Coping with guilt: psychological strategies and therapeutic approaches

Coping With Guilt

In the work the Fall by Albert Camus and Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee there is a consistent theme of guilt. Guilt pervades the minds of the main characters in the novels as a pervasive conflict of character. Each main character attempts to reconcile his guilt in with regard to his inner desires and outward actions and does so with ruthless self-loss. The protagonist in the Fall, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, self imposes a fall from on high, making himself seem the fool to his entire community so it will strip him of his position of authority as a judge or actor depending on your point-of-view. Clamence's crisis of character is brought to him through a rather inconsequential situation. A road rage incident that demands that he deal with not only a rude man on a motorcycle but a man who calls him unfair for moving to strike a man who is disadvantaged by his position, Clamence carries the concern unrealistically far, "...after having been struck in public without reacting, it was no longer possible for me to cherish that fine picture of myself. If I had been the friend of truth and intelligence I claimed to be, what would that episode have mattered to me? It was already forgotten by those who had witnessed it." (Camus 305) the incident sets the judge off in a self-reflective attempt to console himself of his true, selfish character. His self-realization is that he is a hypocrite seeking only the outward expression of a compassionate and powerful man while harboring true hatred for those in need.

A jostling the blind on the street; and from the secret, unexpected joy this gave me I recognized how much a part of my soul loathed them; I planned to puncture the tyres of wheelchairs, to go and shout 'lousy proletarian' under the scaffoldings on which labourers were working, to smack infants in the subway.... The very word 'justice' gave me strange fits of rage. (Camus 325)

Clamence can come up with no resolution for his self-loathing. He has sought to live in such a way that the only thing that mattered was the outward opinion and appearance. As long as he felt that others believed him powerful than he felt he was powerful. Even in his relationships with women he was aware that he was a liar, seeking only to be loved and not to love for as soon as he was loved, he felt whole and completely forgot the presence of the women taking her for granted entirely. (65-67) Clamence's resolution was astounding, he went about explaining to people for the remainder of his life that they were all hypocrites, seeking to do things only for the sake of their outward appearance and he was therefore absolved for his crime of doing the same. Clamence is a believer that he is a judge, by right of his own unscrupulous nature, a nature he shares with all others..".. Inasmuch as one couldn't condemn others without immediately judging oneself, one had to overwhelm oneself to have the right to judge others." (138) Clamence's character is brutally devoured by inaction, inaction when he is struck in public, inability to find reason to commit suicide as it would be as selfish an act as any and others would simply make it what they wanted it to be for their own gain and lastly by his inability to save a young woman from suicide in Paris. His closing words absolve him, just as his resolution to lose his wits and laugh at everything so as not to continue to live a lie, "Oh, young woman, throw yourself into the water again so that I may a second time have the chance of saving both of us!"...Brrr...! The water's so cold! But let's not worry! it's too late now. It will always be to later. Fortunately." (147) Clamence is absolved, to remain a laughing crazy man on a prophetic quest to tell everyone just how selfish they are, proven most eloquently by his own lack of care for his own guilt and corruption.

While in Waiting for the Barbarians the Magistrate (who is never given a name) is only able to truly see how corrupt the institutions he has been working for are, and how much damage his actions and the actions of his government have had on the "barbarians" who are simply peaceful nomadic peoples from the area of the magistrates outpost. He makes choices to help the "barbarians" after falling in love with a young injured girl from their community, thus sealing his fate, imprisonment and torture, not unlike that of the "barbarians" themselves. Having been dethroned and placed in prison the magistrate is witness to Joll bringing in a group of barbarian prisoners, naked and bound with a wire binding their hands to their cheeks, into the outpost, his telling remarks are his self-resolution.

For me, at this moment, striding away from the crowd, what has become important above all is tat I should neither be contaminated by the atrocity that is about to be committed nor poison myself with impotent hatred of its perpetrators. I cannot save the prisoners, therefore let me save myself. Let it at the very least be said, if it ever comes to be said, if there is ever anyone in some remote future interested to know the way we lived, that in the farthest outpost of the Empire of light there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbarian.(Coetzee 104)

The Magistrate is seeking self resolution and absolution by choosing not to witness the bloodthirsty destruction of these prisoners at the hands of the imperialists. He has decided to save himself the grief and absolve himself from further blame by refusing to allow the spectacle to burn into his memory the nature of the system he supported and aided for so long. The magistrate is the purest example of the imperialist "going native" as has occurred in so many other real and imagined situations, where the innocent and ambitious person is blindly led by the convictions of their corrupted system to seek out fortune in a foreign land and then comes face-to-face with the more similar than different faces of the "natives" he is bound to expel, kill and control.

His ideas pervade him as he endures the public humiliation of toture and thinks about the ways in which he and his administration will be remembered. The resolution is that there is not great memory for the man and he wonders why he objects to public spectacles, like that of his own public hanging, which he is currently enduring.

A scapegoat is named, a festival is declared, the laws are suspended: who would not flock to see the entertainment? What is it I object to in these spectacles of abasement and suffering and death that our new regime puts on but their lack of decorum? What will my administration be remembered for besides moving the shambles from the marketplace to the outskirts of the town twenty years ago in the interests of decency? (120)