1968. French continues to be spoken on the island, along with English and Mauritian Creole.

Following independence, the British retained control of the Chagos Archipelago to the north west of the country, which includes the island of Diego Garcia. Diego Garcia has been used as a joint airforce base with the USA since the 1970s.

After decades of dispute and obfustication by the UK government, it finally agreed to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in 2025. Diego Garcia is to remain under UK control. A whole entry could be written on this history alone and I might return to the Chagos islands at a later date as part of my Reading the Dependencies sub-project.

In the meantime, the population of Mauritius, as a result of colonialism, slavery and sitting in the middle of the Indian Ocean, has a heady mix of ethnicities. Indian descendents make up the majority of the population, followed by African, Chinese, French and a large Madagascan population. By some measures, it has the highest population density in Africa with 1.3 million people living there. It is also reckoned to be most developed country in Africa.

Statistics, however, rarely tell the whole picture. A dense population usually equals slums and grinding inequality. In choosing Ananda Devi’s novel, Eve out of Her Ruins, to represent Mauritius, we come face to face with these issues.

The titular Eve is named for obvious reasons. A 17 year old school girl, she has used her body to get what she wants throughout her teenage years. The novel is told by Eve and three of her contemporaries in short, dense passages. The consequences of her actions play out like the Garden of Eden story for which she is named. The tale has been retold by everyone from Emile Zola to John Steinbeck.

Eve Out of Her Ruins is another of those books we have seen in this project that are universal. It could be set in any slum or impoverished country throughout the globe. The problem of teenage prostitution and predatory men is hardly unique to Mauritius. What is less common, at least in literature, is Eve’s disassociation from her own body, even when her encounters can in no sense be considered consensual.

Against Eve’s narrative, we have that of Saadiq, poet and gang member, who is in love with Eve, but for whom she is forever off limits. He is the typical male who wants to save the working girl from herself, as seen in countless movies and songs (cf. Roxanne, where Sting mansplains sex work). There is also her best friend, Savita, and Clélio, another gang member who has already committed vandalism and petty theft and is working his way up to murder.

All four are residents of the fiction slum town of Troumaron, which translates from French into Brown Hole, and, by extension, Shit Hole. Subtlety isn’t always needed. They are all trapped; subjected to violent fathers and distant mothers. Each talks about leaving but escape is all but impossible. Clélio’s brother has emigrated to France, but Clélio knows his brother’s tales of prosperity are just that. He is poor even there.

It’s a short book of only about a hundred and fifty pages, but the short three or four page chapters make it seem longer. The second half of the book hinges on the murder of a girl, the reasons for her killing and Clélio’s arrest and imprisonment. Again the issues of prejudice and poverty rear their ugly heads. There is a resolution of kinds, but it is left sufficiently ambiguous to remind us that life is rarely so neat and tidy as it is in Hollywood movies.

A good book and as I have said countless times, Devi is an author to whom I will return long after this project ends. I read this one in translation, but she writes principally in French and I would like to read some of her many other books in their original language. There are also many other Mauritian writers to explore, but we can’t do a deep dive into every country’s oeuvre or we’ll be here until doomsday.

Anyway, it almost seems apt to restrict an island nation to one or two books to reflect its relative isolation. Even if Mauritius is less isolated than its geographical position suggests.

Ananda Devi

 

Ghana - The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born et al.

Country: Ghana
Book: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Author: Ayi Kwei Armah
Publication Year: 1968
Genre: Fiction 

Country: Ghana
Book: Search Sweet Country
Author: Kojo Laing
Publication Year: 1986
Genre: Fiction 

Country: Ghana
Book: Homegoing/Transcendent Kingdom
Author: Yaa Gyasi
Publication Year: 2016/2020
Genre: Fiction

It is an interesting exercise to compare the countries of modern Africa to the states and provinces of North America. What you observe is a mirror image of one another. Demarcated borders that start small close to their Atlantic coastlines but which grow increasingly larger as they expand into their respective continents. Tiny Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts give way to the behemoths of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas: Slivers of land called Guinea, Togo, Sierra Leone and the like, all of which could be swallowed several times over by Chad or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Here we see the afterimage of colonialism. Relatively minor land grabs that became more and more ambitious as their indigenous populations were slaughtered or sold into slavery or brought under the boot of the imperial heel. Or some combination of all three.

Nestled between Ivory Coast (Côte d'lvoire) to the west and Togo to the east, Ghana is an important place in the history of Great Britain’s part in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. For many in West Africa, the Ghanaian coast and the various forts and castles built along its coastline were their last sight of Africa before being shipped to America and the Caribbean. Though as the country’s former name, the Gold Coast, attests, European explorers from the Portuguese to the Dutch came to this part of the world in search of commodities other than people.

Yaa Gyasi’s 2016 novel, Homegoing, speaks to this history. Told through the diverging fortunes of a single family, one set of descendents remain in Ghana and experience colonialism and tribal conflict. The other line is sold into slavery and bears witness to the expanding fortunes of the United States. Only at the end of the novel, which takes in two hundred years of Ghanaian and American history, do the two family lines come to be reunited. Although the mists of time leave no trace of their shared history.

It starts with Effia, who as a teenager is ‘married’ off to the British governor of the local fort. Her descendents will remain in Ghana. Unknown to Effia, her half sister, Eli, is imprisoned in the dungeons beneath the castle and shipped across the ocean. Her descendents will live through the plantations, the underground railroad, the Runaway Slave Act, the Civil War, reconstruction, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement.

Alternate chapters move between Ghanaian and American episodes, through eight generations on either side of the Atlantic. Each chapter is named after the point of view character, which I always find a little hack, but at least it isn’t cycling through the same three characters like much of modern sci-fi and fantasy (George R R Martin has a lot to answer for).

Homegoing is one of the best books I have read in this project. Three hundred pages that fly by in an instant (I read it in two sessions in less than twenty four hours). It packs so much history, character and plot into such a short space of time that most writers would struggle to fit into a book twice its size. In many ways, it can’t even be called a novel but a series of short stories that are only loosely connected at the margins. Still, for a first novel it is a towering achievement.

Gyasi’s second novel. Transcendent Kingdom, is a sequel of sorts, if only thematically. A Ghanaian family move to the United States to Alabama (Gyasi was born in Ghana, but raised in Huntsville, Alabama). Their son, Nana, is a gifted athlete who becomes addicted to OxyContin and then heroin following a sports injury. His sister, Gifty, who narrates the novel, is a post graduate neuroscientist studying addiction and depression.

The novel is told in a mixture of present day narrative and flashback. Gifty’s mother has come to stay with her but refuses to get out of bed. As the novel unfolds, we come to realise why.

Transcendent Kingdom is a more straightforward kind of novel; not as good as Homegoing, not because it isn’t  a good novel, but simply because Homegoing is so accomplished. Yet it is a thematic sequel to Homegoing because it manages to speak to many of the same issues connected to American and African culture. The opioid crisis of recent years is well known, as well as the scandal of the families who made billions selling OxyContin to vulnerable Americans. Regular drug dealers go to prison. Rich drug dealers do not, even though the damage they do is incalculably worse.

The novel also touches on absentee fathers in the black community, which is almost a cliché in American culture at this point, as well as the way grief takes different shapes for different people. Although the majority of the novel takes place in America, we do return to Ghana to reconnect with West Africa during the flashbacks.

Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi represents the new face of Ghanaian writing. Yet Ghana was at the forefront of the African literary revolution that emerged in the mid-20^th century in the post-independence era. Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, is often regarded as Ghana’s answer to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is about a railway clerk’s struggle to avoid falling into corruption in post-colonial Ghana. It is a satire on the corruption that immediately followed independence in Ghana and indeed much of Africa. Indeed, the book concludes in 1966 on the day after Kwame Nkrumah, the country’s first president and independence leader, was overthrown in a coup.

The book is comparable to many novels in world literature. The lowly civil servant who cannot survive under the oppressive, crushing pressure of the system in which he is entrenched. One has only to think of Winston Smith and Nineteen Eighty Four for a suitable comparison. The human condition is common to all from Accra to Airstrip One.

Chinua Achebe called Armah an “alienated writer complete with all the symptoms. Unfortunately Ghana is not a modern existentialist country. It is just a Western African state struggling to become a nation.” Given that Achebe‘s own Nigeria saw a number of internal conflicts during its own post-independence era, culminating in the Biafra War, which killed an estimated two million mostly Igbo people, his comments seem tone deaf and more than a little hypocritical. Novels come in all shapes and sizes. As we have said more than once in this project, it takes many points of view to give a country a voice.

Ayi Kwei Armah

Sitting almost slap, bang in the middle of Armah and Gyasi is the final Ghanaian author up for consideration: Kojo Laing, and his 1986 novel, Search Sweet Country. Though Laing also harks back to another time and place with the action of Search Sweet Country taking place in Accra, 1975.

Search Sweet Country is one of those novels, like A Grain of Wheat (see: Kenya) that features a cavalcade of local characters whose stories slowly coalesce into one another. Like The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, it speaks to the corruption of post-colonial Ghana and the ways its characters embrace it or struggle against it or are further disenfranchised because of it.

Perhaps more than the other books in this selection of Ghanaian writing, Laing’s first novel manages to evoke the sounds, smells and general disorder of Accra in 1975. At times it plays out like The Wandering Rocks episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, expanded to become an entire novel. A character who is the focus of one chapter is seen as a background figure in the next (and vice versa). Joyce is an appropriate comparison for Laing, who bends language and creates his own neologisms, as well as using a whole host of Ghanaian words that are collected in a glossary at the back of the book.

The plot of Search Sweet Country, such as it is, concerns a scheme to illegally import race horses by disguising them as farm animals. However, the porters at the airport let the horses free from their boxes, causing a stampede of animals and people.

But this is really one thread of many woven into the book, some of which have no ending or resolution. A march to the government buildings to protest poverty in the country and political corruption is forestalled by the army presenting the large crowd with a feast in a perverse restaging of the Biblical feeding of the five thousand. There is also Kofi Loww, who is in love with a witch, and sociology professor Sackey, who dreams of being a farmer.

Why Laing chose to place the action in 1975 is unclear. But then why do authors set their novels in any period of time (I wrote a sci-fi novel set in 1998). Is it a cry for our youth or a rose tinted view of the past or, like science fiction, a way to discuss present day concerns by removing them to some other time or place?

With Search Sweet Country, I suspect Laing chose 1975 as a point equidistant in time from independence and the year in which he was writing.  This way he could discuss the current state of Ghana, twenty years after the British retreated. It should be remembered that Laing was writing in the years after Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings came to power in 1981, suspending the constitution and banning political parties for the next decade. The constitution was finally restored in 1992. By 2012, the country was considered a stable democracy.

Like The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Search Sweet Country is a satire on Ghanaian society and perhaps West African society as a whole. It is more comical, less cynical than its literary predecessor. Armah’s unnamed clerk is so defeated at the end of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, you almost expect him to walk into the ocean like a character in a John Steinbeck novel. Laing’s roster of named characters experience mixed fortunes, like any novel or play with an ensemble cast.

Perhaps Chinua Achebe was right in calling Ghana a Western African state struggling to become a nation. Armah and Laing present a country struggling to forge its own path after centuries of outside interference and asset stripping of its natural resources, not least the indigenous population. The same problems persist as they do in much of Africa, but Ghana’s economy has grown out of proportion with its relatively small size, mainly due to exports of oil, gold and cocoa. I am sure the issues Armah and Laing write about still exist, probably exponentially so, but Ghana seems to be a country on the up.

Yaa Gyasi gives us the other side of the equation. If Armah and Laing are Effia’s descendents, who remained in Ghana to build a nation, Gyasi is a descendent of Eli, transported to the other side of the Atlantic (metaphorically only – she was born in Ghana and is therefore also a descendent of Effia – you get the point). Part of the myriad people who made the journey from Africa to the United States, first involuntarily and later by choice.

Through Gyasi’s novels, we see how those sold into slavery were forced to live, as well as how their descendents and later arrivals from Africa have been targeted by the same destructive forces. In many ways, what we are seeing in America right now is a direct reversal of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The people who built the country are not even permitted to enjoy its achievements.

One wonders if the architects of this orgy of self-destruction will see the errors of their ways before the United States becomes obsolescent. But such revelations require self-awareness. There doesn’t seem to be much self-awareness in the present day American government. Just blind hatred and naked greed: Emotions completely at odds with America’s self-identification as a Christian country.

I don’t want to have to talk about this stuff, but given how many authors in this series have sort refuge and asylum in the United States over the years (see: Afghanistan, Saudi  Arabia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Zimbabwe, Dominican Republic), it is depressing to see those same routes being cut off by the current administration. Hopefully many, if not all of its insane proclamations will be reversed by future governments. Sadly, I suspect it will take decades to reverse the damage. China becoming a democracy is more likely and that isn’t going to happen in the foreseeable future either.

As I say, I don’t want to have to talk about these things, but this seemed like as good a time as ever. There will doubtless be other émigré writers living in the United States on this list and we will once again straddle the line between nations with differing fortunes. However, the scales have started to tip. How far will they have swung the next time we approach the Eastern Seaboard?

For now, Ghana retains its a place of importance in the history of West Africa, slavery and colonialism. After a rocky start on the road to independence, it has found its feet. As usual, it is its writers who speak to the difficulties that have been conquered and those that remain to be overcome. It is another country for which four books by three authors can’t even begin to scratch the surface. I hope to return in the not too distant future. However, there is still much of Africa and African literature to explore.

Kojo Laing

Special Edition: Algeria - La Chute

As with the piece on Haruki Murakami (see: Reading Murakami), the following is a reprint of something I wrote for my other blog in 2018 (see: The Eponymist for more). As with anything, I would write it differently if I was writing it today. I will return to Algerian literature in more detail later. For now, an essay on Camus's La Chute seems entirely appropriate for this project.

"Avez-vous remarqué que les canaux concentriques d'Amsterdam resembient aux cercles de l'enfer?[1]"  

(Have you noticed that the concentric canals of Amsterdam resemble the circles of Hell?)

[Warning: Contains spoilers and references to self-harm. Read-on at your own discretion.]

Albert Camus's 1956 novel, La Chute[2], is an attempt to weave into a narrative structure the ideas and opinions of the French Existentialist movement. How well does it succeed in this attempt?

In order to begin, we must expand our definition. La Chute is better described as an attempt to overlay the ideas and opinions of the French Existentialist movement upon the general landscape of Dante's Inferno. The present-day action takes place in Amsterdam, which here serves as a metaphor for the Inferno in three distinct ways. The nested horseshoes of concentric canals encircling the centre of Amsterdam represent the nine concentric circles that shape Dante's vision of the underworld. Amsterdam can hardly be said to have the climate or average annual temperature commensurate to being an apt stand-in for Hell. Yet Amsterdam also represents a specific location within the Inferno:

"Ici, nous sommes dans le dernier cercle. Le cercle de... Ah! Vous savez cela? Diable³, vous devenez plus difficile à classer." 
 

(Here we are in the final circle. The circle of... Ah! You know that. Damm it[3], you become harder to classify.)

The ninth and final circle of Dante's Inferno is the circle of traitors. Frozen to his waist at its centre is Satan, the ultimate traitor in Christian mythology. His wings beat the air in torment, chilling the air about them, turning the River Cocytus to ice and leaving him trapped, together with all the other traitors to their kindred, country, guests, and lord that inhabit the ninth circle.

In the eight circles above, everything is as hot, humid, and hellish as popular culture tends to conjure in its collective imagination. The ninth circle is Hell's dungeon; the place where are kept all those so beyond hope or redemption that they aren't actively tortured. Rather their souls are encased in the ice at varying levels of immobility and ignored. Virgil and Dante can discern little more than vague shapes in the ice as they pass that way. They move on down the legs of Satan and up onto the island of Purgatory.

Amsterdam, with its temperate climate, situated on the coast of the North Sea, is an effective substitute for the cold of the ninth circle. Snow is falling in the final chapter of La Chute and settling on the "dark jade canals" and the 'little snow-covered bridges". Our narrator idly speculates about second chances and jumping into the water to save another soul. This would leave him trapped in the icing over canal, like those frozen in the ninth circle. He goes back to bed.

As with the ninth Circle, the characters of La Chute are anonymous and go unheard and unseen. The novel's only voice is its narrator, one Jean-Baptiste Clamence. Even this, he tells us, is not his real name. Clamence's narrative is told to another man, principally in a bar near the red light district of Amsterdam. All that we know of this other person's contribution to the conversation is in the phrases that Clamence echoes back at him ("You are in business, no doubt? In a way? Excellent reply! Judicious too."). The true nature of this second presence is obscured until the novel's final page.

The third and final way in which Amsterdam serves as Hell in La Chute is as a personal Hell for Jean-Baptiste Clamence. At the centre of Clamence's narrative is his confession and profound regret for a transgression committed when he was younger. For this he cannot forgive himself, and for which he condemns himself to self-exile as a result.

Clamence had years before been a lawyer in Paris. One night, crossing a bridge in the early hours of the morning, he passed the figure of a woman contemplating the river from the middle of the bridge. He carried on to the other side, but hadn't gone far down the bank when he heard a splash. This splash was quickly followed by a scream. Clamence surmised that the woman had jumped into the Seine to end her life, but changed her mind once in the river. He had a second in which to take action and jump in and save her. He remained frozen on the bank. The screams subsided. He carried on walking.

As Clamence tells it, the incident fades from his mind until one night, crossing a different bridge in Paris, he hears a laugh that seems to come from someone on the river, moving along its waters. The laugh haunts him, as the facade of respectability of his life as a lawyer begins to unravel, like Nekhlyudov in Tolstoy's Resurrection, faced as a magistrate with the woman he'd condemned to prostitution by getting her pregnant and dismissed as a maid in the household of a family friend. In failing to jump into the river and save her, Clamence wonders what shame caused this woman to take her own life. He comes to see himself as the last in a long line of men to have failed her.

Nekhlyudov sells his possessions and retreats from respectable society, as Tolstoy himself did (Resurrection was Tolstoy's final novel). Clamence closes his practice in Paris, and drifts by accident and by design to places and situations that represent variations on the upper circles of Hell, including their infernal heat. He is interned in a North African Prisoner of War camp during the Second World War. He climbs the active volcano, Mount Etna, on the Island of Sicily, to look into the heart of the volcano. He travels around the Greek archipelago, where myths of the underworld were first written down, becoming the bedrock for western literature for the next two and half thousand years.

"[L]e hasard, la commodité, l'ironie, et la nécessité aussi d'une certaine mortification, m'ont fait choisir une capital d'eaux et de brume, corsetée de canaux, particuliérement encombrée, et visitée par des hommes venus de monde entier." 

 

(Chance, convenience, irony, and also the need for a certain mortification, made me chose a capital of water and fog, corseted by canals, particularly crowded, and visited by men from all over the world.)

In moving to Amsterdam, Jean-Baptiste Clamence finds the ultimate representation of personal Hell, like Room 101 in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, laid out across a city. Not only do the concentric canals and climate of Amsterdam suggest the ninth circle of Hell, but with its innumerable bridges, Amsterdam is shaped to remind Clamence of his failure in Paris any time he wishes to travel across the city centre. To cross Amsterdam is to pay a heavy psychological toll for his sins: So heavy that Clamence will not cross a bridge after dark.

The dystopia of Hell is reflected in other ways within La Chute. Clamence draws his companion's attention to the premises of a former Amsterdam slave trader, complete with African heads carved into the woodwork. The bar in which much of the action takes places is called Mexico-City. Its name recalls the Aztecs and their ritual blood sacrifices on the killing floor. The bar itself is situated in the old Jewish Quarter that existed before the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Nazis during the Second World War, and the deportation of its inhabitants to the Hell-on-Earth that awaited them at Auschwitz, Belsen[4], and Sobibor[5].

Dante also makes a personal appearance in La Chute:

"Connaissez-vous Dante? Vraiment? Diable. Vous savez donc que Dante admet des anges neutral dans le querelle entre Dieu et Satan. Et il les place dans les Limbes, une sorte a vestibule de son enfer." 

 

(Do you know Dante? Really? Dammit. Then you know that Dante admits there were neutral angels in the war between God and Satan. And he places them in Limbo, a sort of vestibule in his Inferno.)

Here Camus, or Clamence, misspeaks. The Vestibule and Limbo are very different places in Dante's Inferno, lying on opposite sides of the River Acheron. Limbo is the first circle of the Inferno, where reside all the virtuous pagan souls that existed before Christ and were therefore denied the opportunity to convert to Christianity and be saved. The Vestibule, where we find the neutral angels, is an anti-circle of hell, encountered before Charon and his riverboat across the Acheron and into the Inferno proper.

The name Jean-Baptiste Clamence warrants examination. At face value, the name is a play on John the Baptist, the pre-cursor to Christ in Christian mythology. As John the Baptist carried out baptisms in the River Jordan, Jean-Baptiste Clamence hears confessions near the River Amstel. Clamence describes himself as a judge-penitent; a title of his own invention. His method is to befriend the respectable men who come looking for the seedier parts of Amsterdam. Then he compels them to confess their sins to him by going through the charade of confessing his own sin, as if for the first time:

[J]e me tiens devant l'humanitié entiére, récapitulant mes hontes, sans perdre de vue l'effect que je produis, et dissant: « J'étais le dernier des derniers. » Alors, insensiblement je passe , dans mon discours, du « je » au « nous ». Quand j'arrive au « voilà ce que nous sommes », le tour est joué, je peux leur de leurs véritiés. 

 

(I stand before all of humanity, recapitulating my shames, without losing sight of the effect that I produce, and say: "I am the lowest of the low," Then brusquely I move from "I" to "We". When I get to: "This is what we are." the game is over and I can tell them some home truths.)

As well as allusions to John the Baptist, the name Jean-Baptiste Clamence has more than a whiff of sulphur surrounding it. The initials J.B.C. could be read to spell out some variation on Jesus Bleeding Christ, or Jesus Bloody Christ[6]. The blasphemy inherent in this combination of words and letters once again suggests the pit, and the inversion of a black mass, twisting Christ into the Antichrist. During his time in the internment camp, Clamence's fellow prisoners elect him a kind of mock Pope. The protestant reformer, Martin Luther, considered Pope Leo X to be the Antichrist, as did Protestants for centuries after Luther's death. Jean-Baptiste Clamence is as much Mephistopheles as he is John the Baptist. Clamence collects confessions as Mephistopheles is said to collect souls. Nightly, Clamence has his fill from the inexhaustible supply of budding Fausts waiting to be consumed before the bar of Mexico-City.

What does any of this have to do with Existentialism?

The origins of the Existentialist movement can be traced to the writings of the Danish philosopher, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard[7]. As noted in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy:

"Kierkegaard rejected the claim, which he took (perhaps unfairly) to be Hegel's[8], that we can look forward to a time when the different interests and concerns of people can be satisfied through their comprehension within an all-embracing objective understanding of the universe.[9]"

Whoever developed the idea, it stated that there will come a time when individual intelligence and intellectual thought have reached such a level of refinement and subtlety that all people will think in the same way and come to the same conclusions. Everyone will work towards the same goals and follow one path, once they realise what the right path is.

Kierkegaard rebuts this by noting that individual concern will always be the overriding emotion in sentient beings. It might be possible, through a high level of education and training, for everyone to see their place within society (and the universe), and act according to some perceived norm, or within society's agreed limits. Yet self is always nearer than society: Inner thoughts always closer than the instruction of peer pressure or billboard advertising. As such, human beings, and by extension human society, will never achieve a level of equilibrium in thought or in desire. Hegel's idea of 'absolute consciousness' is unattainable in the real world, except through the liberal use of eugenics, gulags, and concentration camps.

Kierkegaard's objection to Hegel, however, is religious rather than metaphysical. Kierkegaard believes that true objectivity can only be obtained through infinite subjectivity, the ability to see every individual viewpoint simultaneously. The only entity capable of infinite subjectivity would be God, by virtue of his being omnipresent, and therefore everywhere at once. Kierkegaard's objection is not that absolute consciousness is unobtainable, but that it is only knowable to God.

The true father of Existentialism is generally held to be the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger[10], with Kierkegaard considered its principal Godfather[11]. However, Heidegger's is a metaphysical Existentialism, largely dealing with existing consciousness as an abstract concept. Heidegger has little advice on the moral or ethical implications arising from Existentialist thought and its consequences. The work moulding metaphysical Existentialism into an ethical Existentialism would largely be conducted in France during the 1930s and 1940s. Heidegger may have been its progenitor, but one philosopher contributed more to the sum of Existentialist thought than any other: Jean-Paul Sartre.

Jean-Paul Sartre[12] is to Existentialism what Karl Mark[13] is to Communism. While Karl Mark did not invent Communism, he did with Capital (1867), and The Communist Manifesto (1848 - co-written with Friedrich Engels) contribute more to Communist thought, and have a farther reaching influence, than any other Communist writer. Sartre's influence is not to the same magnitude as Marx, but Sartre can likewise claim to have written Existentialism's two most important treatises: L'Etre et le Neant (Being and Nothingness: 1943), and L'existentialisme et un humanisme (Existentialism is Humanism: 1946). For the purposes of the current thesis, we will concentrate on the latter work.

L'existentialisme et un humanisme is based on a lecture Sartre gave at the Club Maintenant, Paris in the months following the conclusion of the Second World War[14]. Sartre posits an ethical Existentialism by drawing a line between two kinds of Existentialists: Christian Existentialists (existentialistes chrétiens) and Atheist Existentialists (existentialistes athécs). The difference between the two essentially comes down to a belief in which came first: existence (l'existence) or essence (l'essence). Do we come into this life with our personality already decided upon and preloaded into the frontal lobe? Or are personality and personal preference something that only emerge after we come into being? It's a variation on the nature versus nurture debate. Is who we are pre-existing, or is our essence shaped by the influence of circumstance and environment?

The prosaic answer to the question is probably a combination of the two. The work done on genetics in the seventy or more years since L'existentialisme et un humanisme was published has revealed certain traits that we find encoded in our genetic code. These traits set our susceptibility to particular hereditary diseases, and determine our hair and eye colour and sexual preference, amongst other things. Yet this is a small part of the picture. Genetics set sexuality, yet everything else is a free choice and open to individual interpretation. A person may be born pre-programmed to be a certain sexuality, but how that sexuality manifests itself and the types of people that that individual will be attracted to is determined by everything else that happens to them after their birth. Genetics can only set the starting conditions for how a person's life might proceed. Until that protean essence comes into existence, we can no more pre-determine the outcome than we can predict the path and position of a single elementary particle.

As an existentialiste athéc, Sartre is firmly of the belief that existence precedes essence. He goes to the trouble of rejecting the existence of God, but notes that belief in a deity is not an answer or panacea to life's ills, as life seems to proceed whether one believes in a god or not, with all the same risks of famine, disease, and war. Those who hold to a particular faith get hit by cars and throw themselves from bridges just the same as those who hold to no faith at all. Sartre posits that by rejecting the existence or influence of God, all that remains is oneself and one's actions. These are the only things for which or to whom an individual can be held responsible ("je suis responsable pour moi-méme et pour tous...").

Moreover, by rejecting the control of any greater power, whether it be God, communism, or societal pressure to conform to a restrictive role in society, we wrestle back control over our life choices. If one believes that one's path in life is hindered by immigrants, or shadowy world cabals, then one's path is unlikely to change, as immigration and global politics (real and imagined) are beyond the range of most people's influence. It is possible to advise others; nurture them; force our will upon them even, but the rationalisation to act or not to act is an internal process and it can only be affected by external influences up to a point. If one is restricted to blaming others for past mistakes, there is little one can do to redress those mistakes for the future. If, on the other hand, one takes ownership of past personal mistakes and takes steps to redress them and prevent such errors occurring in the future, then progress is made by the mere action. You can't change other people. You can only change yourself. And this brings us back to Jean-Baptiste Clamence and La Chute.

In the moment of his paralysis by the riverbank, Clamence becomes Jean Paul Sartre's concept of existentialism made narrative flesh. Clamence is a man alone, free from God (for whom he does not expresses a preference), or the judgement of others. The decision to act or not to is his to make alone. He cannot externalise the responsibility to anyone else. As Dante serves as an avatar for all such pilgrims who make the journey towards Christian redemption, so Clamence is an avatar for the existentialist faced with total autonomy.

Clamence would appear to be the classic model of an existentialiste athéc. He tells no one else of what happened (not until the confessionals of his later years). He takes no steps to ascertain if the woman survived, or her body was found. For a time he forgets the incident, but when the memory returns, Clamence arranges his own series of punishments. He seeks to blames no one else for his lack of activity.

Clamence does not offer an explanation for his inaction. Perhaps it is a variation on the bystander effect, where large groups of people will stand and watch a violent assault, because the presence of others leads individuals to assume that someone else will step in. The more people that are present, the less likely it is that any one person will take charge. As a lawyer, Clamence will have spent a good part of his life receiving training and instruction from others, as well as falling into their bad habits and practices, which is the inevitable consequence of working in any profession of high institutionalisation. In that instant at the riverbank, Clamence is the king of his own domain, with power of life and death over this one person. Yet autonomy is a concept so alien to most people that Clamence baulks at the responsibility. No one else is compelling him to act through instruction, or the simple fear of being thought a coward by society, and so he takes no action. He condemns two people to their fate in doing so.

Considered in reference to its associations with Existentialism, La Chute is a work of tragedy. Sartre notes in L'existentialisme et un humanisme that when faced with two choices, both of which are equally unpleasant, or have unfortunate consequences, there is no right or wrong answer:

"La seule chose qui compte, c'est de savoir si l'invention qui se fait, se fait au nom de la liberté." 

 

(The only thing that counts is knowing if the invention one makes is made in the name of liberty.)

The tragedy in La Chute comes not from Clamence's lack of action at the riverbank, but his reaction to his inaction. Clamence embraces the basics of existentialisme athéc by accepting responsibility for what happened and seeking personal penitence for his transgression. Yet the function of punishment is to force the individual to accept the consequences of their actions to reduce the risk of similar bad behaviour occurring in the future. Once the individual has accepted responsibility for their actions, and demonstrated sufficient remorse to the point where the probability of reoccurrence is negligible, punishment moves on to rehabilitation. Clamence cannot give a repeat performance of his act of cowardice, because he refuses to be placed in that situation again by his prohibition on crossing water after dark, so in one sense the chances of recidivism are slim. Yet this further cowardice only compounds on the original act of treachery towards a fellow human being in need. Clamence is sorry in thought, but not in action. This prevents him from moving on from the punishment stage. He remains trapped in a cycle of self-recrimination: An existentialiste athéc manifestation of hell.

Clamence's remorse is manifest, yet he shows little interest in redemption, unless in his acts of self-confession and contrition at Mexico-City. His refusal to cross a bridge after dark demonstrates the extent to which the event has marked and weakened him for evermore. By hanging around notorious suicide spots and rescuing from the waters the next person that requested help, Clamence would wipe away his guilt at a stroke. Further acts of kindness could rescue something worthwhile from a scene of tragic self-destruction. France had two volunteer lifeboat services at the time: Société Centrale de Sauvetage des Naufragés, and Hospitaliers Sauveteurs Bretons[15]. Another path to redemption. Yet Clamence will not even visit the scene of his perceived crime, only ossify in regret at its borders.

Dante's journey leads away from the ninth circle, towards the ascension of the island of Purgatory and his emersion in the River Lethe, which unaccountably flows out of the Garden of Eden[16], and whose waters wash away the memory of sin from all penitent souls that pass through their flow. Clamence stagnates, despite having less reason than anyone in the Inferno to remain there. It is a free choice, but it's hardly a constructive choice.

There is also the question of the woman on the bridge. What about her free choices? We can of course never know what circumstances motivated her to jump into the River Seine. Had she, as Clamence believes, been ruined by a man, or ruined rather by her own malfunctioning psyche? Is she Ophelia, compelled to drown herself by the actions of some rash Hamlet, or like Virginia Woolf driven to desperation by mental illness and the impact she thought she was having upon her loved ones:

"I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know."

Clamence demonstrates a certain chauvinism by assuming the woman can only have taken her life through the actions of a man. Virginia Woolf had died fifteen years before La Chute was published. Albert Camus had written his treatise on suicide, The Myth of Sisyphus, only a year later in 1942. "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem," Camus writes, "and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy." It could also be argued that suicide is Existentialism taken to its extreme, where the individual assumes responsibility for the their own termination. Although like the choices of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, it hardly demonstrates Existentialism at its most positive or proactive.

In Resurrection, Nekhlyudov is directly and actively responsible for the destitution of the woman who comes before him as a magistrate. Clamence, on the other hand, is a victim of chance. Ten minutes later and he would have had no knowledge of the existence of the woman on the bridge. He had no hand in her downfall and didn't compel her to jump. Yet he carries the weight of her action for the rest of his life. Like Satan, if he only stopped struggling for one moment and recognised that his own actions are what's keeping him imprisoned, he might break free. If Satan stopped flapping his wings, the ambient temperature from the circles above the ninth would melt the River Cocytus beneath him[17]. If Clamence would only cross one bridge after dark, it would negate the need to cross so many during the day.

One answer to why Clamence proceeds as he does might be found in the personal life of Albert Camus. It is known that Camus's second wife, Francine Faure, on at least two occasions jumped from the upper floor of buildings, including the second floor of the psychiatric hospital in which she was being treated for depression. These might have been suicide attempts, and Faure's state is likely to have been exacerbated by Camus's various affairs.

We can therefore read Clamence as Camus, and the woman on the bridge as Francine. La Chute is Camus's partially veiled confession. It is also an act of scapegoating by conjuration. Camus conjures Jean-Baptiste Clamence, attaches his sins to the judge-penitent, and condemns him to eternal damnation. Camus, meanwhile, continued with his life. Francine forgave him, and the couple are buried together in the south of France.

Whether or not one considers its methods wholesome, one can't deny fiction writing as a prime example of the industry of Existentialism. Some people blame others for their mistakes. Writers take their mistakes and turn them into literature, and cautionary tales for the instruction of others.

Clamence wants to be punished. In the final chapter his companion visits him at home, where he is laid up in bed. In his bedroom is displayed The Just Judges, a panel from a larger work painted by Hubert Van Eyck, in real life stolen from Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium in 1934. In La Chute it has been displayed at Mexico-City, but Clamence has taken it home and is telling all and sundry that he is in possession of the painting in the hope of being arrested for its theft. There is a suspicion in the final chapter that Clamence is near the end of his life and is desperate for some real world punishment because he does not believe in anything after death. Perhaps this explains the true nature of the companion to whom Clamence has been speaking all this time:

"Ne sommes-nous pas tous semblables, parlant sans tréve et à personne... Alors, racontez-moi, je vous prie, ce qui vous est arrivé un soir sur les quais de la Seine et comment vous avez réussi à ne jamais risquer votre vie. Prononcez vous-meme les mots qui, depus de années, n'ont cessé de rentir dans mes nuits, et que je dirai enfin par votre bouche: O jeune fille, jette-toi encore dans l'eau pour que j'aie une seconde fois la chance de nous sauver tous les deux." 

 

(Are we not the same? Always talking, and to no-one... Then tell me, please, is it you that arrived one night at the Seine, and how you managed to never risk your life? I say now the words that throughout the years have not ceased echoing in my nights and that I say at last through your mouth: O young women, throw yourself into the water one more time that I might have a second chance to save us both.)

In the book's final moments, Clamence is revealed to be talking to himself. Whether through idle day dream or hallucination, the person to whom Jean-Baptiste Clamence tells his confession is the younger Jean-Baptiste Clamence. Curiously, from the text quoted above, Clamence would appear to be speaking to a postlapsarian version of himself; one who also failed to prevent the women's fall. He also regrets his lack of action and repeats the mantra to second chances. The only difference it seems is that the mature Clamence has ceased to believe in second chances, despite the words still echoing through his nights. A regret, which, as discussed, could easily be remedied by facing the scene of his failure on any bridge after dark. To the bitter end, he obstinately refuses the call:

"Supposez, cher maitre, qu'on nous prenne au mot? Il faudrait s'exécuter. Brr...! l'eau est si froide." 

 

(Suppose, dear friend, that someone took us at our word. It would have to be carried out. Brr...! The water is so cold.)

Albert Camus's 1956 novel, La Chute, is an attempt to weave into a narrative structure the ideas and opinions of the French Existentialist movement. How well does it succeed in this attempt?

The character of Jean-Baptiste Clamence embodies and embraces many of the elements of Existentialism. However, he is a man caught between two camps. He adopts total autonomy for his failure to act at the riverbank, rather than report the incident to the police, or confess and seek forgiveness from a priest. Yet in deciding his own punishment, Clamence falls back on Christian ideas of punishment imposed punitively for disobedience, and as a deterrent to others who wish to challenge the current order. In the end he embraces the worst from both camps, and becomes neither existentialiste chrétien, or existentialiste athéc, but existentialiste tragique.

As well as perhaps being Camus's confession and act of penitence for the impact that his infidelities had upon Francine, La Chute is a cautionary tale on the dangers of living in the past. For one moment of inaction, Clamence lives a lifetime of regret. He could, as discussed, look to mitigate the guilt he feels by putting himself in a position where he can help others. He is stuck, fixated on that one moment in time. So much so that he wishes or prays through all the nights of his life for a chance to travel back and save the woman on the bridge. It is a vicious circle, or time loop, both of which have become staple narrative devices when referencing the Inferno since the death of Dante in 1321[18].

Clamence is an existentialiste tragique by stagnating in the failures of the past, rather than seeking to learn from those mistakes. His attitude towards women develops into something healthier than that of his prelapsarian state, but he also gives up his practice in Paris, which he says specialised in securing monies from estates for the widows and orphans of the deceased intestate. One admires the partial progress Clamence makes in his attitudes, but it only serves to underpin the tragedy of his character. For all his hellish associations, perhaps it is the younger, not older, Clamence who is Mephistopheles here, come to collect his own aged soul. Or like Virgil, come to lead the dying Clamence down into the Inferno. In his imagined conversations with his younger self, Clamence to the last embodies the essence of the Existentialist struggling for their autonomy, principally concerned with moderating their own actions. The tragedy is in how Clamence handles his autonomy, and how he burdens himself with the responsibility for the autonomy of a stranger.

Jean-Paul Sartre was Existentialism's last great contributor, although a clutch of French philosophers that came after Sartre, including Jacques Derrida and Michael Foucaut, could be considered post-existentialists, like the post-punk bands that emerged out of the wreckage of punk[19] in the late 1970s. And yet, Existentialism, particularly Sartre's model, has plenty to recommend it, especially in these days of increasing secularism, and the rising popularity of social media, and the echo chambers of thought and opinion that they create. Where we once lived in societies where we were forced to believe in a single truth that benefited a handful of people, increasingly we come to see our single truth, the one which places us at the centre of the universe,  as the only truth allowable, and waste time and energy trying to impose that truth on total strangers in 280 characters or less.

Existentialism speaks to this. We are each one of seven billion solutions that the planet Earth has found to the problem of consciousness. We are ultimately only responsible to and for ourselves. If we behaved in exactly the same manner as anyone else, we would be failing in the one purpose for which we were created: to be unique. Some of those unique solutions, of course, malfunction so that they are a danger to others or to themselves. This is where society has (or should have) institutions in place to provide remedy or to impose sanction. Individuals have a say in how these are administered, but apart from a handful of people in positions of high power or super celebrity, few people's influence extends far beyond the borders of their own fragile bodies, or short time upon this planet. People seek to interfere in the lives of others, or simply to find someone else to blame for every misfortune that befalls them. Ironically, if we paid less attention to other people's failings, and concentrated more on identifying and fixing our own, we might gain greater influence beyond our borders. Then the outdated ideas, industries, and institutions on which much of modern society is still based might give way to something more beneficial and flexible to the general health of all.

We live in an increasingly decentralised world: Facebook, Instagram,and Twitter are as much nation states as France, India, or Taiwan, only financed by advertising revenue instead of taxation. Much of our infrastructure is still highly centralised, the system of elected representation perhaps the most egregious relic in an age when it is possible to see and speak to someone on the other side of the world as if they were in the next room. It should no longer be necessary for 600 or so individuals to represent and vote on behalf of 6 million people, especially given the poor record of elected representatives in accurately representing the wishes of the electorate. Those 6 million people, the ones considered capable at the very least, should by this stage in our technological evolution be able to vote for themselves on matters before parliament, either through casting their vote directly through secure electronic means, or by having some kind of proxy in place that automatically casts a ballot based on the voter's preferences. The more individual preferences recorded for as many individuals as possible, the better regulated might society become to the wishes and needs of its individual citizens.

“If there were a nation of Gods," wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the grandfather of all French philosophy since the time of the revolution, "it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men.” The existentialiste athéc of Jean Paul Sartre rejects God in favour of making the individual God of their own life, reality, and realm. True democracy is still unobtainable for now, so long as people are bickering over trivial matters in a million places on line, and women are compelled to write and rewrite every social media post they make for fear that some male will pipe in to offer his unsolicited advice. One day we might be ready, and humanity might come to rule itself not through democracy, but nephocracy: rule by the cloud (from nephos, the Greek word for cloud). It would require a society of Existentialists to make it possible. Then might La Chute transcend its place as a novel to become a teaching aid and cautionary tale on the dangers and pitfalls of autonomous self-control. Atheist, Christian, or any other types of Existentialism would all be welcome, so long as they were able to give a better account of themselves than the example set by Jean-Baptiste Clamence.

La Chute also serves to remind us, like John Donne, that no one person is an island. We can accept the mantle of Sartre's Existentialism to take responsibility for our actions, but that is not the same as bearing the consequences of our actions alone. Even a society of Existentialists is a society. You can't change others, but neither can you move through life unaided. Society at its best spreads the load, so that no one individual or group bears too much of the burden. In a top down society, those on the bottom bear the load and so we see, as in Camus's time, that there is a long way to go before we approach any kind of happy societal medium that Existentialist thought might help to facilitate.

Albert Camus's 1956 novel, La Chute, is an attempt to weave into a narrative structure the ideas and opinions of the French Existentialist movement. How well does it succeed in this attempt?

Very nicely, thanks. Devilishly clever, one might say.

Et quand ils ont bien bu

Se plantent le nez au ciel

Se mouchent dans les étoiles

Et ils pissent comme je pleure

Sur les femmes infidèles

Dans le port d’Amsterdam,

Dans le port d’Amsterdam[20]

 

Albert Camus

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[1] La Chute, Albert Camus, Editions Gallimard, 1956

[2] Published in English translation as The Fall (1957)

[3] Which my Penguin Modern Classics version curiously translates as "By Heaven." I am not enough well versed in French or French Algerian idiom to know if it is a usual to use the Devil's name as a vocative or ejaculatory expression, but at face value Camus uses Diable here as both a vernacular expression of surprise and to redouble the hellish overtones. Heaven is nowhere to be found.

[4] Most notably, Anne Frank.

[5] https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005434

[6] As B is the voiced counterpart to unvoiced P, and where C can be pronounced as a K or an S, the initials JPS, signifying Jean Paul Sartre can also be seen.

[7] 1813-1855

[8] Georg Wilhelm Frederick Hegel (1770-1831)

[9] The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Ted Honderich (Editor), Oxford Universe Press, 1995

[10] 1889 - 1976

[11] Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) to a lesser extent is also considered a Godfather of Existentialism.

[12] 1905 - 1980

[13] 1818 - 1883

[14] 29 October 1945

[15] They merged into Société Nationale de Sauvetage en Mer in 1967

[16] Genesis cites four rivers flowing out of Eden: The Tigris, Euphrates, Gishon and Pishon.

[17] There is something wonderfully Greek about Satan's predicament in the Inferno. One finds much of Tantalus and Sisyphus in the punishment chosen for him.

[18] See the TV shows, Preacher and American Horror story, or James Joyce's Finnegans Wake for variations on these techniques. Also, Groundhog Day, Doctor Who, Star Trek or Stargate for variations on the basic theme.

[19] The Fall and Joy Division to Sartre's Clash. Heidegger would be Joey Ramone in this analogy. Kierkegaard: MC5

[20] "And when they are too drunk, They plant their noses to the sky. They blow their noses in the stars. And they piss like I cry, On unfaithful women. In the port of Amsterdam. In the port of Amsterdam." - Amsterdam, Jacques Brel