The Fall: Living in the Little-Ease

Abstract

To come from Nineteen Eighty-Four to The Fall is as short a literary journey as one could make in the twentieth century. Only eight years separate these texts, but the propinquity goes far deeper than a matter of mere chronology, for both exhibit all the marks of a parallel disillusionment and dread in the face of the same disaster. There are, indeed, a number of persuasive parallels between Orwell and Camus. Both won fame as heroes of truth, sworn to an uncompromising honesty which scorned to found the Just City upon a lie, however pious or well-intentioned; both were extolled as atheistic saints whose purity of thought was redemptive in a world dominated by one-eyed ideologues and party apparatchiks. Yet at the same time some found only confusion, even doublethink, in these alleged truth-tellers and sceptically rejected the celebrated integrity as a mask for reactionary views; others, less censorious, nevertheless maintained that both men, in their refusal to make an unreserved commitment to the revolutionary cause, were, however inadvertently, supporting an unjust status quo. Both in their admirers and in their detractors, in the reasons advanced for praise and censure alike, the parallelism persists.