The Plague

Has Camus become such an integral part of my thinking that his thought seems obvious? Man lives in an absurd universe. Bryson makes that clear in Short History. Shit happens for which we are not prepared to deal. Look at the real statistics on the plague--the black death--and look at the dislocations to the society and the economy when it struck.

Of course, Camus is dealing with individual response and reaction--individual consciousness. Isolation, alienation, and death are man's fate. But once you've said that, so what? I was kind of plodding along with the mediocrity of people's lives and the seeming mediocrity of the book--great ideas wrapped in mediocre literature. We are all reduced to the level of the bean counter, and we just dress up the details of life to get through the day.

But that's not true, either, when we come to the death of Othon's son and the vivid portrayal of his agony and death and the inability of any of the characters to do anything about it. This leads to the confrontation between Panelou and Rieux, the priest and the doctor. Panelou gives a sermon that accepted the child's death as a part of God's plan, and Rieux refused to accept it, even though he was powerless to stop it. This leads to the rooftop confession by Tarrou to Rieux: "each of us has the plague within him…we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we…fasten the infection on [someone else]. What's natural is the microbe. All the rest--health, integrity, purity--is the product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter…some of us, those who want to get the plague out of our systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death." And then, of course, Tarrou dies.

Or maybe we are all like Grand, who tries incessantly to get one sentence right. Everything else, he feels, will fall together if he just gets the cadence and the imagery right with the once sentence, based on the unreal expectation of how people will react to it. So is what he does any different from the asthmatic bean counter? And is what Rieux does any different from them? Camus keeps playing exile as a major theme--exile from each other, from ourselves, from an indifferent universe.

Author: Camus, Albert

Date Published: 1947

Length: 10hr 53min

Narrator: Jenner, James