The Plague by Albert Camus
The Plague (1947)
Translated by Stuart Gilbert
My Quick Take: A rich and evocative examination of a plague that ravages a North African town, this showed Camus’ ideas of “revolt” in the face of an absurdist universe.
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Camus broadly wrote in three “cycles” in his work: Exile (The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus and Caligula); Revolt (The Plague, The Rebel, The Just Assassins); and Love (which was never finished because of his untimely death in a car accident).
With The Plague (Fr: La Peste), I’ve come to Revolt, and so far I find it a satisfying place indeed.
Critics note that Camus’ language in The Plague is to the point and straightforward, and this may be the case, but I found it altogether a richer (though not necessarily better) reading experience than The Stranger. As beautiful as The Stranger was, this book feels deeper, more empathetic, more forgiving. And I’m sure that’s purposeful, or at least my mind is superimposing that meaning: The Stranger was about man in exile, in the absurd, alone and confronting meaninglessness. The Plague is about an individual and collective response to that absurdity, and so evokes humanism. Camus comes up with a healthy dose of compassion for the absurd human’s plight, and it feels he’s in dialogue with me, the reader: Answering my questions about just what to do with all this vacuum of meaning and hope that we had to confront in his absurdist philosophy.
Oran is a town on the Algerian coast, medium sized, and unremarkable:
“...everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits. Our citizens work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich. Their chief interest is in commerce, and their chief aim in life is, as they call it, ‘doing business’...you can get through the days there without trouble, once you have formed habits. And since habits is what our town encourages, all is for the best.”
The citizens of Oran are sated by ambition, commerce, habits; not awake to the absurd nature of life. So when dead rats start piling up, everyone looks the other way, as long as they’re swept up out of sight each morning. But soon the signs that something is wrong intrude: “People out at night would often feel underfoot the squelchy roundness of a still-warm body. It was as if the earth on which our houses stood were being purged of its secreted humours; thrusting up to the surface the abscesses and pus-clots that had been forming in its entrails. You must picture the consternation of our little town, hitherto so tranquil, and now, out of the blue, shaken to its core, like a quite healthy man who all of a sudden feels his temperature shoot up and the blood seething like wildfire in his veins.”
When citizens start to get mysterious symptoms and die, it takes a good long while for anyone to admit there may be a plague.
“No, all those horrors were not near enough as yet to even ruffle the equanimity of that spring afternoon. The clang of an unseen streetcar came through the window, briskly refuting cruelty and pain. Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world.”
Here is where the absurd man–the absurd condition of humanness–raises its head: in the acceptance of the plague, forced upon townspeople who can no longer unsee it, after the city walls close and they are cut off from everyone else. “Thus, the first thing that the plague brought to our town was exile.”
The main character is the compassionate, dedicated and thoughtful Dr. Rieux, who is on the frontline of prevention and treatment of the growing pestilence. There is a cast of characters who all have their own way of dealing with the plague that befalls this city, and for me, each of them shows a different way to react to the existential threat of death. Together, though, these individual responses form a collective response. I found it interesting that the narrator always speaks in the collective “we,” promoting a sense of solidarity.
Repeatedly, the narrator’s inclination is to show the good in many (but not all) townspeople.
“The essential thing was to save the greatest possible number of persons from dying and being doomed to unending separation. And to do this there was only one resource: to fight the plague. There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical.”
For Dr. Rieux, the matter is straightforward, and sent some chills up my spine when I thought of all the healthcare workers who stepped up during the pandemic.
"‘However, there’s one thing I must tell you: there’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make people smile, but the only means of fighting the plague is–common decency.’
‘What do you mean by “common decency?”’ Rambert’s tone was grave.
‘I don’t know what it means for other people. But in my case I know that it consists of doing my job.’”
The priest, Father Peneloux, witnesses the horrible death of a child, a truly harrowing scene from which Camus does not back away, and tries to explain the injustice by invoking God, a nod to Camus’ idea of philosophical suicide in the face of the absurd. “Indeed, we all were up against the wall that plague had built around us, and in its lethal shadow we must work out our salvation.”
The good Tarrou, Rieux’s friend and founder of the clean-up squads in the town, is haunted by his father’s job as a prosecutor and advocate for the death sentence, and vows not to be a party to more harm.
“I know positively–yes, Rieux, I can say I know the world inside out, as you may see–that each of us had the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. And I know too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him. What's natural is the microbe. All the rest–health, integrity, longevity, purity (if you like)--is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter…Yes, Rieux, it’s a wearying business, being plague-stricken.”
“All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as is possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.”
I like this, because after the moral questions that Camus’ first cycle of writing on “exile” left me with, The Plague comments on revolt against the absurd. There is a collective humanity that at its best doesn't turn away from death, but fills the moment to moment life with kindness, living each moment for what it is, and trying to do good (or at least less harm). There is a notion to not give in. From The Myth of Sisyphus, about revolt:
“It is an insistence upon an impossible transparency. It challenges the world anew every second. Just as danger provided man the unique opportunity of seizing awareness, so metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the whole of experience. It is that constant presence of man in his own eyes. It is not inspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.”
“That revolt gives life its value. Spread out over the whole length of a life, it restores its majesty to that life.”
As the plague sputters out and dies, the citizens of Oran waste no time getting on with their lives, as if nothing had happened. I find this generally an astute assessment of human nature; it feels the norm, and a way of keeping going in this world. In this novel, I felt that Camus again showed compassion for the everyman who sinks into oblivion. It is Dr. Rieux, the observer, who will document and remember the plague, and who stands as one of the persons awake to the reality of the absurd. He reminds me of a sentinel.
“Calmly they denied, in the teeth of the evidence, that we had ever known a crazy world in which men were killed off like flies, or that precise savagery, that calculated frenzy of the plague, which instilled an odious freedom as to all that was not the here and now; or those charnel-house stenches which stupefied whom they did not kill. In short, they denied that we had ever been that hag-ridden populace, a part of which was daily fed into a furnace and went up in oily fumes, while the rest, in shackled impotence, waited their turn.”
“Yes, they had suffered together, in body no less than in soul, from a cruel leisure, exile without redress, thirst that was never slaked. Among the heaps of corpses, the clanging bells of ambulances, the warnings of what goes by the name of fate, among unremitting waves of fear and agonized revolt, the horror that such things could be, always a great voice had been ringing in the ears of these forlorn, panicked people, a voice calling them back to the land of their desire, a homeland. It lay outside the walls of the stifled, strangled town, in the fragrant brushwood of the hills, in the waves of the sea, under free skies, and in the custody of love. And it was to this, their lost home, they longed to return, turning their backs disgustedly on all else.”
Scholars note that there are many ways to view The Plague: as an allegory for WWII most notably. I can absolutely see this. Camus began writing this book whilst in France in 1941, and it was published in 1947. The war must have evoked feelings of lack of control, and of the imminent threat of an unpredictable death. But the truth of the matter is that the plague in the book can be taken as a literal plague (our recent pandemic is an example), a great war, or as the certainty of death in this life at any point. We are under the constant threat of an accident, an illness, or a natural disaster. The threat looms, but we don’t see it all the time, and only when something tugs at us and pulls us roughly into the knowledge of the absurd do we reluctantly look into that reality. And when the obvious threat passes, it’s easier to forget it altogether and sink back into habits. Camus would argue against this, that we need to live in the absurd and “imagine [ourselves] happy,” to paraphrase The Myth of Sisyphus, though as I read it, the novel allows for a nod to our human tendency to forget.
The end of the book brings a dose of compassion and reality. In the final pages as life returns to normal, Dr. Rieux notes, “these people were ‘just the same as ever.’ But this was at once their strength and their innocence, and it was on this level, beyond all grief, that Rieux could feel himself at one with them.” He knows that, “there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”
However, Camus isn’t going to let us readers off quite that easily. His final paragraphs ring so true:
“Nonetheless, he knew that the tale he had to tell would not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.
And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperilled. He know what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”
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Here's an interesting piece that added some context for me. It discusses some of the critiques of Camus' political stance, and provides links to some related articles:
Resistance through Silence in Camus' The Plague
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My other articles in this series:
Introducing Camus by David Zane Mairowitz and Alain Korkos
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