Literary The Plague by Albert Camus

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

It's been a pleasure reading the many excellent and informative posts preceding this one. I enjoyed the book to a degree and thought it was good but it didn't entrance me. I liked the setting and the descriptions of certain parts of the town for almost the opposite reason as Camus chose it. To me this barren Algerian coastal city seemed exotic, mysterious and interesting whereas to Camus it was an ugly, boring wasteland. His prejudice and negativity towards it irked me at times but I suppose it made sense on a more philosophical level.

Camus wrote several essays on Oran, in The Myth of Sisyphus, and they were generally unflattering. You will notice that many of these sentiments were echoed in The Plague.

The Minotaur or The Stop In Oran
He waxed lyrical about the great cites of Europe. Then, pace Oran, he said "In order to flee poetry and yet recapture the peace of stones, other deserts are needed, other spots without soul and without reprieve. Oran is one of these."

In The Street, he said "The streets of Oran are doomed to dust, pebbles, and heat. If it rains, there is a deluge and a sea of mud. But rain or shine, the shops have the same extravagant and absurd look. All the bad taste of Europe and the Orient has managed to converge in them."

In The Desert In Oran, he said "Obliged to live facing a wonderful landscape, the people of Oran have overcome this fearful ordeal by covering their city with very ugly constructions. One expects to find a city open to the sea, washed and refreshed by the evening breeze. And aside from the Spanish quarter, one finds a walled town that turns its back to the sea, that has been built up by turning back on itself like a snail."

This dislike seems to have been specific to Oran; when he talked about Algiers, the city he grew up in, in the essay Summer In Algiers, "The loves we share with a city are often secret loves. Old walled towns like Paris, Prague, and even Florence are closed in on themselves and hence limit the world that belongs to them. But Algiers (together with certain other privileged places such as cities on the sea) opens to the sky like a mouth or a wound. In Algiers one loves the commonplaces: the sea at the end of every street, a certain volume of sunlight..."

If you enjoyed the description of Oran in The Plague, you may enjoy his last novel The First Man ( Le Premier homme), an autobiographical novel about his childhood as a dirt-poor colon in Algiers. When I read The First Man, I was amazed that someone could rise from that background to become such a great writer.

[Bookpossum]

Thanks everyone for the interesting comments over the last few days. I must try to find the time to read the Defoe, and also try some other Camus, as I have only read The Outsider and The Plague.

Great to read the Nobel Prize acceptance speech too, so thanks for that, Bookworm_Girl.

[caleb72]

I think probably some of the comments that have come out about Camus start to paint a picture of him for me. Oran was a town in which he had a bad experiences - a particular harsh bout of tuberculosis which prevented him from swimming, something I understand he was very fond of.

I think he's taken his vengeance on the town in this book.

I agree with some of the comments about him being a little heavy-handed. There are some references to war throughout which makes the allegory a little less subtle than I thought it would be.

The comments about his treatment of women were equally interesting to me. I don't really hold many expectations of equal treatment or consideration from some of these "greats" in literature. But I'm also rather insensitive to it as a reader. Dostoyevsky and Camus tends to pass me by without me noticing the lack of balance until someone brings my attention to it.

I have always elevated Camus in my mind as a great writer, mainly on the strength of The Outsider. I have read very little about him as a person, but from that suspected I probably wouldn't have liked him as a person. Just a gut feel really.

But I did really enjoy reading The Plague. I didn't find it dull - although a bit heavier in some parts. Tarrou finally succumbing in the last part of the book found a sweet spot for me and the treatment of aftermath echoed for me after the last pages were read - especially people being shown around to where particular events occurred; the tragic already made a spectacle.

[fantasyfan]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

Thanks everyone for the interesting comments over the last few days. I must try to find the time to read the Defoe, and also try some other Camus, as I have only read The Outsider and The Plague.

Great to read the Nobel Prize acceptance speech too, so thanks for that, Bookworm_Girl.

Defoe. of course, is very different with a 17th century mindset. Still, he is remarkably and brilliantly detailed. Interestingly, he shows the futile insistence of human behaviour in the face of the calamity. I recall one instance where a man goes to extraordinary lengths to steal a purse of gold in the street. Yet he may be dead in hours after he takes it.

[Bookworm_Girl]

I finally finished the book last Sunday. My thoughts are most similar to Caleb's. Somewhere around 30% it really slowed down and I thought I'll never finish this.... But, it quickly turned around, and I read the rest of the book over 2 days. I really enjoyed it. I've never studied philosophy so it was a bit challenging to me to try to separate and analyze the overlapping and sometimes contradictory themes of existentialism, humanism and absurdism. Camus's life was filled with suffering and hardships so one can see from his biography how it influenced his thinking and attraction to these themes as well as loneliness and exile.

My appreciation has grown in the last several days as I've been reflecting on the roles and actions of the different characters. I didn't get an impression while reading that the characters were under-developed. Who would have guessed in the beginning that the asthmatic Spaniard and old man who spits on cats would be candidates for saint-hood? I found the transformation of the priest interesting as well as the proclamation of his death being a "doubtful case". The climax of the innocent child Jacques's death was very moving, and his magistrate father is changed by events. Interesting how Camus made one feel sympathetic towards the criminal Cottard and his tragic ending.

I think the book still has meaning today and did not seem out-dated. I could see myself reading this book again in the future as a reminder of its themes similar to how I like to reread some dystopian classics. I found this recent op-ed in the New York Times as an example of how one columnist suggests the book might be applied to today's current events.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/14/op...and-panic.html

He knew that this happy crowd was unaware of something that one can read in books, which is that the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely, that it can remain dormant for dozens of years in furniture or clothing, that it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers, and that perhaps the day will come when, for the instruction or misfortune of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by caleb72

I agree with some of the comments about him being a little heavy-handed. There are some references to war throughout which makes the allegory a little less subtle than I thought it would be.

I had to return my book to the library, but I was wondering afterwards how many times he used the word "war" within the text. The "deratization" vehicle was one war image that really hit me like a heavy hammer.

[Bookpossum]

Thanks for the link to the article Bookworm_Girl - interesting find and post.

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

I had to return my book to the library, but I was wondering afterwards how many times he used the word "war" within the text. The "deratization" vehicle was one war image that really hit me like a heavy hammer.

There are several references to war in The Plague. These are from the Stuart Gilbert translation:

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There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.
In fact, like our fellow citizens, Rieux was caught off his guard, and we should understand his hesitations in the light of this fact; and similarly understand how he was torn between conflicting fears and confidence. When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though a war may well be "too stupid," that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.
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But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination
===========================
Suddenly he realized that Rambert was returning his gaze.
"You know, doctor, I've given a lot of thought to your campaign. And if I'm not with you, I have my reasons. No, I don't think it's that I'm afraid to risk my skin again. I took part in the Spanish Civil War."
"On which side?" Tarrou asked.
"The losing side. But since then I've done a bit of thinking." "About what?"
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As for the others, working themselves almost to a standstill throughout the day and far into the night, they never bothered to read a newspaper or listen to the radio. When told of some unlooked-for recovery, they made a show of interest, but actually received the news with the stolid indifference that we may imagine the fighting man in a great war to feel who, worn out by the incessant strain and mindful only of the duties daily assigned to him, has ceased even to hope for the decisive battle or the bugle-call of armistice.
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Tarrou, when told by Rieux what Paneloux had said, remarked that he'd known a priest who had lost his faith during the war, as the result of seeing a young man's face with both eyes destroyed.
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But the silence now enveloping his dead friend, so dense, so much akin to the nocturnal silence of the streets and of the town set free at last, made Rieux cruelly aware that this defeat was final, the last disastrous battle that ends a war and makes peace itself an ill beyond all remedy.
===========================

Besides direct references to war, there is an odd reference, which I did not understand initially.

The idea was to confer a decoration on guards who died in the exercise of their duties, came to nothing. Since martial law had been declared and the guards might, from a certain angle, be regarded as on active service, they were awarded posthumously the military medal. But though the prisoners raised no protest, strong exception was taken in military circles, and it was pointed out, logically enough, that a most regrettable confusion in the public mind would certainly ensue. The civil authority conceded the point and decided that the simplest solution was to bestow on guards who died at their post a "plague medal".

I have been reading Richard Overy's The Bombing War. Overy noted that in Germany "There were strong demands that the dead in bombing raids should be marked in the newspapers with an iron cross, like the military dead." This was deprecated by the Nazi hierarchy and the military, but eventually

a compromise was reached, allowing civil defence workers of either sex who died while carrying out dangerous duties to have their death notices marked with an iron cross. They could also be described as ‘fallen’ for the Fatherland, but the rest of the bomb victims could not

This seems a striking parallel to the passage in The Plague about decorations for prison guards who died of the plague.