"This Europe of yours is so sad."

”... our old Europe at last philosophizes in the right way. We no longer say as in simple terms: “this is my opinion. What are your objections?” We have become lucid. For the dialogue we have substituted the communiqué. “This is the truth,” we say. “You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren’t interested. But in a few years there’ll be the police to show you I’m right.” -Camus, The Fall

I have always found a certain similarity between Albert Camus and Henrik Ibsen and that is their gloomy and sinister image of Europe * or still better what they had foreseen as what Europe would have become—and no surprise, it actually has, accordingly.

I have just finished reading The Fall and there Camus portraits a Europe of which Ibsen had prognosticated in his latest plays and yet Camus prophesizes another future that is our time’s. I find a straight line from Ibsen to Camus which has consentaneously handed down to even Lars von Trier’s Europa through, let say, Jürgen Habermas when he writes in the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity:
“A self-sufficiently advancing modernization of society has separated itself from the impulses of a cultural modernity that has seemingly become obsolete in the meantime; it only carries out the functional laws of economy and state, technology and science, which are supposed to have amalgamated into a system that cannot be influenced.”

Echo of all this can be heard in the mysterious voice of the hypnotizer/narrator of Europa: “You want to wake up to free yourself of the image of Europa. But it is not possible.” Isn’t that just the same voice as Jean-Baptiste Clamence in The Fall: “In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that’s all. […] A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.”

* It gets sometime tremendously alike: for example the character of Marta Bernick in Ibsen’s The Pillars of The Community—who longs to leave Europe for somewhere that “the skies are wider; the clouds move higher than here; a free wind blows overhead…”—extremely resembles the character of Martha in Camus’ The Misunderstanding: “I have no passion for this dreary Europe, where the autumn has the face of spring and the spring smells of poverty. No, I prefer to picture those other lands over which summer breaks in flame, where the winter rains flood the cities, and where … things are what they are.”