The Plague by Albert Camus

The Haiku

Fails the Bechdel test / Bloviations writ large / Not bad plane reading

The Short

Lengthy films in Thailand, all other factors equal, fared better than short films on account of the dollars-per-minute air-conditioned respite they offered their viewers. So claims my mother. Perhaps wordy books in the olden days fared similarly well against their more tightly composed cousins. What else could explain the description of Albert Camus’ The Plague as one of “the great novels of the twentieth century”? The verbose and repetitive expositions, many of which spout fountains of philosophical blah blah blah stylistically (but not substantively) reminiscent of Ayn Rand, could possibly be defended as a device that cleverly subjects the reader to that which the citizens of plague-stricken Oran were subject. But a clever device, while fine for the pages of the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog, does not a great twentieth century novel make, and boy are those bold words for Mr. Book Jacket Writer to have penned when only 72% of the twentieth century was finished.

It would be interesting to see how a book like this would be edited today. Its message is fairly no duh (though perhaps it was for me, thanks to the existential lit class that I often skipped) but it afforded me a fictional glimpse at the north coast of Africa, and there are some cats who make an adorable appearance. Its narrative style reminded me, for some reason, of Graham Greene’s The Captain and The Enemy, but maybe this memory was conjured only by the feeling and scent of the yellowing paper onto which the text was printed.

The Vocabulary Quiz

Know all these words? Then you got me beat.

• assizes
• carapaced
• embrocation
• fillip
• imprimatur
• lassitude
• multitudinous
• objurgations
• parapet
• pestiferous
• pestilence; pestilential
• strophes
• tenterhooks
• tocsin
• tremolos
• vouchsafed
• weal

Stuff My Dad Likes

The copy of The Plague that I read was ganked from my dad’s book collection. Highlighted in pencil decades ago by, presumably, my father:

“The important thing isn’t the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.” (Castel, p. 47)

(Does it matter that my father is a devoted Republican?)

It was undoubtedly the feeling of exile – that sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire. (p. 67)

I didn’t need to mark this, as I stumbled upon these words by James Baldwin in Giovanni’s Room years ago:

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or; it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

Hmm. Maybe Camus said it better.

Dad Intersection Daughter

Thus, in a middle course between those heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the pretty of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that would have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress. (p. 68)

This reminds me of something I wrote in one my zine rants ages ago, something to the effect of my desire to tumble into a place where I am living and not simply existing. I wonder what my dad was thinking of when he highlighted the passage?

Hats Off

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. (pp. 35-36)

Ain’t that the truth. And if you think not, perhaps you have not experienced the delight of working in a modern American corporation?

People linked together by friendship, affection, or physical love found themselves reduced to hunting for tokens of their past communion within the compass of a ten-word telegram. And since, in practice, the phrases one can use in a telegram are quickly exhausted, long lives passed side by side, or passionate yearnings, soon declined to the exchange of such trite formulas as: “Am well. Always thinking of you. Love.” (p. 65)

But are we not often hunting for tokens of affection in one way or another?

The common lot of married couples. You get married, you go on loving a bit longer, you work. And you work so hard that it makes you forget to love. (p. 77)

Oh, please say it isn’t so.

Says Rambert, a journalist from somewhere else stuck in Oran away from the woman he loves for the duration of the plague:

“The truth is I wasn’t brought into the world to write newspaper articles. But it’s quite likely I was brought into the world to live with a woman.” (p. 80)

He continues:

“Public welfare is merely the sum total of the private welfares of each of us.” (p. 80-83)

!!!

But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. (p. 125)

You could see, for instance, even the most intelligent among them making a show like all the rest of studying the newspapers or listening to the radio, in the hope apparently of finding some reason to believe the plague would shortly end. They seemed to derive fantastic hopes or equally exaggerated fears from reading the lines that some journalist has scribbled at random, yawning with boredom at his desk. (p. 173)

Again, extrapolating from tokens …

“At my age one’s got to be sincere. Lying’s too much effort.” (Tarrou, p. 192)

Ain’t that the truth?

A loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one’s work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart. (p. 243)

Hats On

“sensibilitiy” (sic) (p. 178)

Context Clues

• There followed objurgations, screams, batterings on the door, action by the police, and later armed force; the patient was taken by storm. (p. 85)
• Whatever the reason might be, people living in the central districts realized that their turn had come when each night they heard oftener and oftener the ambulances clanging past, sounding the plague’s dismal, passionless tocsin under their windows. (p. 158)
• The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. (p. 161)
• And all the time nothing more important befell us than that multitudinous marking time. (p. 175)
• Throughout the first act Orpheus lamented suavely his lost Eurydice, with women in Grecian tunics singing melodious comments on his plight, and love was hymned in alternating strophes. (p. 185)
• Only a few people noticed that in his song of the second act Orpheus introduced some tremolos not in the score and voiced an almost exaggerated emotion when begging the lord of the Underworld to be moved by his tears. (p. 185)
• Then the storm-wind passed, there came a lull, and he relaxed a little; the fever seemed to recede, leaving him gasping for breath on a dank, pestilential shore, lost in a languor that already looked like death. (p. 199)
• [Rieux’s] lassitude had returned and from its depths he spoke, more gently: “[Grace is] something I haven’t got; that I know.” (p. 203)
• Thus today God had vouchsafed to His creatures an ordeal such that they must acquire and practice the greatest of all virtues: that of the All or Nothing. (p. 208)
• There was no question of not taking precautions or failing to comply with the orders wisely promulgated for the public weal in the disorders of a pestilence. (p. 211)
• The young deacon, his head bowed to protect his face from the wind, replied that he saw much of the Father, had followed the evolution of his views, and believed his forthcoming pamphlet would be bolder still; indeed it might well be refused the imprimatur. (p. 212)
• The authorities, who had long been desirous of giving a fillip to the morale of the populace, but had so far been prevented by the plague from doing so, now proposed to convene a meeting of the medical corps and ask for an announcement on the subject. (p. 219)
• And then [Gonzales] fell to conjuring up, as best he could, the once familiar smell of embrocation in the dressing-rooms, the stands crowded with people, the colored shirts of the players, showing up brightly against the tawny soil, the lemons at intermission or bottled lemonade that titillated parched throats with a thousand refreshing pin-pricks. (p. 222)
• Tarrou had moved and now was sitting on the parapet, facing Rieux, who was slumped back in his chair. (p. 228)
• “There was a big case on at the assizes, and probably [my father] thought I’d see him to his best advantage.” (Tarrou; p. 230)
• “I didn’t want to be pestiferous, that’s all.” (Tarrou; p. 232)
• Every passenger had reserved his seat long in advance and had been on tenterhooks during the past fortnight lest at the last moment the authorities should go back on their decision. (p. 273)

The Plague Intersection Flannery O

Tarrou 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.

“Paneloux is right,” Tarrou continued. “When an innocent youth can have his eyes destroyed, a Christian should either lose his faith or consent to having his eyes destroyed. Paneloux declines to lose his faith, and he will go through with it to the end.” (p. 213)

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Albert Camus’ The Plague on Amazon.com | Thoughts on Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood