Underground Whispers

Whether or not Albert Camus ever read Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is less important than how it summons Camus’s final novel, The Fall, into existence, and how the latter responds to its intellectual forebear on the question of freedom. Do we have it? Do we need it? Resting on opposite ends of the existential narrative, the distinction between these novels can be inferred by comparison of their dates of publication: Dostoevsky’s, in 1864, a youthful precursor, not quite ripe, among the first words in the genre; Camus’s, in 1956, a perfect representative, almost bitter, among the last words. Both texts, however, pose a timeless ontological problem without any discernible solution, shaking the reader’s confidence in the most fundamental ideas.

Like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Camus’s Jean-Baptiste Clamence catches us unawares and bids us, ever so seductively, to stay and listen. “May I, monsieur, offer my services without running the risk of intruding?” Despite his good manners, he has intruded, and in the course of several days, in the form of a long confessional monologue, unravels this human conundrum: what good is free will if it constantly subjects us to antithetical moral choices, self-judgment and recrimination, and the inconsistency of reason and passion?
The subject of reason is at the forefront of Notes from Underground. Its anomalous speaker despairs of the Social Utopian project of codifying rational human behavior and subordinating human will to the laws of reason, for these efforts fail to appreciate the complexity of the human condition, and lead inevitably to a uniform and totalitarian society. Nevertheless, the Underground Man is paralyzed by his own freedom to choose. Because he is conscious of every motive, consequence, and counterargument of every decision he could make, no decision seems to be right. His self-doubting breeds his inability to act.

Clamence’s own impotence on that fateful evening, when he failed to help the drowning woman, defeats all his early pretences to generosity and benevolence. In time he realizes that the charitable instinct was no more than a show and an ornament, that this self-stylized “superman”—“a man at the height of his powers […] fundamentally pleased with himself”—was a mere hypocrite. The truth haunts him with a mocking laugh always at his back, never visible, like the abstract public he fears has been judging his every action. But the laugh comes from no external place; it is the reproachful conscience that needs to be silenced, and not by reason but through passion. “Despairing of love and of chastity, I at last bethought myself of debauchery, a substitute for love, which quiets the laughter, restores silence, and above all, confers immortality […] Yes, I was bursting with a longing to be immortal.” In submitting to his primal urges—of wanton pleasure, violent anger, scorn for the beggar, the need to survive—he can relinquish his hypocrisy and, in crude terms, finally be honest with himself.

For Clamence, man’s greatest illusion is that he can be redeemed from this honesty. “I am for any theory that refuses to grant man innocence and for any practice that treats him as guilty. You see in me, très cher, an enlightened advocate of slavery.” If man had never fallen, he would never know pain; had he never desired freedom, he would be immortal. Our Edenic legacy imposes upon us free will in a world seemingly without any objective moral truths. Should we try to save our dying comrade, though we may die in the attempt? Does nobility supersede vanity? “In short, you see, the essential is to cease being free and to obey, in repentance, a greater rogue than oneself. When we are all guilty, that will be democracy.” The judge-penitent’s argument, as Camus has been suggesting all along, culminates in absurdity. If the “greater rogue” is the collective of human passions, and submission to libertinism is enlightenment, then self-destruction must surely follow. The Underground Man is acutely aware of this fact, of the doom inherent in exercising either pure reason or pure passion, and in dismay, has withdrawn from the world above, where damnation seems to attend every human decision.