SUSAN DUNN
87
talking of it. Simply, no one is ever acquitted any more." Clamence can offer
no clemency. An irremediable fall from grace, a relentless consciousness of
guilt in a world which knows neither compassion nor pardon constitute the
sad human condition. The twentieth century, having exiled the king, exiled
itselffrom his kingdom of misericord. Camus, by the way, had originally in–
tended The Fall to be one of the short stories in his last collection,
Exile and
lhe Kingdom.
In Camus's vision of the development of the Occident, the decapitation
of Louis XVI was the single most significant event in French history. No
person, no institution, and no ideology could henceforth replace the king who,
like God, comforted and rescued the poor and the suffering. In the cold, sun–
less, foggy universe of
The Fall,
the sun-king is absent and a tortured and
pitiless "sun-citizen" reigns in his place. Clamence's fall mirrors an entire civi–
lization's fall from grace, of which the execution of Louis XVI was emblem–
atic. The sad and defenseless Louis XVI , the first victim of the Terror, rep–
resents all subsequent victims of political terror and moral indifference.
Lest one think that Camus overestimates the significance and the con–
sequences of the regicide, it is interesting to read Jean-Fran<;ois Lyotard's
pronouncement in a dialogue with Richard Rorty in 1985 in
Critique.
Ly–
otard argues that the regicide was not only a specifically French and specifi–
cally modern crime but that it is the point of origin of all modern French
thought: "We French cannot really think about politics or philosophy or
literature without remembering that all this - politics, philosophy, literature–
began, in the modern world, under the sign of a crime. A crime was commit–
ted in France in 1793. They killed a good and entirely likable king who was
the incarnation oflegitimacy. We cannot not remember that this crime was
horrible. This means that when we try
to
think about politics, we know that
the question of legitimacy is always at issue. We can say the same for
literature. The difficulty that Americans, and also English and Germans have
in understanding what we ourselves call writing ("ecriture") is linked to the
memory of this crime. When we speak about writing, the accent is on that
which is necessarily criminal in writing."
Like Camus , Lyotard has elevated the regicide to the status of water–
shed in French history. And, like Camus, he seems to envision centuries of
monarchy as a golden age before the revolutionary Fall. But Lyotard's thesis
does not concern compassion and political morality; he makes instead the
hallucinatory assertion that not only French history but French language and
thought bear the mark of the founding crime of regicide. It seems pointless to
debate such a factitious position that isolates the execution of the king as the
focal point of French consciousness and intellectual life, but it is a fascinating
argument for remembering (he insists that the French cannot not remember)
