The Plague
Albert Camus (1947)
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A lot of people read Camus’ The Plague back when they were teenagers or perhaps when they were in college, as one of those classics of world literature that generally demanded attention as the magnum opus of the youngest Nobel Prize winning writer in history. But it should probably come as no surprise that The Plague has become a bestseller again in the past eighteen months, as the world has reeled from the COVID-19 pandemic: After all, the novel offers a fictional account of a large city in which citizens are isolated from the world, while their neighbors are struck down by a disease no one can stop, and where body counts are rising every day.
The outbreak of bubonic plague in the French-controlled Algerian city of Oran in 1947 is completely fictionalized. Camus was inspired somewhat by a notorious cholera epidemic that struck that city in 1849, and uses the history of that event as source material to some extent. His descriptions of the plague victims and of mass burials and the like certainly owe something to Boccaccio’s account of the Black Death in Florence in the opening pages of his Decameron, and other details are likely inspired by Defoe’s 18th century Journal of the Plague Year. But there is no doubt that Camus succeeds in creating a milieu and a mood that feels genuine—that puts us convincingly in the middle of a plague-ridden city, and presents a world that COVID self-isolationists can relate to.
The first thing you may notice as Camus describes the opening stages of the epidemic is how alarmingly prescient he seems to have been. As the rats begin to appear and die, the populace simply complains about the sanitation department not doing its job. When people begin to fall sick and die, the city’s bureaucracy does nothing, led by a Prefect who takes the very presidential attitude that he is “personally convinced that it’s a false alarm,” and goaded on by a lower-level official who insists that the disease not be identified to the public as “plague” but only as “a special kind of fever.” While the city’s most vocal physician (and the novel’s protagonist), Dr. Rieux, keeps pushing the government to take actions to limit the increasing death counts, they resist until it becomes simply too dangerous, and finally close the city to outsiders, and quarantine everyone within. It’s so much like reading of Dr. Fauci’s difficulties under an unresponsive and antiscientific administration that it’s as if Camus had consulted some Sibylline prophetess three-quarters of a century ago.
But if this is all you take from a new reading of the novel, you will have wasted your time. This only emphasizes one minor theme of the book: “Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world,” Camus’s narrator says, “yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.”
It’s how we ultimately respond to those things that crash down on our heads that Camus wants to explore. He presents us with several major characters, each of whom responds to the plague in his own characteristic manner. Jean Tarrou, a visitor who arrived in Oran a few weeks before the epidemic broke out, is a friendly, good-humored man who befriends Dr. Rieux and keeps a diary that is sometimes incorporated into the narrative. Tarrou, appalled at the government’s plan to force prisoners and conscripted citizens to do the necessary work of isolating infected persons and dealing with the dead, proposes that, since the plague is everyone’s problem and everyone’s responsibility, then everyone should take action to fight it, and so he organizes teams of volunteers, “sanitary squads,” to help the victims. Tarrou’s personal moral code prompts him to this service.
Father Paneloux, the city’s revered Jesuit priest, also joins the volunteer workers as his Christian duty. His attitudes toward the plague, however, are revealed in his sermons. The first of these he delivers early on in the epidemic, and it takes on the predictable message that the plague is a scourge sent by God because of human sins, but insists that God is present to offer us hope if we turn to him. Later, he watches at the bedside of the young son of one of the town’s officials, and watches the young, innocent child die in protracted agony. When he preaches another sermon on the child’s death, he declares that while nothing can rationally explain the death of an innocent child in a universe governed by a benevolent God, we must nevertheless accept it as God’s will and thus even will it ourselves. Camus suggests that only by such rationally and morally unacceptable arguments can Christian faith be maintained during time of plague. And there is no doubt that he rejects it.
Raymond Rambert is a journalist who finds himself in Oran researching a story on the standard of living among Oran’s Arab population when he is suddenly prevented from leaving because of the plague quarantine. He is cut off from the woman he loves in Paris, and is desperate to get out of the city and back to his beloved, but the bureaucracy will not let him leave. There are thousands in the city in the same position as he, and exceptions cannot be made. Rambert even tries to make arrangements with smugglers who promise to get him out of the city for a fee of 10,000 francs. Ultimately, however, Rambert has a change of heart. He would be ashamed, he admits, to pursue his own private happiness when so many in Oran are struggling against the pestilence, and he decides to say and help the volunteers because the plague is the responsibility of everyone.
Dr. Bernard Rieux himself is motivated not by Christian morality, or some private moral code like Tarrou, or some sense of responsibility to the community like Rambert. He is a doctor. His profession is the relief of human suffering. He runs a hospital and treats victims as best he can from morning far into the night. He lances buboes which occasionally helps. He develops a serum, which seems to help some. He seems impassive—when he enters the house and sees a person with the plague, he follows the safety protocols and makes sure the victim is taken away, deaf to the pleas of family members, who find him heartless. But he simply must steel himself against emotion. It would be impossible otherwise to do his job.
The theme—essentially an existentialist one, though Camus rejected that term—emphasizes human choice: We did not make the world—we did not create the plague—but we are responsible for the way we react to it. Human agency, in the face of resignation or despair or even the overwhelming force of the plague, is Camus’s constant emphasis.
Camus began writing The Plague during the war years when, working with the French resistance, he made his own choice to take action against the overwhelming force of the Nazi regime. It is no secret that he intended The Plague to be taken as an allegory. “It is at the same time a tale about an epidemic,” he said, and also “a symbol of Nazi occupation.” In this sense, Dr. Rieux and his fellow volunteers are a representation of the Resistance—a collection of volunteers from across the political spectrum, banded together for a common purpose.
Camus added that there is a third allegorical interpretation of the plague: “the concrete illustration of a metaphysical problem, that of evil.” Perhaps this is what the old man in the last pages of the novel seems to suggest when he says, “What does it mean, the plague? It’s life, that’s all.” And how we respond to life, how we deal with the metaphysical problem of evil, is our own choice. Rieux himself contemplates at the end of the book whether struggle against the evil of the world, the plague, has any meaning, especially if it is essentially hopeless. Perhaps there is, he decides, for those “who knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.”