Falling for Dante: The Inferno in Albert Camus's la Chute

Two features of Camus's chute have received critical attention: its status as a long-delayed response to Jean-Paul Sartre's criticisms of The Rebel and the influence of Dante's Inferno. However, the extent to which these two features of chute are interconnected and the way in which Camus's intertextual dialogue with Inferno is integral to that interconnection remains unexplored. This essay seeks to repair that omission. ********** Albert Camus's last completed work, chute (The Fall), has frequently been regarded as an earnest, yet tongue-in-cheek, response to the scathingly personal criticisms leveled at the Nobel-prize-winning author by his one-time friend and compatriot, Jean-Paul Sartre. In May of 1952, nearly one year a chapter of L'homme revolte (The Rebel) published in Sartre's journal, Les temps modernes, it subjected to a harsh review by critic Francis Jeanson. Startled by the appearance of such extensive criticism in a publication edited by fellow intellectuals whom he also considered his friends, Camus replied to Jeanson: the result a firefight between Sartre and Camus, publicly waged in the pages of Les temps modernes and not limited to politics, philosophy, and ideology. In fact, Sartre used the August 1952 issue of his journal not only to record his disagreements with his fellow existentialist, but also to announce the dissolution of their (admittedly tenuous) friendship. Sartre thus announced: Notre amitie n'etait pas facile mais je la regretterai. Si vous la rompez aujourd'hui, c'est sans doute qu'elle devait se rompre. Beaucoup de choses nous rapprochaient, peu nous separaient. Mais ce peu etait encore trop: l'amitie, elle aussi, tend a devenir totalitaire; il faut l'accord en tout ou la brouille, et les sans- parti eux-memes se comportent en militants de partis imaginaires. [...] Je repondrai done: sans aucune colere mais, pour las premiere fois depuis que je vous connais, sans menagements. Un melange de suffisance sombre et de vulnerabilite a toujours decourage de vous dire des verites entieres. Le resultat c'est que vous etes devenu la proie d'une morne demesure qui masque vos difficultes interieures et que vous nommez, je crois, mesure mediterraneenne. Tot ou tard, quelqu'un vous l'eut dit: autant que ce soit moi. (90, 91) Four years later, Camus would publish his last, and perhaps most complex and personal recit, chute. Marking the end of a long period of writer's block, chute was quickly seen as a time bomb, a long-delayed reply to Sartre's August 1952 Temps modernes attack (Lottman 593). Perhaps more important to Camus's sense of literary well-being, however, the fact that after [...] years of pained silence, it a creative triumph, a victory of the spirit--simultaneously revenge, self-understanding, and a modern vision of damnation (Aronson 200). Thus, as Olivier Todd suggests in Albert Camus: Une vie, La Chute n'est pas une autobiographie. [...] Mais Camus fut-il jamais aussi profondement et subtilement autobiographique que derriere le masque de Clamence? (637). Consequently, Todd concludes, avec ce recit peut-etre le plus etincelant et accidentel de tous, Camus resume, survole et rassemble sa vie, lui donnant comme malgre lui, apres coup, une unite (647). Equally apparent to subsequent critics of the novel has been the influence of Dante's Inferno on its organizing structure and imagery: repeatedly marked by overt references to the first cantica of this fourteenth-century epic, chute's monologue seems to represent an oblique, intertextual dialogue between Camus and Dante. Nevertheless, most scholars seem content to regard the references to Inferno in chute as pedestrian observations and superficial invocations designed primarily to showcase the erudition of the novel's verbose and pompous protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Clamence. And yet, the function of Dante's Inferno in Camus's chute may be both more subtle and more sophisticated. …