Hi, my name is Monte Johnson, this is the third of my lectures on Albert Camus, The Plague (La Peste),
originally published in
1947 and I'm using the translation by a Stuart Gilbert that was published in 1948.
So we move on to Part three
which in the overall structure is kind of a pedestal
Chapter; meaning parts one and parts two build up to it.
It's kind of a climax and then we move
downwards in parts four and five. Part one
introduced us to the plague. There was a lot of
denial that it was happening, a lot of dithering on the part of public officials and
it wasn't until the last line of that part that there was acceptance
that there was the plague. It was officially declared in part two, by far the longest chapter.
We had in-depth character development of the main characters;
Rieux,
Tarrou, Rambert, Grand, Pantaloux and so forth.
In part three then we
have already met the characters and we have
essentially a graphic description of
the waste that the plague
lays to the city and the mass death and destruction and how it is coped with. And in a way
It's the most difficult
chapter to deal with, the hardest to read. It hits
very hard. After this we have a part that explains how the characters are
transformed in response to the plague, how they cope with it, as it goes on interminably
before the resolution, and the end of the plague in Part 5.
Now one thing I think is crucial,
philosophically, to this chapter is the idea of focusing on those who are worse off and that being a kind of
coping mechanism for dealing with a difficult situation.
Consider this passage from chapter 18; the
authorities had the idea of segregating certain particularly
affected central areas in permitting only those whose services were indispensable to cross the cordon.
Dwellers in these districts could not help regarding these regulations as a sort of taboo
specifically directed at themselves and thus they came by contrast to envy
residents in other areas their freedom. And the latter to cheer themselves up in
despondent moments fell to picturing the lot of those who were less free than themselves.
"Anyhow, there are some worse off than I", was a remark that voiced the only solace to be had in those days.
In fact, this is an effective coping
mechanism. For one thing, it does relieve some of the pain that is
augmented by
rumination and
constant return and reflection on your own difficulty.
But also I think that Camus shows how this
focusing on those that are less fortunate than us also
changes our perspective from one in which we envy those who are better off, and
we come to feel pity and
mutual fellow-feeling for those who are worse off. And
this psychological mechanism was also utilized by the
Epicureans most famously in the opening of Book 2 of
Lucretia's, On the Nature of Things where he says;
Sweet is when on the great sea the winds are buffeting the waters, to gaze from the land on another as great struggles;
not because it's a pleasure or joy that anyone should be distressed, but because it is sweet to perceive from what
misfortune you yourself are free.
Sweet it is to behold great contests of war in full array over the plains,
when you have no part in the danger.
Now he makes it clear that this isn't a kind of taking pleasure at another's misery,
but it's rather by focusing on them one feels more safe and secure
oneself. In fact, this is a very very ancient piece of his wisdom -
perhaps the oldest piece of ethics that we actually have. We go back to
one of the key longest and most secure fragments of Democritus of Abdera.
He says; "one should keep in mind one's capabilities and be content with what one
has, having few memories or thoughts of those who are objects of envy and admiration,
by not paying attention to them. And one should observe the lives of those who are enduring hardship, taking into
consideration the defects they suffer from,
so that the things one has and already possesses will seem great and worthy of jealousy and
no longer, would you suffer badly because of having desires in your soul.
For the one who in his memory at all hours dwells on those who are objects of
admiration and deemed blessed by other humans is always compelled to find new opportunities
and to overshoot because of a desire to do desperate things which the laws forbid.
That is why, by not doubting what must be but by being content with respect to the things that must be.
By comparing one's own life with those who do worse and
by deeming oneself blessed, keeping in mind the things they suffer, one does and fares much better than they do.
So this chapter, which described so much misery and mass death,
invites the reader to follow along with the procedure
that the characters in
the novel
engage in, which is to constantly describe and understand worsening conditions that other people are going through.
To give an idea of the overall structure of this short chapter.
Initially Camus describes the climax of the summer heat in the disease as we move into summer and the days get steadily
more hot, more sweaty, more
uncomfortable, even as the death rates
climb.
And he says he'll describe this miserable situation with respect to three issues;
one - the excesses of the living.
How people are reacting and dealing with the plague. Not very well,
they are rioting and burning down buildings, attacking the police, and guards and so forth.
Second, what happens with burials of the dead and how the dead are treated. And Third, the plight of
parted lovers.
So to begin with the excesses of the living.
So the contagion most immediately threatens those who live together in groups like prisoners, soldiers,
monks, nuns,
students, and dormitories as it were.
These individuals must leave these group living situations and be billeted in private houses.
But that entails a breakdown of these groups and a disruption of their daily routines,
so this contributes to a sense of
disruption and even chaos.
Now this is impossible, of course, for prisoners. They can't be released
so they stay
trapped within the prison and being in prison becomes a kind of death sentence because you have the highest rates of
transmission there and weak health care.
At the climax of the summer heat there is an outbreak of rioting and
arsons caused largely by people who had returned from a quarantine and
they're thrown off their balance by bereavement and anxiety.
They were burning their houses under the odd delusion that they were killing off the plague in the holocaust.
But there are other reasons why people are burning buildings and many of them are
engaging in looting, theft, and so forth.
So the authorities enact stiff penalties of imprisonment in order to prevent these arsons.
Again, imprisonment in this context amounts to a death sentence.
So an epidemic of burning buildings, of looting buildings, also
attacks, sometimes armed, on the police and the guards of the town usually at the gates.
So the authorities are forced to respond by
imposing nighttime curfews and
eventually martial law.
All of this just
tightens the widespread feelings of being imprisoned along
with this inference that being imprisoned leads to a death sentence,
certainly if you are within the prison. But everyone is in a way
imprisoned and so everyone feels like they're under that kind of death sentence and some people,
forced to stay where they are within their own homes,
within their own districts.
Everybody is
immobilized so there is a very awkward and unsettling combination of
growing lawlessness and chaos
outside, along with the lethargy and
immobilization inside.
Now this misery is described
basically through all of the sensory
modalities, the way that we sense what's going on around us. And
the
apprehension that that causes. For example, Camus describes dust clouds - a gray crust
forming on everything due to the dryness and heat.
Darkness at night when electricity is cut off and curfews are
imposed and so you have a kind of absence of sensation and a haze of dust and golden light upon
treeless streets. So there's the sort of combination of
things being too bright and there being too much glare from the Sun but then also
being
obscured
in a haze and a dust before
totally
disappearing at night when there's no
electric light. Almost like a kind of blindness is coming on,
but as for hearing loud shrilling of wind, a
defunct city in which plagued stone darkness at effectively silenced every voice.
One vast rumor of low voices and incessant footfalls, the drumming of innumerable souls time to the eerie
whistling of the plague and so
unfamiliar sounds and yet they are repetitive, and annoying, and
irritating.
Also, of course the searingly hot days, the warm
darkness of the summer nights, the constant sweating, feeling too hot
but can't relieve oneself by
swimming or
gathering in cafes to drink and things like that. Also,
foul-smelling
clouds of smoke, they come from the plague fires.
Both the
arsons, where houses and buildings are being burned down, but also from the crematorium
they've had to start employing.
Such were the sights and
apprehensions that kept alive in our
townspeople, he writes, their feeling of exile and separation. in this connection
the narrator is well aware how regrettable is his inability to record at this point something of a really spectacular
order - some heroic feat or memorable deed like those that thrill us in the chronicles of the past. The truth is that
nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are
monotonous in the memories of those who live through them. The grim days of plague do not stand out like vivid flames,
ravenous and inextinguishable
beaconing a troubled sky, but rather like the slow,
deliberate progress of some monstrous thing crushing out all upon its path.
Even while all of the senses are
stimulated by these
disturbing and irritating new sensations, the overall effect is actually not
excitement, but
monotony. And
this going on and on and they're sort of being no release from it.
Now the most grim
section concerns burials of the dead and
the narrator offers his own apology for the graphic nature of his descriptions
but he insists that he doesn't have a morbid taste.
In fact, he prefers the living and prefers activities like swimming - but swimming is impossible now,
and he's surrounded
not by swimmers in beach days, but by funerals and death. So he must give an account of them.
Actually the most striking feature of our funerals was their speed. And
formalities are quickly
abandoned both for health reasons and because they are happening so
often and
it's just not tenable to give everybody a full
funeral. The rushed and
unceremonious of moving bodies from the hospital (actually a converted school) over to the cemetery is
described; the whole process was put through with the maximum of speed in the minimum of risk. It cannot be denied that
anyhow in the early days, the natural feelings of the family were somewhat outraged by these lightning funerals,
but obviously in a time of plagues such sentiments cannot be taken into account and all was sacrificed to
efficiency,
People not allowed to see their loved ones
in the last stages of their dying and then not even being able to
see them off at a funeral. So again,
absolute separation and isolation from the closest loved ones and at a crucial time in their life their death.
Now there is a shortage of coffins which necessitates ultimately combining funerals and
then
reusing coffins in order to transport bodies from the hospital to the cemetery. At this point,
mourners had to be
forbidden from the actual
interments.
These now take place in two pits;
initially two of them for propriety's sake divided into a men's pit and a woman's pit. But eventually even this
decorum has to be abandoned and men and women are thrown
indiscriminately into pits together and quickly covered with layers of quicklime, which he describes as steaming and
seething. Again
describing its effect on our senses.
Burials are then conducted eventually at night in order to obscure and
cover-up
the more and more summary procedures that are employed to cope with the growing number of corpses. And
as space runs out, you know the
cemetery plots eventually run out, and then not only the plots run out, but those have to be dug up and
large pits to throw bodies into. But then even
there's not enough space for those anymore.
And so the plague victims have to be cremated. And for this purpose a
crematorium on the other side of town is employed and eventually a streetcar is converted to
transport bodies more efficiently from the town out of the crematorium. So
Camus says; making a very morbid kind of joke, a branch line was laid down to the crematorium
which thus became a
terminus.
Now the final
description of the climax of misery due to the play is
the plight of parted lovers.
He goes so far as to say that the chief source of distress, the deepest as well as the most widespread,
was
separation of people from one another. But that gets so bad that
even this distress eventually comes to lose some of its poignancy as people become
essentially
disinterested in
everything and treat everything as being kind of indifferent.
While during the first weeks, they were apt to complain that only shadows remained to them of what their love had been, and meant
they now came to learn that even shadows can waste away -
losing the faint hues of life that memory may give. Again, describing this darkening and
becoming more bleak, and
fading from our visual perception.
The here-and-now had come to mean everything to them. For there was no denying that the plague had gradually
killed off in all of us the faculty not of only of love, but even of friendship.
Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future and nothing was left to us but a series of
present moments. So under these circumstances even
friendship starts to fade.
Being parted from your friends, not being able to get together with friends, not even really being able to meaningfully
communicate with them. So they'd cease to choose for themselves and plague had levelled out discrimination.
This could be seen in the way that nobody
troubled about the quality of their clothes or the food he bought, everything was taken as it came.
People don't get dressed up anymore. They roll out of bed and put on the same set of
clothes,
wearing whatever is most comfortable at hand and not
trying to dress to please or impress other people.
This shows, a gradual losing of connection with other people and
so this feeling, this strange feeling of a simultaneous
exile and imprisonment. So that all of us ate the same sour bread of exile.
The blind
endurance, again an endurance, a period of endurance robbed of real
sensation. This blind endurance had ousted love from all of our hearts.
That's the depth of the misery reached
by the plague in Part Three.
