Death, War, Pestilence and Lockdown:
Some Thoughts on Re-Reading Camus’s The Plague 

By Dr Christine Simon

When the Algerian town of Oran is hit by plague in the late 1940s, it is caught off guard. Its residents, absorbed in the ‘peaceful and unthinking tranquillity’ [1] of their daily routines, are suddenly forced to confront the reality of horrific death, quarantine, curfews, food and electricity shortages, looting and — with the closure of the city gates — separation from friends and family in other parts of the country. The municipal authorities are slow to acknowledge the fact of the plague and are inefficient, if not incompetent, in dealing with it. A black market flourishes. Life is now governed by the constant possibility of catching the disease, which spares no one, not even children.

I first read The Plague (1947) as an undergraduate, long ago when the world was new, and it has been one of my favourite novels ever since, largely because of its philosophical and allegorical aspects. Re-reading it during lockdown, I found it took on new and disturbing resonances; the story of the plague itself — of infection, uncertainty and sudden change — came to the fore, and tapped into the current anxieties surrounding coronavirus. But this underlines both the relevance and the complexity of a novel which works on several interconnected levels. First and foremost it is an objective and clinical account of a plague outbreak; it spares none of the grisly details, from the lancing of ghastly buboes to the excruciating death of a young boy. It is the story of its protagonist-narrator, Doctor Bernard Rieux, and those who work with him, at the risk of their own lives, to combat the plague and alleviate the suffering of the town’s population. But it is also a complex double allegory, both of the German occupation of France during World War II (historical and contingent) and of the human condition (universal and timeless).

The first allegory would be easy to miss now, given that there is no mention of any specific war or occupation. Both allegories are mediated subtly, largely through metaphor and simile. Plague and war are linked from the beginning. When the mystery disease, heralded by the town’s rat population leaving their hiding-places to die by the dozen in the open, is finally identified as a form of bubonic plague, Rieux reflects: ‘There have been as many plagues in the world as there have been wars’ (p. 56). The course of the plague follows a similar pattern to that of the German occupation and is described in similar terms: starting as ‘a brutal attack’ (p. 96; Camus used the word ‘invasion’, which makes the link clearer), the victims of which are repeatedly described as prisoners, it continues as an ‘endless defeat’ (p. 181) and its end is described as a ‘liberation’ (in the French text; the English version has ‘being free’, p. 395). The celebrations which mark the end of the plague and the re-opening of the city gates are reminiscent of those which accompanied the liberation of Paris in 1944.

‘I was already suffering from the plague long before I knew this town and this epidemic. All that means is that I am like everybody else’ (p. 345). So says Jean Tarrou, a somewhat enigmatic political activist recently arrived in Oran who befriends Doctor Rieux and throws himself wholeheartedly into the struggle against the plague. This comment underlines the second allegorical sense of the novel: the plague as a figure of the human condition. This allegory is a carrier for the major themes of Camus’s thought. For Camus there exists a divorce (as he terms it in The Myth of Sisyphus) between human beings and the world around them, between our need for meaning and explanation and the fact that these can only ever be partial and provisional (through science, for example). Although most people, like the people of Oran at the start of the novel, are locked into their daily routines and thus oblivious of this rift, those who do become aware of it come face-to-face with what Camus terms ‘absurdity’. This is not inherent in the physical world, or in human life, but in the mismatch between the two, in the conjunction on the one hand of a human consciousness that needs answers and on the other of an impersonal universe which cannot provide them. Those who develop this awareness become ‘strangers’ or ‘outsiders’, unavoidably exiled in life like Meursault, the protagonist of The Outsider. Exile is a major theme in The Plague; the epidemic brings ‘exile and separation’ (p. 251) from normal life, both through enforced quarantine and the closing of the city. Rieux, walking alone, bereft and bereaved through the end-of-plague celebrations, reflects on the ‘irremediable exile’ (p. 422) that the plague brought with it; but this temporary exile elides with the more general and unavoidable one which makes up the texture of life itself.

Though Camus disliked being described as an existentialist, his world-view has features in common with that philosophy. Its roots can be seen in both Pascal and Kirkegaard, who resolved the problem of existential angst with a leap of faith. For Camus as for Sartre this is not a viable option; there is no possibility of an afterlife which might bring meaning. Death, then, accentuates the absurdity of life. Though in the novel the plague highlights death and in many cases brings it forward, it doesn’t alter its actuality. It is present in many forms, most ironically in the case of Mme Rieux, the narrator’s sick wife, who leaves for a sanatorium in the mountains at the start of the novel and dies there at the end. Tarrou’s life, as well as his sense of justice and social responsibility, which mirrors that of Camus, has been shaped by his hatred of the death penalty; having been taken at the age of sixteen by his father, a public prosecutor, to witness a the passing of a death sentence, he is sickened by the idea of what Camus later called 'the most premeditated of murders’. [2] Tarrou tells Rieux: ‘And this is why I have decided to reject everything that, directly or indirectly, makes people die or justifies others in making them die’ (p. 356).

The Plague goes further than Camus’s earlier works in that it doesn’t simply depict the awareness of absurdity but also dramatises possible responses to it. The characters are interesting in their own right, but they also personify these responses. One of Rieux’s patients in a poor area of the city clearly voices the parallel between the plague and the human condition: ‘But what does it mean, the plague? It’s life, that’s all’ (p. 433). However, though the character is depicted with compassion, his way of life — living in bed, his days measured out by the activity of counting chickpeas from one bowl to another — represents an opting-out of the human condition. At the other end of the spectrum are Rieux and Tarrou, and other like-minded characters, who band together to fight against the plague, setting up voluntary health teams and quarantine camps. ‘When you see the suffering it brings, you have to be mad, blind or a coward to resign yourself to the plague,’ says Rieux (p. 177). Raymond Rambert, a Paris journalist caught in Oran on assignment, initially puts all his efforts into clandestine escape attempts, but after these prove abortive has a change of heart and decides to stay and help in the effort against the plague. This exemplifies the process of what Camus termed ‘revolt’, the development of authentic ways of dealing with both the human condition in general and the specific injustices and afflictions it brings. Importantly, this is a collective endeavour; solidarity was a vital element in Camus’s concept of revolt. ‘The plague became the affair of us all,’ comments Rieux (p. 95).

Cottard is a shady character and the only one for whom the plague is beneficial, as it postpones the arrest he fears for an unspecified crime committed in the past; he flourishes during the outbreak, engaging in black market activities and finding an unaccustomed contentment. In the war allegory, Cottard stands for the collaborator (a fact Simone de Beauvoir seems to have missed when she criticised the book for having failed to take on the problem of Vichy); in Tarrou’s view, he has ‘given approval in his heart to something that kills men, women and children’ (p. 426). At the end of the book he loses his head and starts shooting at passers-by from his window; he is arrested in a dramatic shoot-out with the police.

My favourite character, though, is the paradoxical Joseph Grand, a retired civil servant who never moved up the promotion ladder and whose wife left him because she tired of the monotony of their life. He can’t find the right words for the letter he wants to send her. Nor can he find the right words for the novel he’s been working on for years, and so has never got beyond the first sentence, continually rewriting, juggling adjectives and word order. Grand is a nobody, a failure, but the irony of his name, though deliberate, is not cruelly intended. There is a sense in which Grand is truly great in Camus’s eyes because he has got the point that the only authentic response to the plague, and the adversities of life, is to struggle against them alongside others of like mind and without the need for social status. He comes quietly out of retirement, laying aside his magnum opus, to compile statistics which enable a productive analysis of the course of the plague. In a fit of despair, when he seems to have caught the plague, he gets Rieux to burn the pages of his novel; but he recovers and determines to start it again.

This is not a perfect novel. It has been criticised because it features few women characters; only two, in fact: the wife and the mother of Doctor Rieux. The mother is strong, supportive and courageous, but is not an agent in the way the male protagonists are. There are likewise no Arabs. (The issue of whether novelists are duty-bound to include in their works every aspect of the topic they are dealing with, to be seen to be ticking all the boxes of political correctness, is a separate — if nonetheless a topical — issue.)

Those of my friends who’ve read this novel find it unremittingly grim. Yet I like the fact that Camus encourages us to stare reality in the face, however monstrous. His insistence on truth and objectivity; his emphasis on personal responsibility and social justice; his celebration of friendship and the joys of this life (Rieux and Tarrou, in a rare moment of relaxation, enjoy a dip in the sea); his humanist compassion — all these are heartening. There are touches of gentle humour — the old man counting chickpeas, Grand’s attempts at novel-writing, for example — and the narrative, though not always an easy read, is devoid of sentimentality or melodrama.

Some critics have considered the two allegories to be mismatched, claiming that since plague is a natural phenomenon it is unsatisfactory as an allegory for war, which is a function of human evil, and thus deflects from the concept of personal responsibility. The point, however, is that the allegories here are not totally distinct, either from each other or from the motif of the plague which represents them. The human condition and the German occupation are both figured by the plague, but plague and war are both representative features of the human condition — ‘scourges’ is the term used throughout the book. Some scourges are natural phenomena (as for example death and plague) and some are the result of human activity, such as the death penalty and war. A second line of criticism has concerned the novel’s ahistoricity; yet this lack of specific historical reference, either to World War II or the Occupation, is a component of its perennial relevance. The allegory is flexible enough to be applied to any scourges, any elements of the human condition. It is both specific and general. Wars and plagues, figurative and literal, come and go unremittingly; ‘the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely’ (p. 435). This novel is as relevant in a time of inane politicians, Brexit and coronavirus as it was in 1947.

Endnotes:
[1] Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Robin Buss (London: Penguin, 2013), Kobo edition, p. 66. All further references will be given in the body of the text.

[2] Albert Camus, ‘Reflections on the Guillotine’ in Resistance, Rebellion and Death, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), p.199,
http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/deathsentences/CamusGuillotine.pdf [accessed 17 Aug. 2020].

Citation:
Christine Simon, ‘Death, War, Pestilence and Lockdown: Some Thoughts on Re-Reading Camus’s The Plague’, Notes on Literature: For Readers and Writers, www.notesonliteraturechester.blogspot.co.uk [accessed Day Month Year].

About the Author:
Dr Christine Simon is a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of English, University of Chester.

On BA (Hons) English Literature and Creative Writing, she has taught the following modules: Writing Prose; Writing Poetry; Research Methods for Writers; Writing the Past.

On MA Creative Writing: Writing and Publishing Fiction, she teaches on the modules: Writing Short Fiction for Publication; Writing Novels for Publication; Getting Published.

She has a particular interest in historical fiction, and is a regular reviewer for Flash:The International Short-Short Story Magazine.