Albert Camus,The Plague:Face of Death

By Avik Gangopadhyay, Masters Student

The essay intends to probe the realistic,existentialist & fictional dimensions of the much debated allegorical milestone of world literature.

An essay hosted at LiteratureClassics.com

ALBERT CAMUS

THE PLAGUE : FACE OF DEATH


Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria, in 1913. As a novelist, dramatist, essayist and journalist he exerted a profound influence in the mid 20th century on the conscience of Western man. A man of great personal integrity, Camus did not seek to define a dogma but a way of life that would respect in equal measure the logic of the heart, the logic of the mind, and the limitations imposed on the individual by reality. A master of diverse literary techniques, he was one of the exponents of existentialism in literature, along with Jean – Paul Sartre. In his novels, plays and essays Camus examined the fundamental dilemmas of modern man, who is shorn of traditional structures of religious belief and explanation and who sees human existence as purposeless and incomrehensible in rational terms. In his humanism his existentialist perspective is vibrant: his approach towards human existence is characterised by the sense of ‘anguish’, ‘absurdity’, ‘nothingness’, ‘death’ and ‘alienation’ – five of the six elementary themes of existentialism.
His three novels, L’etranger (1942) or The Stranger also popularly titled The Outsider, La Peste (1947) or The Plague, and La Chute (1956) or The Fall have changed the approach towards fiction in terms of content and style. L’etranger portrays the feelings, responses and attitude of an Algerian Clerk, Meursault, that cannot be classified. Meursault is a person who is innocent, who never lies and also does not believe in God. His indifference to his mother’s death and funeral, releasing his hangover with his girl friend on the swimming pool, blindly committing a murder, charging the clergy of becoming sure of the most uncertain thing of the world – demonstrate an uncertainty, that critics call ‘Absurd’. La peste depicts a human situation of an epidemic of bubonic plague in the Algerian town of Oran and reactions of individuals. Dr. Rieux, who has no faith in the rationality of the universe, acts as a humanist but makes us see different faces of death. La chute enters into the consciousness of Clamence, a former Parisian lawyer and reveals his guilty conscience as a man who has spent his life professionally seeking justice for others but who when personally confronted with a women’s attempt at suicide does nothing to save her. Stylistically, the first novel has a blend of third-person and first-person narration, the second novel is a chronicle and the third novel is an interior monologue. These three works have redefined the existing fictional status in terms of content and form in the post-war literary scenario.
The Plague is a novel where the uncertainty of both the life and the death enchains the characters of the chronicle as well as the psyche of the readers. The conventional status of the life and the death is fractured while encountering both the life and the death from the perspective of death. My intention is to avoid deliberately the only one interpretation repeated by critics: “the novel is an allegory of occupied France by German conquerors during the World War II.” It is the existential and the metaphysical meaning that concern me most.
After stating the themes of existentialism I shall examine them in the plot. The main themes are as follows:
i) The basic existentialist standpoint is that existence precedes essence; existentialism says “I am nothing else but my own conscious existence.”
ii) The second existentialist theme is that of anxiety, or the sense of anguish, a generalised uneasiness, a fear or dread which is not directed to any specific object. Anguish is the underlying, all-pervasive, universal condition of human existence.
iii) The third existentialist theme is that of absurdity: “To exist as a human being is inexplicable and wholly absurd. Each of us is simply here thrown into this time and place – but why now? Why here?” Pascall puts it quite directly: “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of space of which I am ignorant, and which knows me not, I am frightened, and an astonished at being here rather than there, why now rather than then.”
iv) The fourth theme has its deep philosophical roots: it is of nothingness or the void. The existentialist says, “If no essences define me, and if, then, as an existentialist, I reject all of the philosophies, sciences, political theories, and religious which fail to reflect my existence as conscious being and attempt to impose a specific essentialist structure upon me and my world, then there is nothing that structures my world. …I live then without anything to structure my being and my world, and I am looking into emptiness and the void, hovering over the abyss in fear and trembling and living the life of dread.”
v) The fifth theme is the theme of death: “Nothingness, in the form of death, which is my final nothingness, hangs over me like a sword of Democles at each moment of my life. I am filled with anxiety at times when I permit myself to be aware of this.” The German existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) says, “…my death is my most authentic, significant moment, my personal potentiality, which I alone must suffer.” But French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre differs and says, “What is Death? Death is my total nonexistence. Death is as absurd as birth – it is no ultimate, authentic moment of my life, it is nothing but the wiping out of my existence as conscious being.”
vi) The sixth theme that characterises existentialism is alienation or estrangement. Alienation is a theme which Hegel opened up for the modern world on many levels and in may subtle forms. In the 20th century terms alienation is the individual’s sense of separation or isolation from society, from his own feelings or identity, from God, from his work and attendant feelings of meaninglessness, normlessness, and powerlessness.
The concern with death and its abyss of nonexistence is the basis for most of Camus’ literary works. Dr. Bernard Rieus, Father Panelous, Jean Tarrou. Raymond Rambert and Joseph Grand are individuals armed with life against death in The Plague. The tragedy of a Plague is announced in the title of the book. In the opening scene the face of death fades in. As the face of life fades out Camus is announcing the death of many people. The announcement of death is paramount in Camus’ philosophy and in his novels. The people of Oran in The Plague are warned repeatedly of their fate to die-they are waiting, watching, hearing and even learning from the consequences of the day-yet choose to be unbelieving, antagonistic and indifferent to the warning. That is the reason behind the slow initiation of the chronicle. The first chapter begins with Dr. Ricux’s discovering a dead rat and a crotchety concierge’s indignant and comic fussings and it ends with a total of several thousands of dead rats, and the plague’s first death – M.Michel, the concierge. The first dead rat begins the chapter and the first human victim ends it. Structurally, there is a sense of completeness in the first chapter. The sum-up style of the narrator involves occasional asides and short discourses that too slips out to the second chapter to introduce several important characters.
In expanding the canvas of death and the deads, Camus’ style is semi-documentary. Perhaps his several years of newspaper writing are the genesis of this style helps to formulate his ideas concerning the need for careful, documented truthfulness. For instance, the character – focus of the book is not wholly on Dr. Rieux, but because he is, in disguise, the narrator, he assumes a kind of early hero focal point. Rieux is a doctor, throughout the book, he doctors. He does not act as a mouthpiece of the existentialist didacticism of Camus. In the strict sense he is not even a pivotal character. He is not a character around whom the events take place. He is the part of events with a role assigned to counter the death with the life. He epitomises the massive protest of the humans against mortality, only with a difference: others fight for their own lives and Dr. Rieux only fights death in particular. He acts the role which he feels and wills consciously. Being an atheist he does not believe the roles assigned to him by an unknown and mighty scriptwriter. There is an objectivity of approach uniquely displayed by Dr. Rieux in his fight against the collective and the subjective death in the chronicle. He is the narrator who is in his late thirties, a highly respected surgeon. The tonal detachment of his portrayal depicts nothing Heroic in his actions. He refuses to leave Oran to join his wife and fights death and disease because he has been trained to do so. He conceives of his life having value only when he is continuing to help others combat death and achieve health. To Dr. Rieux, there are two evils: death and man’s ignorance of it.
Father Paneloux is a priest who undergoes a transformation. First, he interprets the sudden plague as just punishment for the sins of his congregation. Later, after enrolling in the plague fighters’ battalion, confronting directly the poisoned victims, both death and plague cease to become easy abstracts. Leaving the preaching of the ideas like punishment, God’s will and curse he devotes himself to fight death; in existential terms, it not the ‘essence’ but ‘existence’, the very conscious being-the ‘being-in-itself’ upon which he concentrates. He joins the dead, first with a will to fight and then with a will to joint the ranks of the victims.
Jean Tarrou is wanderer who comes innocuously to Oran and becomes the best friend of Rieux. His notebooks are used as part of the chronicle. He is the last victim of the plague. He is a person who is alienated from his family – patroned ideals, from the surrounding notions of the social justice. He encounters ‘dread’ or ‘anguish’ much more psychologically than socially. During the chronicle, he realises Rieux’s struggle as futile but not impossible. He seeks inner peace by becoming his own moral sentry so as not to bring harm to others. He lives ever-sympathetic with men, always aware of his human duty to heal. Tarrou dies with a strangely smiling, courage: “The storm, lashing his body into convulsive movement, lit it” (eyes opened glowing in the ravaged face) “up with ever rarer flashes, and in the heart of the tempest he was slowly drifting, derelict”. Moments before “Tarrou tried to shape a smile, but it could not force its way through the set jaws and lips welded by dry saliva. In the rigid face only the eyes lived still, glowing with courage”. It is only here that we find tears blinding Rieux’s eyes. The ‘absurdity’ of existence seems less pronounced here in the ‘absurdity’ inherrent in death. Rieux realises it in “the tranquil death-chamber, beside the dead body now in everyday clothing”. This realisation of Rieux has come upon his mind in the “silence brooding over the beds in which he had let men die. There as here, it was the same solemn pause, the lull that follows battle: the silence of defeat”.
Both Raymond Rambert and Joseph Grand are the individuals metamorphosed to responsible adulthood by the plague. Rambert is a former football player and a feature-writer for a Paris newspaper, is in Oran on assignment when the city is quarantined. He feels unjustifiably exiled in Oran-the city of exile. Grand is an eccentric writer-world-be, and Rambert willingly elect to remain in Oran and assist Rieux and do their meager best to defend the city during the Period of trial.
The title Camus initially thought for the book was ‘The Prisoners’. Infact the theme inherently possesses the prisoner idea, specially the idea of separation. If seen from an awareness of a Godless universe the existential context of the novel seems dominating. All existential themes go hand in hand. Within the plot, many of the characters are alienated from one another by their small-time greeds, their lack of human love, and their indifference. As plague progresses the living are alienated from the dead, which under normal circumstances look unnatural, if not inhuman. The ill are put into isolation camps and are estranged from family and relatives. Strangely enough the radiant sea of Oran, nature herself is separated from the Oranians in her awesome beauty all through the sick-tainted days of the epidemic. In the vast backdrop of the universe man’s plight seems nonexistent. Man fervently intends to become important, prays for something larger than himself yet remains separated from the universe.
The world of Camus in The Plague has an extreme situation where the death and the life are equally uncertain. Oran is cut off from the outside world and characters are forced to think, reflect and assume responsibility for living. With concrete symptoms of distress before him man comes to terms with his existence in the universe. Death is faced by many Oranians for the first time with the horror of a plague. Existentially, this confrontation is mandatory for experiencing the Absurdity. Rationally facing our existence is one of the most extreme of metaphysical trials. Dr. Rieux experiences such vision of man’s problem of mortality. Through him Camus reasserts the Socratic idiom: “the unexamined life is not worth living”. To Camus “God can too easily become last minute insurance”. Sitting between “the ravaging winds of heaven” and “the dark flood of pestilence”, Dr. Rieux tries to swallow “the silence of defeat”. The sense of nothingness reverberates in his flow of thoughts: “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.” Camus’ sense of finality lies in the defeat in The Plague, neither in the uncertainty of life nor in the certainty of death. Soren Kier Keggard (1813-1855), one of the forerunners of existentialism thus summed up:
“Here the cry of the mother at the hour of giving birth,
See the struggle of the dying at the last moment: and
say then whether that which begins and that which ends
like this can be designed for pleasure.”