The Fiction within the Fiction of Our Own Lives: Reflections on Albert Camus’s The Fall and the Selves within my Old Journals.
When a writer attempts to create fiction and draws on her own life, she is consciously stepping back from her life experience and making it an object of observation. She is moving from experiencing a scene in her life to transforming it into a work of art. That shift from subjective to objective requires the writer to become an author of a virtual reality. Seeing oneself as an object is not easy because most of us make assumptions about what is known and who we are. Unless some trauma or earthshattering event intrudes on our lives, forcing us to reassess our assumptions about reality and ourselves, we remain securely in the world we have fabricated and confident in the self we have come to be. We don’t question who we are simply because it is familiar and reveals a face others recognize as ours. And we recognize it as our own. Yet if we are to create a fiction based on our lives, we need to let go of those assumptions that others have about us. We must begin to see the multiplicity of selves that are within us.
When we pick up our pen and begin our story, we don’t necessarily think of ourselves as a character with definite life experiences that have shaped who we are. Why would it be important that we were born in Schenectady, New York, our father worked for General Electric, our mother lost two babies before we were born, our father’s mother committed suicide, our parents, raising us in the 1950s, were obsessed with appearances, with making us look like perfect children with the right clothes and ideal manners?
Those facts of our lives are, indeed, important because fiction relies on the details of our characters’ lives and how, as the story develops, the characters can change or refuse to change when faced with challenges.
It’s also important because those experiences inform how we view reality, ourselves, and others in our stories. What may blind us to fully developing our characters is our own blindness to the different selves that inhabit our lives. We cannot write about how a character struggles unless we have struggled. We cannot render a change in a character unless we have made a change.
Recently, I was rereading Albert Camus’s novel The Fall. The whole story is a long monologue by the main character, Jean-Baptiste Calmence, who happens upon another man and, as they drink, walk the streets of Amsterdam, and ride on a ferry, attempts to explain the nature of his life. At first, as Jean-Baptiste Clamence reflects on his life to a stranger, he paints a picture of a successful, generous, and empathetic man. But the more he speaks, the darker sides of his real self emerge.
I read the book in college while taking a Basic Beliefs class. The professor focused on a scene in the novel in which Clamence, the main character, came across a woman in black leaning over the bridge. He hesitates for a moment, thinking the sight strange at such an hour and given the barrenness of the streets, but continues on his way nevertheless. He had only walked a short distance when he heard the distinct sound of a body hitting the water. He knows exactly what has happened, but does nothing—in fact, he doesn't even turn around. The sound of screaming was
repeated several times, [as it went] downstream; then it abruptly ceased. The silence that followed, as the night suddenly stood still, seemed interminable. I wanted to run and yet didn't move an inch. I was trembling, I believe from cold and shock. I told myself that I had to be quick and felt an irresistible weakness steal over me. I have forgotten what I thought then. "Too late, too far..." or something of the sort. I was still listening as I stood motionless. Then, slowly, in the rain, I went away. I told no one. (Camus )
Prior to this moment, Clamence views himself as a selfless advocate for the weak and unfortunate. He ignores the incident with the woman because it contradicts his self-image as a generous man, and he continues on his way without making any effort to save her.
The professor asked us if we would, in such a circumstance, leap into the river? If we viewed ourselves as selfless, heroic, wanting to save someone’s life?
Or would we, as Clamence, turn our backs and continue on our way, pretending to be generous but, in reality, only wanting to preserve our image and not risk our lives for someone else?
I remember wondering if I would dare to leap into a river. As a twenty-year-old from an upper-middle-class family, would I even care if someone jumped? My inclination, because I was taught not to get involved with strangers, was to admit I’d most likely call out for help but not dive into the river. Some students thought they would sacrifice their own lives to save her. I didn’t believe them.
When I reread the book, I realized that Camus was exposing the conventional self-infatuation of middle-class liberals with helping others. He was addressing the hypocrisy and delusion of those who think that, because they are wealthy, they can help those unfortunates. He realized that such munificence was condescending.
He was painting an indictment of me, my wanting to help the less abled, the poor, and the disenfranchised. He could make such an indictment because he came from poverty from the inside. As an outsider who was raised in poverty in Algiers, Camus became famous in his early 20s. Fame brought him many admirers who gave him access to high society, where he was wined and dined. But he knew, deep inside, none of those wealthy advocates really knew him. He could wear a mask of a successful writer. He could speak out for political causes after WWII. But he also knew, deep in his heart, that he was playing a part and that few knew the complex, often contradictory, sides of him that he was able to portray in his novel.
As it happened, while reading Camus, I was browsing, as I am wont to do, searching for abandoned poems or stories. I found journals spanning from fifty years ago to more recent times. The initial entries were from August 13, 1976, and the last were from last year. There were also entries from the 1980s and late 1990s. When I read those entries, I realized that whoever I was back then was distinctly different from who I am now. Even how I wrote was different.
But I know that young man in his thirties. I remember him. He was newly married, trying his best to be a good husband, and had just started a job as a therapist at a methadone clinic in Lowell, Massachusetts. He was lonely. Although he could not speak of it, not if he wanted to keep up the fiction of being a straight, married man, he was tormented by his sexual attraction to men. He knew what that meant. But he hated what it said about him, almost as if it were an indictment of his masculinity, his sense of self. Yes, he could almost say the word. Homosexual. Yet that rage inside him didn’t make sense to him. He wrote and wrote about a world that was not right; his wife, sensing his ambivalence, rejected him. Here is what he said about his fits of rage and despair:
The vacuum sucks the empty air. It wines, cries, and tugs at the dust that riled up and slants across the light, glittering flecks of despair. The begonia crumbles in my hand as I tear it to a leafless stem. It never bloomed. It grew upward. But I had to tear it down.
Can I take this order and tear it down? Can I rip away her face of rejection? To please her, to want to be with her, and yet, and yet I tear doors off their hinges. I pull out drawers and fling the neatly folded clothing at the window. . . .I wish I had the gall to kill myself, to cut my wrist as I crushed the red begonia, pulling it apart leaf by leaf until it was naked, bloody, crying, screaming. . . .
The Bruce that I was went on for two pages, crying out against what, as it turned out, would take twenty-five years for me to reconcile: I was gay.
That was one self. Now, if I flip through 40 pages in the same journal, I meet another version of myself, newly divorced, dating a man. I wasn’t able to separate from my past since I was so immersed in the angst of a recent divorce, and fully accept that this new self was doing the unimaginable: dating men, but I could at least step back somewhat, looking at what was happening to me as I floundered in one relationship after another:
I spend the way with Gary, a new lover, learning how those with cable TV can waste hours, as we did, from four to eleven, seven hours with an interlude of making love, watching “Hells’ Body,” then some sentimental sitcom about angels, and finally “Naked Gun 3 ½” with O. J. Simpson before blood was smeared over him. You do not have to do anything. You just sit and flip from one station to another, endless choices, all insipid, all dreadful. I watched to avoid real contact with Gary. I made love out of habit. He cried because he does love me and probably sensed my distance, saying, “I love you,” and all I can say, as close to saying love without saying it, and still be honest, is “It feels good.”
The angst of not feeling right hasn’t gone away. I may not be tormented about my repressed feelings for men. But I was still writing subjectively about being in a relationship and wanting something more, though I didn't yet know what that was. Mostly, I was subject to the welter of feelings and mixed thoughts rattling in my brain. I could be somewhat objective, but, if I were honest, I was not sure what I wanted, who would satisfy me, and how I would ever find that special person, if, indeed, I could at the age of forty-nine. It felt as if I was starting a new life, much too late. I was past middle age. Who would ever want me??
Skipping forward another ten years, on a road trip with my son and my partner, soon-to-be husband Myles, I could write about the past, the selves I had been with more objectivity. They had become objects of my perception. I wasn’t subject to them anymore. I wrote about our excursion to Harper’s Ferry with an objectivity that allowed the place to become a metaphor for my past life without feeling torn apart and still under the influence of my old agonies about not being right:
My old self is like Harper’s Ferry, the Civil War town, preserved by the National Park Service. I can go there on a bus with other tourists and walk the streets that John Brown stalked with his renegades, hoping to spark an uprising to end slavery. The factory that produced rifle barrels for the US Army is still intact. The houses along the steep street are as taciturn as the past that seems like my past. My old self, a slave to being who I wasn’t, is a factory of self-recrimination in a marriage that was closed as the doors to the shops. I tried to please her, turn my socks the right side out at night, to be home at five, to leave my shoes like the dead at the doorway. I attempted to make love, to strip and climb into bed, but every time my hand reached across a Grand Canyon of failed desire, its fingers would draw back and hold the arm or leg of Flip, my friend who took me canoeing in the dark river of wanting. A tourist can find the ruins of another life here. He can stand at the windowless armory with bullet holes in it, with me held up inside it, wanting to be free. He would hear the gunfire of a fierce battle lasting ninety minutes. A small band that no longer wanted to be slaves to false desires was gunned down by a battalion.
But I was here with Myles and my son, still standing, and I was free.
I was able to hold up my old self for scrutiny. I could see what I had been. Yet I was in a relationship that, like any, would have its ups and downs, which was stable and felt like a safe holding environment, allowing me to be my full self. I could, therefore, look at the other selves in my life and, if I wanted to make them into stories, which, over the last twenty years, I have in novels, memoirs, and poems, become characters in those narratives.
As writers, we have the luxury of snooping around in our past lives to find the plurality of other people that we were and how, if we were lucky and persistent, we changed. In those moments of being lost and in those of searching for the right person and seeking the rightness within us, we can explore how our different selves speak to one another. Indeed, they can be different characters. I often imagine what my present self would say to my thirty-year-old self. What advice would he give? What would Bruce say to him?
The magic of storytelling allows us to inhabit different lives, exploring how what we were can inform who we are, and how our evolution can be the grit of a plot or storyline.
