Provided Quote:
“The Plague may be read in three different ways. It is at the same time a tale about an epidemic; a symbol of Nazi occupation (and incidentally the prefiguration of any totalitarian regime, no matter where), and thirdly, the concrete illustration of a metaphysical problem, that of evil.”
– Camus in his Notebooks

So, apparently, there is no need for us to commit the Intentional Fallacy in our reading of Camus’ La Peste (or The Plague); the author has already beaten us to it. If not ostensibly a purely philosophical writer, Camus at least did not seem to ever allow his novels to carry the same ambiguities of ethical interpretation that colour the work of such famed contemporaries as Andre Malraux, Marguerite Duras or even Jean-Paul Sartre. It’s hard to avoid what the particular plague in question ‘really means’ as we sift through the text itself. We are obliged to read it, as Camus did, as an allegory for existential humanism’s stand in the face of every form of absurd ‘terror’ in the mid- twentieth century. In fact, it is only its pedantically precise placing in the context of the Algerian 1940’s that prevents the text from straying into the domain of modern Fable. As such, we should indeed take Camus at his words and thus attempt to explicate his own three readings in their direct applicability to the text, though with one nuanced follow-up commentary to illuminate their inherent links. So, this essay’s task will be to systematically construct that analysis in a manner to match the gradual unfolding of Camus’ own ‘chronicle’: starting from a surface-study of the epidemic’s pure portrayal, moving through the political subtext that animates the town’s particular group of ‘resistance fighters’ and finally addressing the dialectical concerns that populate most of the novel’s dialogue with regards to its modern solution to the age-old Problem of Evil. Our overarching qualification will be that a fourth reading here is also possible: that is, a compressed understanding of all the first three in a single allegorical flourish that ‘short-circuits’ the universal and the particular and once again attempts to build the hopeful bridge from Fiction to Philosophy.

The lingering enigma, at least to my mind, in Camus’ construction of The Plague is his avowed insistence on the objective ‘existence’ of his novel’s central event. Dr. Bernard Rieux’s ‘anonymous’ narration throughout the novel is taken especially seriously from the outset: “[A historian’s] business”, he declaims, “is only to say, ‘This is what happened’, when he knows that it actually did happen…” (1975: 7). And did a plague in the town of Oran actually occur in ‘194-’? Well, not as such, but a fictional one does break in this novel to such a detailed extent that the reader is made able to accept Rieux’s narrative as a kind of honorary public document. In a sense, we come to trust the accuracy of his devoted empiricism more than we would a subjective ‘true story’ regaling of any similar tragedy. Camus signifies his intent in this regard by his choice of epigraph:

“It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not”- Daniel Defoe, 17th-century author of A Journal of the Plague Year (3)

That is to say – in my understanding of it – that The Plague’s metaphorical representation of communal ‘imprisonment’ is not lessened in power by its state as a fiction, as a story ‘which exists not’ (Quite the opposite in fact, in this case). At the level of prose, this innate drive for ‘historical’ facticity is achieved through a certain obsessive clarity of depiction: a style that soon seems reminiscent of the concurrent brand of detective fiction so often labeled ‘existential’ in tone1. “I’d come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clean-cut language” (207) states Tarrou in his late ‘confession’ to Rieux; an epigram that surely stands, amongst so many others, for Camus’ own opinion (this example being almost pseudo- Orwellian). It certainly describes his preferred style for this novel, evident in such a classically matter-of-fact sentence as “Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky.” (63) Allied to this newfound ‘truthfulness’ in language is a conscious attempt to redefine, for our self-aware times, the very concept of such an attempted record as Rieux’s. As the good doctor humbly admits, “[he is] well aware how regrettable is his inability to record … something of a really spectacular order; some heroic feat, or memorable deed like those that thrill us in the chronicles of the past.” (148, italics mine) To write such a ‘thrilling chronicle’ of Oran’s plague year would constitute, in Camus’ eyes, a gross error of escapism. Instead, this relatively ‘unheroic’, ‘uneventful’ and wholly systematic tale of the arbitrary isolation of a town is ultimately true to life, the world and the real history of such epidemics. Having consecrated this foundation of reliable portrayal, Camus’ attention – and, implicitly, the reader’s – is quickly turned to the text’s more allegorical portents.

In almost every overview of The Plague’s direct interpretations- including Camus’ own- a strict equation is first made between Oran’s experience of pestilence and France’s ‘Vichy’-era under Nazi occupation. Why do we- and should we- make this contextual presumption? Because novels are, of course, never written in a vacuum,

1 The thematic links between Camus and Sartre’s existential heroes and the likes of Raymond Chandler’s ‘absurdist’ detective Philip Marlowe (both invented in the 1930’s and 40’s) are many and profusely theorized upon in other, better analyses.

and even a skimming of Camus’ publishing history shows that The Plague had a particularly long gestation period as his follow-up novel to The Stranger in the years 1943-1947. (Todd, 2000: 165) That is, precisely the years when Camus and his intellectual friends functioned in their own right as civilian ‘health teams’- resistance agents- fighting the oppression of a different “never-ending defeat” (108), enforced by the Nazi’s in Paris, as well as the time of the immediate aftermath of their survival. Even if only via a socio-political osmosis, Camus’ experiences of life ‘underground’ are reflected in at least the essential form of his novel’s drama. The mistake we should not make though, in applying Camus’ personal history to his work, is to find any number of Animal Farm-like correlations between real-world figures and their supposed counterparts in the text. “Man is an idea,” (136, italics his) Rambert claims in the course of his moralizing to Rieux, and we can see that Camus concurs in the way he depicts his own created examples. They are men embodied only through their statements of belief- ranging from Rieux’s ‘pragmatic’ atheism to Father Paneloux’s unfortunate ‘excess’ of faith- and they are all showcased through their respective reactions to the ‘prefiguration of totalitarianism’ that is, in this example, the unpredicted onslaught of the eponymous pestilence (first shown in the symbol of dead and dying rats). It is clear by the end of the novel that the ‘best idea’- Camus’ own- on either side of the world’s defining division- between ‘pestilences’ and ‘victims’ (207), tyrants and humanitarians- is Rieux’s unadorned espousal of “common decency” (136). That is to say, a simple acceptance of one’s own ethical obligation to aid the prevention of human suffering and to revolt against the ‘absurd’ conditions that everywhere cause it2. As readers, we have seen too many needless, horrifying deaths (as well as bored, wasted lives) in the novel’s span not to accept the arbitrariness of any other course of action. The inevitability of this conclusion also indicates Camus’ acknowledged limits as a novelist. The Plague is indeed a pure allegory- a manifesto for ‘revolutionary’ humanism- and, as such, it can only let its characters prove their author’s points and then expand no further. But only once we accept these constraints as being essential to Camus’ relevant agenda as a ‘political’ writer can we move on to the other, grander philosophical concerns that populate- and popularize- his books.

2 Better-read Camus scholars will excuse me my general paraphrasing of the morals of The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel in these passages: my ulterior aim here is to evidence the many continuities between Camus’ fiction and his philosophical tracts.

The most unavoidable of which is what we can term the modern ‘Problem of Evil’. From an existential perspective3, it may be colloquially phrased thus: ‘If God really is dead, then did the devil die with him?’ Yes, it seems, and the world is made that much more terrifying a place for the apparent absence of any kind of agency in human suffering. (Certainly, the novel itself lacks an obvious antagonist, and even the morally questionable ‘collaborator’ Cottard has his sympathetic moments) It is ‘absurd’- utterly unreasonable- to suffer without reason, but it is also the human condition. What this insight most immediately explains is the pertinence of Camus’ central metaphor: “[W]hat does that mean- “plague”? Just life, no more than that.” (250) This is a great blanket statement, from the mouth of Rieux’s eccentric oldest patient, but it is a point repeated on enough occasions and in enough variations in the text to be quoted as Camus’ philosophical lodestone. It is part and parcel of life’s deal, he intimates, that an arbitrary epidemic- re-occuring anywhere and at any time in history, as Rieux reflects more than once- can incur the ‘irreproachable evil’ of human suffering (182-3), even the horrific deaths of children. The question that The Plague therefore asks and answers is not just the ethical dilemma of resistance against indifference and oppression, but also the metaphysical query of how to carry on living in this new, full knowledge of the inevitability of the triumph of death and suffering over innocence. The ‘simple’ solution is just not to submit: neither to despair, nor the sway of ‘History’- as in Sartre’s communism- but especially not to religion, in the manner of Father Paneloux: “[M]ightn’t it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him, and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes towards the heaven where He sits in silence?”- Rieux to Paneloux (108). And what would be the weapons of this ‘struggle’, besides ‘common decency’? Surprisingly enough, they would be a touch sentimental: ‘love’, better “illusions” (237) and the inspiration of “[A] happiness that [forgets] nothing, not even murder.” (210). It is only these free celebrations of life- portrayed in the novel through Rieux and Tarrou’s ‘brotherhood’ as fellow swimmers and the teary reunions of the town’s lovers- that are seen to

3 I know that many purist philosophers might find my apparent interchangeable usage of the Sartrean terms of existentialism and Camus’ notions of revolt against the absurd horrifying to read, but here I only mean the non-specific definition of ‘existentialism’ as the acceptance of the utter absence of pre-given absolute meaning to the universe.

rebuke the essential fatalism of Oran’s ordeal. Camus most clearly states this peculiar optimism through Rieux’s consolations: “What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.” (106) This very may well be the moral of the story.

Having elucidated these three levels of interpretation as a kind of descent from the surface to the metaphysical soul of Camus’ novel, I’d like to take the concluding liberty of refuting such a schematic autopsy of the text. When we actually read The Plague we essentially cheat; we compress the aesthetic, political and philosophical concerns into a single interlocking narrative of human experience. Hopefully the links of my analysis have shown how each individuated level lays the foundation for its successor: how the ‘plain-spokenness’ of the prose creates the artifice of reliability in its socio-political depictions and how those depictions set the playing-field of the novel’s debates on suffering and freedom, and so on and so forth. My point now is that what we really see is the structure in its entirety, not level by level. Camus does not obscure his humanistic concerns and- besides the equation of the experiences of a plague and a tyranny- there is little real subtext either evident or needed. The characters talk over the plague’s meanings themselves and they directly represent the opinions and attributes of Camus’ ‘absurd heroes’. In this manner, The Plaguefunctions as a synecdoche- a self-evident microcosm- for both existence and the human ideas that constitute our awareness of it, though Camus does, inevitably, come around to his particular point: that we must fight to be happy, in spite of our conditions.

Word Count: 2043

Reference List:
Camus, Albert. 1975. The Plague. Hammondsworth: Penguin Books. Todd, Olivier. 2000. Albert Camus: A Life. London: Chatto & Windus.