Inspiring Older Readers
The Plague (Le Peste) by Albert Camus
When the rats start to leave the cellars and sewers and drop dead, the population of Oran in Algeria is puzzled but not unduly upset by this odd behaviour. However, it’s not too long before the first human causalities start to show up – sweating, sick and with the tell-tale buboes of their disease. Initially everyone is reluctant to acknowledge what seems obvious – the town is in the grip of the bubonic plague.
Camus tells the tale of the how the plague comes to Oran largely through the eyes of Dr Bernard Rieux whose ‘journal’ of the events it turns out that we are reading. We see the illness begin to spread exponentially through the town’s citizens until eventually the whole population is placed in isolation and any travel outside its boundaries is banned. Weeks and months pass as they wait for the illness to run its course.
But detailed though this chronology of events is, we see that physical illness is not the only problem as the plague begins to have its psychological and cultural effects as well. Fear and the urge to escape begin to grip some of the inhabitants who are trapped together with no realistic prospect of escape and facing the daily prospect of death. A small cast of characters occupy centre stage – the doctor himself, a journalist, a criminal, a priest, a legal official – and they become representatives of what modern man can be at their best and their worst.
It is generally accepted that Camus’ inspiration for The Plague came in part from the details of actual historical events relating to Oran’s great cholera epidemic of 1849, when the disease had ripped through this and other cities in Algeria’s interior. However, faithfulness to the historical reality of an infectious disease isn’t his main intention – the plague Camus is writing about is actually an extended metaphor for the sickness of Fascism that had swept through Europe as a political and ideological sickness. Camus’ novel was published in 1948 and stands as his most detailed analysis of the impact of totalitarianism on the population that had spent so many years in thrall to dictatorship and war.
Writing in The Guardian in January 2015, the critic Ed Vulliamy captures, I think, the contemporary importance of Camus’ masterwork when he says:
Nowadays, I think, La Peste can tell the story of a different kind of plague: that of a destructive, hyper-materialist, turbo-capitalism; and can do so as well as any applied contemporary commentary. In fact especially so, for this reason: the Absurd. Our society is absurd, and Camus’ novel examines – among many other things, and for all its moralising – our relationship to the absurdity of modern existence. It can describe very well the plague in a society which blares its phantasgmagoria across the poor world so that millions come, aboard tomb ships or across murderous deserts, in search of its empty promises; and which even destroys the constant against which Camus measured human mortality: nature.
The characters who populate The Plague are all presented with seeming sympathy – the doctor who tells the story is a model of patience and application and even those who try and exploit the situation for personal gain or seek to simply run away are not explicitly judged. However, in reality, Camus is inviting us to see that humanity, even at its very best, is a ‘plague’ – something infecting what should be a natural and healthy environment. We carry the plague and it can erupt from us at any time under any name in the future – what we’ve lived through we are condemned to live through again because of our very nature.
Camus’ book seems to be an analysis of the world as it was in the middle of the war torn 20th century but it is much more than that. What it tells every age is that the plague of fascism and totalitarian dictatorship is dormant in all communities - just waiting to emerge again when the conditions are right.
Terry Potter
June 2016