A NETWORK OF GUILT

That Camus was very much aware of the complex interrelationship of these discourses is apparent in The Fall. As he looks back to the war in this novel, the focus that he gives to the issue of judgment does center on a figure who clearly represents the legal profession Yet the novel’s aim I will be arguing, is to remind its readers in subtle but unmistakable ways of the complicity of both law and medicine in the Holocaust⁷ The ‘‘bystanders’’ that The Fall indicts are both legal and medical practitioners those whose institutional affiliations paved the way toward making extermination a political reality during the war But Camus’s indictment of these specific ‘‘bystanders’’ - physicians and jurists - works not by rendering them into two discrete and distinct types but by depicting them through a figure who condenses fea­tures of both

Indeed Camus begins his novel by having Clamence recount how the Dutch host of the bar in which he and his interlocutor are sitting mistook him for a doctor: ‘‘Yes’’ he says irritably ‘‘the ape opened his mouth to call me doctor In these countries everyone is a doctor I am not a doctor If you want to know I was a lawyer’’ (Camus 1991a ₽· 8) The importance of the bartender’s error is not that he substitutes lawyer with doctor - an error that the narrator in turn corrects by replacing doctor with lawyer The significance of this mistake rather, hinges precisely on the man’s confusion, that is on the commingling of these two figures.

This confusion is refigured at the end of the narrative which repeats this moment of mistaken identity with a crucial difference For it turns out that Clamence’s companion is not as he believed a policeman whom he hoped would arrest him for concealing a stolen painting significantly called ‘‘The Just Judges’’ - a kind of displaced penance for the guilt he presumably feels at having turned his back on the woman in Paris⁸ Instead of a policeman, he finds himself confronted with his mirror image: ‘‘But of course you are not a policeman; that would be too easy What? Ah I suspected as much, you see That strange affection I felt for you had sense to it then In Paris you practice the noble profession of lawyer! I sensed that we were of the same species’’ (Camus 1991a ₽· 147).

The English translation however misses a critical element of the state­ment’s political potency In the original French Clamence exclaims ‘‘Je savais bien que nous etions de la meme race’’ (Camus 1956, p. 152) -1 knew that we were of the same race In this moment, Clamence both recognizes himself in his interlocutor and subsequently raises the specter of race - a concept that laid the foundation for Nazi genocide and one that was shaped through both medicine and law ⁹ The jarring invocation of race in what had appeared to be a story of moral or legal culpability sets The Fall on a course toward another more specific target inviting a series of associations that move the novel not just toward its final moment of confession but also to Camus’s sweeping accusation of those who abandoned their professional responsibility ‘‘When one has no character one has to apply a method’’ (Camus 1991a p 11) Clamence states with regard to the ‘‘vacuum-clean­ing’’ of Amsterdam’s Jews In the wake of the Nuremberg trials this method emerges as a resolutely professional one: as the combined destructive power of medical and legal ‘‘methods’’ that defined citizenship (and with it, the right to life) in racial terms.

The Nuremberg trial of the Nazi doctors demonstrated the multiple ways in which medicine advanced and reinforced the Third Reich’s politics for­malizing racial concepts and laying the groundwork for government pol­icies Telford Taylor’s opening statement, for example notes a 1935 volume by Dr Arthur Guett, Nazi Director of Public Health in the Ministry of the Interior Guett asserts: ‘‘[T]he ill-conceived ‘love of thy neighbor’ has to disappear especially in relation to inferior or asocial creatures It is the supreme duty of a national state to grant life and livelihood only to the healthy and hereditarily sound and racially pure folk for all eternity The life of an individual has meaning only in the light of that ultimate aim that is in the light of his meaning to his family and to his national state’’ (Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, 1949-1953, vol.

The alliance of law and medicine was particularly manifest in the 1933 creation of ‘‘Hereditary Health Courts’’ which made decisions in cases of sterilization The prosecution in the Justice Case documented the legal establishment of these composite institutions in the Law of July 14 1933 for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases which dictated that such courts be ‘‘composed of a local court judge as president, a public health officer and another physician approved in the German Reich with expert knowledge of matters pertaining to eugenics’’ (Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, 1949-195) vol. 3, p. 244) The combined force of the medical and legal professions thus achieved not only rhetorical amplitude but above all institutional potency ¹¹

What the Nazis pushed to its most horrific limits is nonetheless imbricated in the national rhetoric of France’s own politics One might think here of the particularities of French history with regard to race of the national claim to purity at the very foundations of political life. ‘‘La Marseillaise” the French national anthem declares that ‘‘an impure blood should not water our soil” (‘‘qu’un sang impur n’abreuve nos sillons”). The verse resounds as a chilling echo of Nazi Germany’s doctrines of racial purity As the Journal of the American Medical Association documented in 1935, the Nuremberg law­makers saw themselves as ‘‘permeated with the knowledge that the purity of the German blood is a precondition for the continued existence of the Ger­man people and filled with the inflexible determination to make the German nation secure for all future time’’ (Lifton 1986, p.

The irony of The Fall's moment of recognition moreover is that Clam- ence’s vision of himself - ‘‘we were of the same race’’ - is produced by using race to identify the similar the semblable. In the wake of Nazism however, race had become a tool of distinction - a way to differentiate between desirable and undesirable pure and impure.¹² And in this regard one can­not forget that what was formalized in law was carried out in medicine at the hands of those physicians who authorized decisions of whom to sterilize or kill. Race like the bridge that Cover posits as a fitting metaphor for law, not only connects individuals to each other but also creates communities and nations through differentiation

The Larousse Dictionary of the French Language (1988) defines race as a ‘‘category of people who have the same behavior the same tasks and the same inclinations” But the examples given to illustrate this definition take on a dramatically different tone relying not on sameness but in an unset­tling way on distinction and separation - and on turns of phrase that recall history through its most painful idioms And so we find the following: ‘‘La race des exploiteurs est une race maudite’’ - the race of exploiters is a cursed race; ‘‘Quelle sale race que la des usuriers’’ - what a dirty race is the race of usurers The pejorative context that these illustrations evoke - one might think for instance of the epithet ‘‘sale juif,’’ dirty Jew - remind one all too well of how racial theories in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe sought to unify one race together by brutally separating others from it

As a synonym for race the Larousse dictionary directs us to the word engeance, derived from the latinate meaning of denoncer: to indicate, reveal denounce or expose - and perhaps most important for our consid­eration of The Fall, to inform against Engeance, defined as ‘‘a group of people who are judged to be suspect ’’ ‘‘une sale engeance ’’ reminds us that race in Camus’s novel is burdened with a weight that far exceeds its final moment of recognition For its darker history is also that of medicine’s and law’s joint roles in separating and distinguishing one race from another as well as of communities in which Aryan neighbors became informants - and thus accomplices - in turning over their Jewish neighbors to Nazi authorities.

The act of informing against a suspect group is here embedded in the mistaken identities of Clamence as a doctor of his interlocutor as a policeman and of the recognition of sameness in the discovery that he too, is a lawyer What we witness in The Fall is not, in other words simply the conversion of a medical narrative into a legal one ‘‘We were of the same race”: Camus’s turn to race and the medicine and law that defined this race in the Third Reich hinges on something much subtler and more sinister and speaks not explicitly through one discourse or the other but points to their concomitant complicity to the way law and medicine mutually reinforced each other As Robert Jay Lifton documents in The Nazi Doctors, while eugenic theory also took hold in the United States and Britain the pos­sibilities for political and legal redress left ample room for resistance to eugenic policies Contrasting the American and British situations with that of the Third Reich Lifton concludes

In Nazi Germany on the other hand the genetic romanticism of an extreme biomedical vision combined with a totalistic political structure to enable the nation to carry out relentlessly and without legal interference a more extensive program of compulsory sterilization than had ever previously been attempted Indeed the entire Nazi regime was built on a biomedical vision that required the kind of racial purification that would progress from sterilization to extensive killing (Lifton 1986, p. 24)¹³

In recognizing himself through the mirror of race - through in other words the reflection of his own vocation in another’s - Clamence at last informs against himself ‘‘I informed no one’’ he says of the woman’s suicide least of all himself: ‘‘The next day and the days following I didn’t read the papers’’ (Camus 1991a p. 71) The flight from information and the ensuing descent into willed ignorance comes undone in this final moment setting complicity on par with culpability The collaborative work of law and medicine that The Fall illuminates thus resists the historical insistence on ordinariness refusing to corroborate the broad categories of ordinary perpetrators or bystanders; for Camus as Bergerson claims in his reading of The Plague, insists that ‘‘we must learn to see through this distracting and dehumanizing culture of nor­malcy and struggle against it as a rebel’’ (Bergerson 2002, p. 130).