JUDGMENT IN THE SUBJUNCTIVE

The Fall's confession in which Clamence expresses his anguish over the woman’s suicide - the closest he will come to confessing his guilt outright - thus issues from a moment of identity which is also Camus’s suggestion of complicity Harnessing race’s synonym engeance, Clamence recasts it, informing against himself - and against the doctors and lawyers with whom he has been associated in the narrative In this moment, Clam­ence recognizes himself in his interlocutor through the specter of racy a recognition which occasions the transfer of his moral dilemma onto his companion and the examination of his culpability in the light of day: ‘‘Then please tell me what happened to you one night on the quays of the Seine and how you managed never to risk your life,’’ he implores Speaking both as and to his companion Clamence then articulates an impossible wish: ‘‘O young woman throw yourself into the water again so that I may a second time have the chance of saving both of us!’’ (Camuy 1991a, p.

But if race gives him the certainty (‘‘I knew we were of the same race’’) that precipitates this expression of grief Clamence’s knowledge dissolves before the desire to go back in time and do things differently For he addresses the woman’s ghost in the subjunctive: ‘‘jette-toi encore dans l’eau pour que j'aie une seconde fois la chance de nous sauver tous les deux!’’ (Camus 1956, p. 153) The hypothetical nature of his exclamation, expressed through the subjunctive ‘‘j’aie’’ - ‘‘so that I may a second time have the chance of saving both of us!’’ - should not surprise us since Clamence has already noted his predilection for the subjunctive mode of speech ‘‘Ah I see you smile at that use of the subjunctive I confess my weakness for that mood and for fine speech in genera)’’ (Camus 1991a, p 5) he tells his listener as the novel opens

The ‘‘fine speech’’ that keeps the past at a safe distance offers Clamence the very relief he seeks enabling him to conclude his outburst with the reassurance that comes of an irreversible past ‘‘But let’s not worry!’’ he concludes ‘‘It’s too late now It will always be too late Fortunately!’’

Thus far I have been arguing for a reading of Camus that engages the joint culpability of medicine and law in the trauma of World War IL I would like to conclude however by broadening The Fall's focused accusation of perpetrators in order to think about the work’s wider juridical claim In order to consider the reassurance that Clamence longs for - the relief of a past that cannot be reversed - I turn to the question of law’s confrontation with trauma and more broadly with how to judge the irreversible past How does one judge a perpetrator when to recall Robert Jackson’s opening statement at Nuremberg ‘‘Juridical action always comes after the event?’’

The answer to this question I believe lies in The Fall's use of the sub­junctive, which enters the narrative as a reminder of what law cannot do - or rather what it cannot undo.

In its recourse to the subjunctive to the past as a hypothetical, The Fall suggests that the force of judgment lies in issues other than compensation Its force rather emerges from the historical imagination that the subjunc­tive demands: the act of imagining what one might have done how one should have acted The subjunctive and juridical force thus posits the imagined alternative not to the future but to the past and sets this alternative against the past as the basis of judgment and culpability On the bridge between ‘‘what happened’’ and ‘‘what should have happened’’ Clamence - and those he represents - crosses from denial to guilt

Seen in this light, the certainty of The Fall’s last sentence - ‘‘It will always be too late’’ - enters as a kind of plug or gauze staunching the uncertainty of Clamence’s wishful address to the woman to ‘‘throw yourself into the water again." For if he could go back would anything really be different? The sarcasm embedded in his ‘‘Fortunately!’’ resonates with an earlier episode in which Clamence clearly grasps how he should have acted and confronts the futility of looking back in frustration Following an alterca­tion with a motorcyclist during which Clamence feels himself humiliated in public he replays the incident in his mind imagining how it might have been different:

As an afterthought I clearly saw what I should have done I saw myself felling d’Art­agnan with a good hook to the jaw getting back into my car pursuing the monkey who had struck me overtaking him jamming his machine against the curb taking him aside and giving him the licking he had fully deserved With a few variants I ran off this little film a hundred times in my imagination But it was too late and for several days I chewed bitter resentment (Camus 1991a p· 54)

Clamence’s resignation with regard to this moment - ‘‘But it was too late” - anticipates the narrative’s final pronouncement, the emphatic realization that ‘‘It will always be too late’’ As frustration dissolves into relief the narrative signals its condemnation of its own narrator who recognizes an alternative to the woman’s suicide but is all too eager to dismiss it as an irretrievable moment of history This dismissal, however is the very moment when judgment can begin: the juridical imagination insists on judging sub- junctively - on holding an individual responsible for what might have been, rather than turning away from this possibility as a moment that ‘‘will always be too late’’ As Telford Taylor remarks in the Justice Trial, the jurists accused of membership in criminal organizations ‘‘all had special training and successful careers in the service of the law They of all Germany should have understood and valued justice’’ (Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, 1949-1953, vol.

To realize that rewriting the past does not amount to re-righting it is not ultimately to absolve individuals of the responsibility to judge retrospec­tively Revisiting history in narrative in other words does not revise it in any moral sense: the alternative to this history will continue to haunt to remind a passive or impassive bystander of‘‘what I should have done’’ And yet if The Fall's more explicit bridges buckle under the weight of time and history, Camus offers us another kind of connective tissue - a conceptual bridge that connects rather than separates: the term race and the knowledge and rec­ognition that this word produces bringing the guilt of professions to bear on each other and subtly but forcefully reminding us of the interlocking pro­fessional network that made atrocity possible of the ‘‘race’’ of doctors and lawyers who made race a cornerstone of an unspeakable chapter in history

It is here in the novel’s moment of deepest certainty that confession can begin - and with if the recognition of what is possible in the face of history. For if one cannot go back to right a wrong one can nonetheless identify the positions from which that wrong was committed And so it is as a profes­sional - a mistaken doctor a former lawyer - rather than simply as a broadly construed bystander that Clamence stands accused

The Fall, in revisiting the past to ask ‘‘Could it have been otherwise?’’ does not suggest that there is nothing worthwhile in imagining alternatives that are no longer available But it does insist that these subjunctive hypothetical meditations cannot arise without that moment of identification and self-recognition - without crossing the bridge of race into complicity a crossing over which sets us on the course away from the prospect of reliving or undoing history and toward the possibility of identifying and judging its perpetrators

NOTES

1. I am grateful to Daniel Y. Kim for his invaluable comments and suggestions in writing this article.

2. See for example The Holocaust Chronicle, ed. David Aretha: ‘‘Some 170,000 Lodz Jews were forced into the ghetto which was served by only two major avenues, and by wooden pedestrian bridges that were constructed over those streets” (Aretha, 2002 p. 191).

3. United States v. Karl Brandt et al., which became known as the ‘‘Doctors Trial” or ‘‘Medical Case” indicted 23 defendants and was conducted from December 1946 to August 1947. United States v. Josef Alstoetter et al., referred to as the ‘‘Justice Case” indicted 16 Nazi jurists including officials in the Reich Ministry of Justice, prosecutors and judges The trial began in March 1947 and concluded in December of that year

4. Sander Gilman points out the close alliance between disease imagery and difference during the Nazi era: ‘‘In the realm of German science as in American medicine during the very same period syphilis was associated with a racial (as well as a pathognomonic) image of difference” (Gilman 1991 pp 218-219) In her polemic against the metaphoric use of illness Susan Sontag notes the way in which disease imagery enters in the service of politics in particular those of the Third Reich ‘‘Modern totalitarian movements whether of the right or of the left have been peculiarly - and revealingly - inclined to use disease imagery The Nazis declared that someone of mixed ‘racial’ origin was like a syphilitic European Jewry was repeatedly analogized to syphilis and to a cancer that must be excised ( ) As was said in speeches about ‘the Jewish problem’ throughout the 1930s to treat a cancer one must cut out much of the healthy tissue around it The imagery of cancer for the Nazis prescribes ‘radical’ treatment in contrast to the ‘soft’ treatment thought appropriate for tuberculosis - the difference between sanatoria (that is exile) and surgery (that is crematoria)’’ (Sontag 1990 pp 81-83)

5 Camus was well aware of this bitter irony and published a caustic appeal on May 17 1945 in Combat calling for the immediate release of prisoners in Dachau: ‘‘Can it be understood what this means when it is a matter of men who instead of waiting for victory to come from the other side of the sea sacrificed everything to hasten the day of their most cherished hope? And now that day is here! It finds them in the midst of corpses and stench trapped by barbed wire excluded from a world which in their darkest moments they never imagined to be so stupid and oblivious’’ (Camus 1991c p 109)

6. More recently Alan Dershowitz has echoed some of Camus’s concerns in his recent account of noteworthy trials: ‘‘The Nuremberg tribunal and those that fol­lowed it administered justice to a tiny fraction of those guilty of the worst barbarism ever inflicted on humankind (...) By convicting and executing a tiny number of the most flagrant criminals the Nuremberg court permitted the world to get on with business as usual· The German economy was quickly rebuilt the unification between East and West Germany became a reality - and anti-Semitism is once again rife throughout Europe ( ) The reality that following Nuremberg the world was to experience genocide again and again - in Cambodia the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda - demonstrates that trials alone cannot put an end to human barbarity’’ (Dershowitz 2004, pp.

7. For a lucid account of the historical relationship between medicine and law in Nazi Germany see Henry Friedlander The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Eutha­nasia to the Final Solution, and particularly Chapter 6, detailing the judiciary’s sup­port of the T4 (euthanasia) killing program (Friedlander 1995).

8 ‘‘I always hope in fact that my interlocutor will be a policeman and that he will arrest me for the theft of ‘‘The Just Judges.’’ For the rest - am I right? - no one can arrest me But as for that theft it falls within the provisions of the law and I have arranged everything so as to make myself an accomplice: I am harboring that painting and showing it to whoever wants to see it’’ (Camus 1991a p 146)

9 For a reading of race and disease in German literature both during the Third Reich and in the late 20th century see Sander Gilman The Jew’s Body, and par­ticularly Chapter 9, ‘‘The Jewish Disease: Plague in Germany 1939/1989.’’ (Gilman, 1991 pp 210-233) My focus here on medical discourse does not posit racial ideology - or the participation of professional discourses more generally - as a sufficient condition for the Holocaust I take such ideology to be a necessary rather than a sufficient condition a position articulated forcefully by Claude Lanzmann in relation to his film Shoah: ‘‘Between all these conditions - which were necessary conditions maybe but they were not sufficient there is an unbreachable discrepancy It is simply not possible to engender one out of the other There is no solution of con­tinuity between the two; there is rather this gap an abyss, and this abyss will never be bridged.’’ (Lanzmann 1995, p 206)

10 As one of the particularly horrific examples of Nazi doctors’ ‘‘scientification’’ of race Taylor cites the collection of Jewish skeletons undertaken by Third Reich physicians and particularly by the defendants Rudolf Brandt and Wolfram Sievers, who ‘‘were completely obsessed by all the vicious and malignant Nazi racial the­ories.’’ In a 1942 report to Himmler Sievers wrote: ‘‘We have a nearly complete collection of skulls of all races and peoples at our disposal· Only very few specimens of skulls of the Jewish racy however are available with the result that it is impossible to arrive at precise conclusions from examining them The war in the East now presents us with the opportunity to overcome this deficiency By procuring the skulls of Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars who represent the prototype of the repulsive but characteristic subhuman we have the chance now to obtain a palpable scientific document.’’ (Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, 1949­1953 vol 1 p 54) These skulls were eventually collected not from the front but from Auschwitz and the corpses of Jewish victims were delivered to Strasbourg and discovered at the end of the war

11 Robert J Lifton thus concludes that these courts illustrated ‘‘the desired combination of medicalization and Nazi Party influence’’ and states that ‘‘The entire process was backed up by law and police power.’’ (Lifton, 1986 p 25) For a sus­tained account of Nazi Germany’s legal system see Muller (1991).

12 As Sander Gilman maintains ‘‘The very choice of the label ‘anti-Semitism’ was to create the illusion of a new scientific discourse for the hatred of the Jews.’’ (Gilman 1991 p 5)

13 Richard Lawrence Miller echoes this sense of professional cooperation in delineating race as a social and legal category pointing out that when a group's social status is formalized in law ‘‘Victims who were formerly enemies of the people now become enemies of the state This change in status is important Now bureau­crats take over from the rabble What was once disorganized becomes scientific, legal, and precise.” (Miller 1995, p 9) For a rigorous assessment of eugenics in British intellectual circles see Stone (2002).

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