Thirty Nine. The Plague by Albert Camus
1947, Everyman’s Library, 272 pages. Written in French, read in English.
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Albert Camus’ most famous novel, The Plague, can be read, in my opinion, in two ways — in the literal sense, it’s a chronicle of an outbreak of the bubonic plague in a small city that is not fully equipped to deal with the implications of the situation, which is part of a country which is similarly not fully equipped to deal with its implications. In the metaphorical sense, the plague, the city and the protagonist all stand to account for something in a wider parable, that I could not fully understand, and even the very useful — as always — introduction to this Everyman’s Library edition of the book could provide. Maybe the time of the book’s publication — 1947 — and Camus’ refusal to pin the narrative time to a specific time (the opening phrase of the novel times it in 194…), are hints of a reality that the novel tries to be a parable of.
I will stick with the literal sense, then. In a small city called Oran on the coast of Algeria, rats start dying in unprecedented numbers. Then, the people who have to tend to their disposal start becoming sick and dying, and it becomes apparent that the whole city has fallen victim to an outbreak of the bubonic plague. As the city officials try to determine what needs to be done, and as the city’s doctors attempt to decide how to treat this unprecedented event, the decision is made to seal off the city — shut its gates closed, shut down the port and the train station, and stand guards at the gates to prevent people from escaping the city, until the plague is contained and victory is declared.
In the midst of this unusual occurrence, Camus follows, through an anonymous narrator, several of the inhabitants of the city. There’s the doctor Bernard Rieux, trying to decide how to treat the victims of the plague efficiently, and how to persuade the city officials that a real, dire, problem is in their midst; there’s Cottard, who tries to kill himself (the reasons for which will be revealed by the end of the novel) and Grand, his neighbour, who saves him and dispatches Dr. Rieux; there’s Rembert, a visiting journalist who happens to be stranded in the city as it is being shut down, and spends the majority of the novel trying to find ways to escape from the city, and Tarrou, a citizen of the city who spends his days collecting impressions of his surroundings, a journalist for his own amusement.
Camus’ primary concern in this novel is to reflect on how the larger calamity, almost uncontrollable and incomprehensible to the individual characters, affects their lives, and how they progress as human beings within it. At the end of the narrative, when the plague dies down and the quarantine is lifted, and each character is free to go about their lives as they have planned to do before, it appears that the end of the ordeal has been as random as its beginning, and Dr. Rieux, revealing himself as the narrator (not really a spoiler, as it is already mentioned in the introduction), reminds the reader that the bacteria responsible for the disease is never really eradicated. The bacteria — both literal and figurative — lies dormant, waiting for the next time it will have a chance to rise and sweep the whole city into another bout of chaos.
