“The truth must be told:
the plague had taken away from all of them the power of love or even
of friendship, for love demands some future, and for us there was
only the here and now.”
The philosopher prince and enfant
terrible, Albert Camus, did not much like the Algerian city of
Oran, which is now and forever associated with his most famous novel,
The Plague, a story part
parable, part metaphor about the catastrophe of pestilence. One can
read into its subtext the trials of the French Resistance, from which
its ideas and arguments were drawn and of which Camus was a reluctant
hero, though he would later disavow all accolades. Rather, he
identified with his altar ego from the novel, Dr. Rieux, a physician making the rounds of the city's sick, risking infection on 20-hour shifts day in day out for months, never knowing when the plague might end, and worst of
all, completely unable to heal the dying, stuck with the unenviable
task of validating death sentences and arranging victims' families
to be quarantined. That Dr. Rieux fulfills his role with good temper,
in Camus' view, does not make him a hero, but a man.
The book begins when all the city's
rats wander into the living rooms to die. Shortly thereafter the
first men and women begin to convulse violently with high fever, swollen
lymphs, and coughing blood, the Bubonic Plague redux. When the number
of deaths begin to escalate no one wants to mention the unmentionable due the
inevitable economic and social disruption: “Dr. Rieux was
unprepared, as were the rest of the townspeople, and this is how one
should understand his reluctance to believe. One should also
understand that he was divided between anxiety and confidence. When
war breaks out people say: 'It won't last, it's too stupid.' And war
is certainly too stupid but that doesn't prevent it from lasting.”
But the epidemic does not just last but thrives and Oran has to shut its
gates to prevent the spread of contamination, isolating the city from the
rest of the world. “Thus the first thing that the plague brought to
our fellow-citizens was exile... we accepted our status as prisoners;
we were reduced to our past alone and even if a few people were
tempted to live in the future, they quickly gave up.”
In such a climate only those with
something, or more importantly, someone to love for,
were not overwhelmed by the collective despair: “The egotism of
love protected them in the midst of the general distress and, if they
did think about the plague, it was always and only to the extent that
it risked making their separation eternal.” The visiting
journalist, Rambert, exemplifies this condition of exile, scheming to escape
but prevented from doing so for many months. When he finally has an
opportunity to leave he instead chooses to stay and continue his work on the health
teams. Why do so when he has no vested interest in the city of Oran
and he can be reunited with his sweetheart? Because even if he were
to succeed and achieve this vision of happiness, it would be a
“happiness in solitude,” understanding that this was a crisis and that he had chosen to flee rather than aid his fellow men. Even though his friends, Dr. Rieux and Tarrou, encourage him to
escape, he knows he wouldn't be able to live with himself had he abandoned the city in its time of desperate need.
The Plague
is about how men and women respond to crises when their lives and
livelihoods are threatened. And while some men will exploit a
calamity for their own gain (such as the criminal Cottard profiteering off the black
market) Camus, via Dr. Rieux, takes the optimistic view that most men
are good, not because they have religious or spiritual
motivations but on behalf of utterly humanistic impulses. Tarrou, a drifter who organizes
health teams to combat the epidemic, asks Dr. Rieux, “Can one be a
saint without God: that is the only concrete question that I know
today.” In fact, the religious authorities are a complete failure
in the face of the plague, the city's spiritual leader, Father
Paneloux, even condoning the suffering and deaths of children as a
test of the believers' faith, describing the choice as a zero-sum game: one either loves
and accepts God (the horrors being part of his Plan) or one
denies his existence. Delivered in such all-or-nothing stakes, the
realists dealing with the plague firsthand mostly ignore this ridiculous
proposition.
The Rebel
As Camus' narrator says, “The trouble
is, there is nothing less spectacular than a pestilence and, if only
because they last so long, great misfortunes are monotonous.” At
times, so is the novel, especially such a conceptual one with
philosophical points supplementing nearly every development. And
though the circumstances of such a disease can be tedious-- time
literally standing still for one to survive or perish in the epidemic's steady method of attrition-- the conclusions Camus reaches are instructive and for the most part true. We
are each independent persons with unique and special pursuits and
most of the time, hopefully for all of our lives, this is fine and
good. But there comes a moment for some of us when such living is no
longer morally tenable and hard choices need to be made. Importantly, doing the right thing does not necessarily
promise heroism, but does guarantee membership in the human race.
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