Jean-Baptiste Clemence is a stand up guy. He is a perfectly content man, with an excellent social relationships, a handsome wealth, a good reputation, and a good job that he loves as a defense lawyer in Paris. He has a kind heart too, where most of the people that he defended were “widow and orphan” cases, along with the poor and disenfranchised.
We get to know Clemence’s life story right from the beginning of the book, where he was found sitting in a bar in Amsterdam and started to talk with strangers to reflect on this perfect past life.
The choice of location in Amsterdam is particularly interesting, considering that Camus loves to set his stories in his native French Algeria. But it will make sense once we read this line early in the book, when Clemence said: “Have you noticed that Amsterdam’s concentric canals resemble the circles of hell? The middle-class hell, of course, peopled with bad dreams. When one comes from the outside, as one gradually goes through those circles, life – and hence its crimes – becomes denser, darker. Here, we are in the last circle.”
A decent guy sitting in the deepest circle of hell, in a sin city located below the sea level? Indeed, the book has plenty of symbolisms, where as the conversation continues we’ll also discover that the bar conversations take place on the backdrop of World War 2 and the Holocaust, which raised the question of that era of how can humankind be so evil?
This philosophical conundrum was given a more rich backstory when Clemence reveals that he lives not far from the bar, in the formerly Jewish quarter that was turned into a ghetto by the Nazis. And the name of the bar that he’s sitting in? Mexico City, which symbolized the destruction of the Aztec Civilization that the city then replaced. How did he end up here?
Late one night in his past life, when crossing the Pont Royal bridge in Paris on the way home from his mistress, Clemence walked pass a woman dressed in black leaning over the edge of the bridge to commit suicide. But he decided to ignore the sight and kept walking, when few minutes later he heard the distinct sound of a body hitting the water. Clemence stopped walking for a brief moment, but did nothing, knowing very well what just happened. He felt the urge to go back to help, but was too afraid of his own safety and afraid of being tied to the death.
As Clemence tells the story over several drunken nights at the Amsterdam bar, he recalls that the sound of screaming was repeated several times, then it abruptly gone. Total silence. He said that he wanted to run but yet didn’t move an inch. He was still listening at the silence as he stood motionless, before slowly, in the rain, he walked away and told nobody.
Several years later, after successfully blocking the memory from that night’s incident, he walked pass an empty Pont des Arts bridge (on the opposite of Pont Royal bridge) after a particularly good day at work, when he distinctly heard a laughter. It was a laughter between friends and not in any way directed towards him, but still it made him quite paranoid and remember the suicide. Not long after, he found himself in another incident involving a road rage where he was left getting punched by a jackass motorcyclist and get humiliated. This seems to finally hit his nerves, triggered an existentialist crisis in him over the illusion that everyone is trying to get him (and his inability to do anything about it), and sent him to a psychological downfall that questions his own self worth.
That’s right, these overblown reactions from the incidents were indeed the manifestation of his suppressed guilty feeling. At the deepest level he began to question himself whether he was really a good person and doubt his own ability to help people. And it changed him from a decent stand up guy into a bitter man spiraling down.
The proceeding conversation at the bar in Amsterdam then dwells around the topics of morality, decency, and even hypocrisy, through telling the stories of what he did afterwards: He left behind his perfect Paris life and first escaped to London, and then to North Africa where he eventually settled in Tunisia, before getting captured by the Germans and was put into a concentration camp; chain of events that would not happened if only he helped the suicidal woman, and all of which pushed him further more into the existentialist abyss.
Hence, the chilling statement at the end of the book, filled with regret: “Pronounce to yourself the words that years later haven’t ceased to resound through my nights, and which I will speak at last through your mouth: “O young woman, throw yourself again into the water so that I might have a second time the chance to save the two of us!”
As always with Albert Camus’ books, this short book is very dense with deep philosophical thinking. It is described by existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre as the most beautiful but the least understood of Camus’ books. Which I get it, because the book is narrated through a simple enough story but the thought-provoking philosophy was implied in lengthy conversations that are not easy to follow (due to the absence of quotation marks that often makes it unclear who was talking, among others).
Nevertheless, strip away the often confusing conversations and instead focus on the morals of the story, and we have ourselves one hell of a book.
THE CHAOS THEORY 