What Happened?: Camus's La Chute, Shoshana Felman and the Witnessing of Trauma

What Happened? The event is not a given.

(Felman 194; emphasis in original)

The "act" of the woman remains unclear in the text: she may have jumped, she may have fallen, or something else may have happened.

(LaCapra 78)

At the end of the last century Raymond Gay-Crosier invoked practical reasons for declining to cite the more than two hundred works devoted specifically to Camus's La Chute (127). It would be a much more realistic undertaking to list critical studies of Camus's third novel in more recent years. Whilst there has been a palpable revival of interest in Camus, much of it has been from a postcolonial perspective, drawing impetus from the posthumous publication of Camus's final, unfinished novel Le Premier Homme in 1994 and focussing on his conflicted attitude to Algerian independence. Set around the foggy streets and canals of Amsterdam, La Chute offers less obvious material to the postcolonial critic than Camus's other major novels and short stories. However, as important texts by Shoshana Felman and Dominick LaCapra have demonstrated, the novel is of substantial interest when read from the standpoint of trauma studies.¹ La Chute refers explicitly to the killing of Jews during the Second World War and it revolves around questions of memory, narratorial reliability, and the entanglement of personal and collective histories. This article examines the issues of trauma and witnessing in La Chute principally by analyzing Felman's essay "Camus' The Fall, or the Betrayal of the Witness," which appears as a chapter in her and Dori Laub's Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Felman's discussion of La Chute is exemplary both as a committed reading and as an instance of how Camus's novel entices its readers into the pitfalls of misreading. What interests me here are the ways in which the novel both encourages and resists Felman's reading, implicating her—as it has perhaps implicated all its best readers—in a complex interplay of blindness and insight through which the text itself remains stubbornly opaque. Felman's interpretation of La Chute tells about the nature of reading in general and about the specific difficulties of producing a persuasive, comprehensive reading of Camus's most difficult novel.

Felman makes an irresistible case for relating La Chute to the problems of witnessing and representation raised, in particular but not uniquely, by the Holocaust. The invitation to read the novel in the dark light of the Holocaust is issued in its opening pages when Clamence tells his interlocutor that he lives in the former Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. This establishes Amsterdam, and Europe more generally, and the text of La Chute, as spaces which are marked by an indelible crime:

Moi, j'habite le quartier juif, ou ce qui s'appelait ainsi jusqu'au moment où les frères hitlériens y ont fait de la place. Quel lessivage! Soixante-quinze mille juifs déportés ou assassinés, c'est le nettoyage par le vide. J'admire cette application, cette méthodique patience! Quand on n'a pas de caractère, il faut bien se donner une méthode. Ici, elle a fait merveille, sans contredit, et j'habite sur les lieux d'un des plus grands crimes de l'histoire.

(701)

Although there is no reason to believe that Clamence is directly or indirectly a victim of the Holocaust, he can readily be seen as suffering the effects of some kind of trauma, acting out an experience that is not fully recalled and assimilated. This could explain, for example, his sense of doubleness and falseness, his dissociation from his own acts, his sense that he is playing a game or performing a role, and the oscillations between forgetting and partial remembering which recur throughout his narrative. It might also help to explain the self-consciously unreliable nature of his narrative. As Cathy Caruth explains, trauma narratives almost invariably raise the question of their own truth: "The problem [of truth] arises not only in regard to those who listen to the traumatized, not knowing...