Read for Lit & Medicine.

read this book then the Covid pandemic started a week after, shits cursed but great if you liked the style of the stranger

Camus' best, in my opinion. An important and compelling work that profoundly influenced my thinking.

I read this one for unsurprising reasons.

The Plague by French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus, is a bad novel about a French Algerian colony suffering under an outbreak of the bubonic plague in the 1940s. It may be a good novel about the Human Condition and What It All Means, if you're into that in your fiction. At the risk of being unfair to Camus, "the plague is a metaphor" is weak tea in the face of our own, very real, pandemic.

Set in the French city of Oran on the Algerian coast, Camus wants his parable to be universalizable to humanity. About Oran, Camus' unnamed-until-the-end narrator writes that “Its ordinariness is what strikes one first." “Really, all our contemporaries are much the same," “completely modern." Despite these claims, the specificity of the French colonial setting looms large in the background, yet is barely acknowledged by Camus. Whatever he wants to say about the human condition, he’s really just describing a particular (and particularly noxious) section of a society.

The novel is a “philosophical novel” but it might be better read as a failed attempt at a sociological novel. The characters are technicians, institutions, the public, and several incidental individuals who can illustrate what some parts of the public are doing. And of course the plague itself acts and is ascribed intention and motive. It makes perfect sense for Camus' narrator to anthropomorphize the plague. It doesn't make sense for a philosophical novel to refrain from challenging this by showing how alien and inhuman a virus is. But again, the plague is a metaphor, so -

A metaphor with interesting and lively characters can still be a worthwhile novel. Instead and unbeknownst to Camus, The Plague has emotionally stunted characters. At the end of Part 2, the self-interested Rambert is discussing with the doctors Rieux and Tarrou his attempts to escape the quarantine around Oran to return to his girlfriend, before she gets too old. Rambert has repeatedly assailed the stoic Rieux for not assisting in his efforts to escape, accusing him of being unfeeling and unable to understand the pain of separation he feels. Rieux in his turn asks Rambert to volunteer as a sanitation squad member. It is only when Tarrou tells Rambert, in what’s designed to be a stunning emotional revelation, that Rieux too is separated from his wife by the plague that Rambert is transformed and agrees to give up his private interest in order to help others.

The whole climax of Part 2 is built around a fucking full grown adult realizing that someone else might be suffering like he is and the apparently laudable virtue of making this realization. A better book could have played up Rambert’s stunning obtuseness as a broad satire; Camus sees it as an earnest scene of emotional and philosophical growth.

Dramatically, the novel wavers between dull and trite.

Spoiler

Not one, but two named characters die just at the end of the plague, just to illustrate the cruel vicissitudes of life snatching away what we care about just as hope is attained again, or something.

There are several monologues, illustrating philosophical perspectives. The excitement that does happen, like riots or attempts to break quarantine, mostly happen off-screen or are described only as general occurrences and not ones with the drama of specificity, character, and motivation. This could be excused as an attempt to show life as it is, which is to say generally not dramatic, if Camus wasn't indulging in the maudlin timing of deaths elsewhere.

This all circles back to the fact that the plague is not an inciting event that spurs dramatic scenes in which Camus can explore the themes that interest him. It is, instead, a metaphor. “Each of us has 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. [...] The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention.” The plague is described as “A never ending defeat” and, of course, an allegory for Camus’ theory of the Absurd and the necessity to struggle against it despite the impossibility of any lasting victory.

With that attitude, it isn't surprising that everyone is so fucking miserable in the novel. Camus circles back to themes of exile and escape, boredom, overwhelming private interest, a very unhappy relationship with time (aching for the past, dreading the present, doubting the future or suffering under its unknowable length), and an idea of abstraction that really sounds like alienation.

Camus doesn't want to write A Plague he wants to write The Plague so that he can describe the human condition from the imagined perspective of the universal. And from there, the joys, solidarity, and victories of the present must seem pathetic. In the face of the boundlessness of the universal, resolve grounded in but never undermined by pessimism seems like the answer. But the universal doesn’t exist, and whatever perspective Camus is imagining from, it is just his own.

If Camus wanted to take a knife to the particularities of the French colonial society and individual, maybe this novel would have more worth. Instead, he hides the particularities - no real mention of the colonial situation, hardly a thought given to class and racial dynamics, basically no mention of Arabs or Berbers. Camus wants to say: This is the condition of Man. Or, more narrowly, that this is the condition of modern man. Yet the overwhelming impression the novel gives is: this is the condition of some shitty French colonizers. Struggling to make sense of the universe, feeling exiled and bored.

J'ai été surpris de voir à quel point ce livre est bon. Ça devait faire près de 10 ans que je l'avais dans une boîte de livre et enfin je me suis décidé de le lire. À première vue, on une belle histoire sur la force de l'être humain à résister à un fléau comme la peste. Malgré tous les inconvénients qu'elle apport, surtout la mort, plusieurs s'organisent et luttent pour s'en débarrasser.

Lorsqu'on regarde plus profondément, on peut y voir un lien entre la peste et l'occupation nazie. Les héros du roman représentent donc la résistance face à l'occupant. Juste pour ça, ça en fait pour moi un grand roman.