Ok, Hi 1C.
It's Professor Tyberg.
I hope you're having a good day.
I just wanted to jump into a brief introduction
of Albert Camus' The Plague, published in
1947, and I wanted to talk about setting.
Here we go, paragraph by paragraph: "The unusual
events described in this chronical cocurred
in 194- at Oran," so we know the time, 1940s,
makes us think maybe of World War II.
We're not sure if that's going to have a bearing
on the plot later in the novel.
The place:"A large French port on the Algerian
coast."
So you can see on the map here where Oran
is--it's across from Spain and Algeria is
a country that was colonized by the French
between 1830 and 1962, so there's some brief
historical background for you.
It's going to be interesting to see the tension
and negotiation between these two cultures,
the Western European culture and the North
African cultures.
"How to conjure up a picture, for instance,
of a town without pigeons, without any trees
or gardens, where you never hear the beat
of wings or the rustle of leaves--a thoroughly
negative place, in short?"
It's hilarious the way that the narrator criticizes
this town and calls it "ugly."He said it's
devoid of life, no birds, no trees.
He defines it negatively by what it lacks
rather than what it has.
And as for the people, the narrator writes,
"Our citizens work hard, but solely with the
object of getting rich."
So he criticizes these people as just single-mindedly
pursuing money.
Then he generalizes that idea to all the people
at this time in the 1940s.
"Really all our contemporaries are much the
same."So the narrator seems dissatisfied with
the state of the world.
"Oran, however, seems to be a town without
intimation; in other words, completely modern."
The narrator criticizes modernity as having
this trait of people who pursue empty capitalism.
"At Oran, as elsewhere, for lack of time and
thinking, people have to love one another
without knowing much about it."
The people of Oran are alienated from their
own consciousnesses.
They don't truly experience how they're feeling
or why they're feeling certain things; they
just act.
Okay the narrator introduces the theme of
death: "But at Oran the violent extremes of
temperature, the exigencies of business, the
uninspiring surroundings, the sudden nightfalls,
and the very nature of its pleasures call
for good health.
An invalid feels out of it there."
So it's not a good place to be sick because
if the definition of life in Oran is to pursue
money, and you are too sick to pursue money,
you will not be able to participate in life
there.
So these people seem complacent:"But, at least,
social unrest is quite unknown among us."
This seems like an ironic statement; it seems
surprising that there would be no unrest based
on the fact that this town has been colonized
by the French; it seems like their would be
some tension between the colonizers and the
colonized in Oran.
The narrator talks about the natural landscape
and personifies it; he explains, "All we may
regret is the town's being so disposed that
it turns its back on the bay, with the result
that it's impossible to see the sea, you always
have to go look for it."
So this town is turned away from the sea;
it's turned away from beauty, and the people
in it are turned away from beauty.
The narrator suggests that in order to find
beauty, you must be intentional; you must
go look for it.
Okay, some foreshadowing: "Such being the
normal life of Oran, it will be easily understood
that our fellow citizens had not the faintest
reason to apprehend the incidents that took
place in the spring of the year in question
. . . ." So because these people are so complacent,
they will be particularly vulnerable to the
strike of the plague.
And then the narrator ends by talking about
the act of narration, so this is a metaliterary
moment: "In any case the narrator (whose identity
will be made known in due course) would have
little claim to competence for a task like
this, had . . . he not been, by the force
of things, closely involved in all that he
proposes to narrate."
There's a bit of a mystery: we don't know
who this narrator is, but the narrator claims
that his is involved in everything that happens,
so he's going to be a credible source, and
it makes us think about history, recording
history, and sort of the myth of recording
history perfectly.
So that's it for this chapter.
I just want to leave you with the idea that
you think about why Camus chooses to set up
his novel in this way.
Why all the criticism of Oran and its people?
All right, have a good day!
