Hi, my name is Monte Johnson, I teach philosophy at the University of California, San Diego,
and this is the first of my lectures on Albert Camus' The Plague
(La Peste), 1947.
I'm using the translation of Stuart Gilbert published in 1948.
Now to begin with the overall structure of the work. It consists of
five parts which are of various lengths. And
these parts are divided into chapters;
part one, which is an
average-sized part, eight chapters,
63 pages in translation.
Explains that the book is a narrated chronicle of events that take place from mid-April to mid February sometime in the
1940's of a plague that affected a French colony called Oran in North Africa.
Initially
the citizens deny that this is happening, but that gives way to steadily growing unease and eventually panic.
Plague, although its effects have already spread far and wide, is not officially declared and
accepted by everyone until the very last line of this first part.
The second part, by far the longest
part, consisting of chapters nine to seventeen. Ninety seven pages,
gives us the
introductions to the
characters;
an in-depth character descriptions of Rieux,
the
doctor who's leading the medical response.
His friend Tarrou,
who's a traveler who keeps a journal that the narrator uses in recounting the events.
Rambert, a kind of
hack journalist who just happens to be trapped in
Oran because he was visiting there and who spends almost the entire novel trying to escape from it.
Grand,
an unassuming bureaucrat who proves himself constantly
useful during the emergency. And
Father Pantaloux, a Jesuit priest and intellectual who at first treats the plague very abstractly and
surmises about it as a punishment for
religious indifference on the part of Oran's citizens.
Chapter 2 introduces all of those characters in their
complexity, by describing their initial
reactions to the plague and the rapidly changing circumstances in the town.
And then in part three, which is a kind of pedestal of the whole work -
center of the work, but the simplest and briefest part the entire part just consists of one chapter
that's 18 pages long.
Contains a
graphic description of the treatment of mass death as a result of the plague, in Oran.
Part four;
quite substantial, seventy six pages, chapters 19 to 25. Is
a collection of self revelations and
descriptions of changes or
transformations that the main characters undergo. There are perceptions of themselves, of their friends, of
strangers, and of the world itself,
including nature, are
revealed and reflected and changed in various ways as a result of
the plague.
Part five; the last 39 pages in translation in chapters 26 to 29,
we get an end of the plague and
resolution of the novel. A review of the main characters, some of them have of
died,
others have been profoundly changed but have lived, and others still remain essentially
unchanged.
So to begin with, part one and
the opening; the time is
Spring April 16th to be specific of
some unspecified year in the 1940s. The narrator tells of unusual or extraordinary
events in what he describes is a very usual or ordinary very - he complains of how plain it is -
town called Oran
which is in
Algeria North Africa on the southern coast of the
Mediterranean.
He describes the ordinariness of the town in great detail
but basically with respect to three kinds of themes; number one, work. He describes them as a completely
mercantilist, and
commercial, and business oriented people who are mostly focused on
making money, and absorbed with making money
to the exclusion of almost everything else.
He describes their attitudes about love, which he describes as basically
thoughtless - either kind of young lust or
bored
domesticated
relationships. And then their approach to death, which seems to be even more
thoughtless because it's just not in their view at all since they're too caught up with business. They
have a perfunctory
observation even of its existence.
Now at this point the calm and tranquility of the town
corresponds to a lack of real feeling and kind of emotional detachment of the citizens due to their
largely commercial preoccupations with money and
businesses.
And so we are to get a sense of a normal but uninspiring and
passionate place.
The narrator says that to some people these events will seem quite natural to others all but
incredible and so that depends
apparently on the reader and their
situation,
As for the narrator himself,
the work is said to be a chronicle and a narrative both,
although it's not a strict chronicle. Some of the later chapters describe events that occur
earlier than other chapters.
It is essentially a narrative but a
composite and often a linear narrative that's been constructed
afterwards out of the notes of several different people.
In fact, it's not immediately clear who the narrator is. He doesn't reveal himself
at the beginning but says his identity will be made known in due course.
Now Oran in Algeria happens to have actually been the birthplace of Albert Camus and he lived there,
but he is not a character in the work and it would be facile to
read any one of the characters as corresponding to
his own views.
The
narrator
claims that they are merely playing the part of an historian and
thus relying on
hard data of which he describes three kinds. His own
view of things or
autopsies as it were since the narrator turns out to be a surgeon.
Second; other eyewitness accounts that are known to him through talking with some of the central people
involved in the town and the plague.
Third; documents that subsequently came into his hands by which he seems to mean primarily
the notes of his friend
Taro, who was keeping a
journal and describes many things in details, that it turns out the narrator
comes into possession of because he dies of the plague towards the end,
Now the
characters over the next several slides;
I will introduce the characters. The first, perhaps most important, is the Dr. Rieux. Dr.
Bernard Dr. Rieux, a practicing surgeon who's at the center of all the action.
The narration begins when he sees a dead rat and in the end
it is revealed that he is the narrator and he
Introduces and concludes the entire work.
His wife is
set off on a train in the very
beginning of the whole novel going out of town to a mountain
sanitarium for treatment for an unnamed serious illness and
Dr. Rieux is
remiss at her departure, but they pledge to each other to make a fresh start when she
returns. In her place
Dr. Rieux's mother has showed up to
live with him while his wife is away and
we also learn of
his friend Jean Tarrou, in his young idealistic
friend who's also a writer or keeping a kind of plague diary or journal
of his travels or wanderings.
That is, we learn,
consulted by Dr. Rieux in constructing the overall
narration of the novel.
Now the
journalist Rambert. A major character is a
former football player
turned journalist kind of hack journalist from
Paris who's on assignment in Oran to report on conditions with local Arab population.
He is going to interview Dr. Rieux about this. Dr. Rieux explains to him that the conditions aren't good,
but he hesitates to cooperate with Rambert
because of doubts he has about Rambert's commitment to telling the uncompromised truth, when it becomes clear that Rambert
would not or could not do so, and is not in fact an
idealistic or
courageous
journalist.
Rambert responds by comparing Dr. Rieux to song just a very problematic
Jacobin leader of the reign of terror during the French Revolution. Dr. Rieux
ignores this comparison, but
describes himself, in an important passage, as sick and tired of the world that he lived in, though
he has much liking for his fellow men.
He is the kind of person who had resolved to have no truck with injustice and
compromises with the truth. So his
relationship with Rambert
begins with tension and there's kind of tensions throughout. But in part, that's because one is very committed to the
truth and to
intellectual
virtues, while the other is mostly motivated by his
desires and
emotions and is slow to use his reason to examine what he should do in this situation.
Several other central
characters include the priest, the bureaucrat, and the criminal. The priest, Father Pantalox, a learned and
militant Jesuit who was highly thought of in the town - even in circles who were quite indifferent to religion.
He's a serious man who gives two key sermons in the novel. In the first one
about how the plague is a punishment for sins,
but then as he sees the innocent suffer due to it as well,l his
religious convictions are
challenged.
Joseph Grand, a very interesting character, a clerk and a
patient of
Dr. Rieux's, he's also an aspiring writer who asks Dr. Rieux to come to his building where he's just saved his neighbor
who tried to hang himself.
Grand is an enigmatic figure who has resigned himself to the life of a petty clerk and
his austerity or asceticism
protects him from
anxiety, so that he's able to maintain his
tranquility even though he's eventually put in charge of keeping track of the mortality figures due to the plague, which
steadily rise.
Now the person who he's just saved from hanging himself is his neighbor Cottard.
But Cottard
doesn't even want the
Doctor to be brought in because he fears having to notify the police,
Cottard begs 
Grand not to
notify anyone.
Dr. Rieux agrees to ask the police to put off an inquiry into him and we later learn that the cause of Cottard's
reluctance is the fact that he's a criminal
fugitive who's hiding in Oran and was on the brink of suicide in order to escape his fear of punishment.
Now most of Part 1 is just a description of the growing uneasiness due to the plague as
people
initially deny, and then slowly are forced to accept
the reality of what's happening. It begins on April
16th
when a
porter becomes
afflicted and has a terrible illness and a very brief remission from this illness.
It's described in some detail
before he has a crisis and then dies.
Raving in the end about the rats whose existence, in the very beginning of the novel,
he
denies exists.
The
affliction of this person known directly to Dr. Rieux
begins the
entire set of tragic events, denial of the reality or existence of the very cause of
the plague.
Dr. Rieux rings up the sanitary services.
Mercier the man who's in charge of that department
promises to get an order to deal with the problem
but evidently doesn't bother to actually follow through. The bureaucracy kind of fails in its response on
April 18th.
The evening papers are questioning whether the
municipality is acted on the rat problem. Turns out that it had not and so a meeting is later scheduled,
and
ends up issuing an order to get the sanitary services to finally act. But it describes a kind of plotting and
bumbling response.
Things thus worsen over the next several days with respect to the dead and dying rats to the point where people are literally
stepping around and on them.
So what they had initially considered stupid or obnoxious and didn't even want to talk about, they begin to see as vaguely
menacing.
By April 28th
panic sets in.
Authorities are accused of slackness.
Some people flee the town to their coastal summer homes,
even though it's early in the season and then it's announced that only a few rats were found.
So everybody breathe freely and thinks the problem is over.
It's at this point that we hear about Dr. Rieux's
ruminations over what's going on. In Chapter five
we hit a description of his personal thoughts about the possibility that
the
rats actually
and the fleas indicate that there's a problem with plague, once he starts to see
this unexplained illness.
He sympathizes with townspeople who were going about their business and taking no notice of the plague and
the thinking it's too stupid...it can't last long.
But he points out that many stupid things do last very long and
so they went on doing their business, arranged for journeys, formed views how
should they have given a thought to anything like the plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys,
silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free and no one would ever be free so long as there are
pestilences.
One of the first reactions is - this is affecting my freedom. I reject that
imposition on my freedom so I won't cooperate
with not only the laws put in place to deal with it,
but even the claim and the reality acknowledging the reality that it's happening.
Dr. Rieux reflects on history and the horrible death toll due to plagues,
such as those at Athens which is described by
Lucretius who is explicitly mentioned on page 40.
Plagues in China, and Constantinople,
Venice, London, and so forth, but he says it's impossible to fathom how many deaths happen.
And nobody takes these account seriously
even the historians that are interested in researching them have no direct
acquaintance with the reality of plague. So at this point there still seems to be
hope that the plague can be stopped and Dr. Rieux just cannot imagine how it could affect
such an unremarkable town. And so late in this part
he's still thinking that the plague might not actually make much headway
among the citizens as he says.
Now
this
leads to a
strange
phenomenon, which is the kind of irrational denial of the plain facts of the situation.
Beginning with
M. Michel, the concierge of the building in which Rieux lived,
initially he denied there were dead rats,
then he tried to blame them on kids or pranks.
Then he develops symptoms of the plague but denies that they are anything serious and
as a result, he's the first one to
die of
the plague.
Now Rieux also has an asthmatic Spanish patient who
reveals that there's a lot of chatter in his poor neighborhood about dead rats. He's more
realistic about the problem, but he never acts,
he's just a patient not an agent.
He observes the events that are happening but does nothing and can do nothing to change them.
M. Othon, a police magistrate in a chance encounter with Dr. Rieux
says; oh the rats, that's nothing. And in a restaurant
he forbids his children to even mention the word rats. Later, his wife is quarantined
due to
the
Plague but he refuses to stop taking his children out to public restaurants and so forth.
And in the end he is forced to,
in a very vivid way to acknowledge,
finally the existence of the Plague.
Now after consulting with colleagues and learning of about 20 deaths Rieux
encourages the local Medical Board to put fresh cases into isolation wards.
But the board says that only the prefect can do that and so it fails to act. The prefect in turn
tells another doctor to take prompt action if you like, but don't attract much attention. He's personally convinced
it's a false alarm and so there is still
dithering over the response to the plague among most of the officials.
Another doctor, a colleague of Dr. Rieux named Castel tells Dr. Rieux that he is
convinced that the fever is plague. He had actually witnessed it firsthand a long time ago in China and even just twenty years. ago
He says in Paris and he points out that people will insist that the plague has
disappeared and refused to accept the possibility that it can afflict them. That seems to be one of the symptoms of the
plague is that people deny its reality.
Everyone knows that
pestilences have a way of recurring in the world yet
somehow we find it hard to believe in the ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.
There have been as many plagues as wars in history,
yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise Camus writes.
It's the
fact that we should have been able to predict. We knew it was coming, officials warned us about it,
historians teach us about it. They describe it in vivid detail.
Everybody knows it's real, knows it can happen,
but whenever it does somehow the human reaction is to deny its reality and
to let it become a crisis such that characters are
tested and lives that managed to survive
it are changed forever.
So by the end of part one, we finally have an acceptance of the reality of the situation.
Even when the doctors meet they are at first reluctant to accept the facts and even the willingness to
call it the plague because
it's clear that that would imply the need for a very drastic action and
initially, they embrace a kind of wait-and-see attitude.
They entertain the idea that the epidemic could just stop
spontaneously but Dr. Rieux insists that
whether it's called plague or not, they must immediately enact severe
prophylactic measures.
The media
doesn't however take the story up very quickly
because it's a kind of invisible thing, unlike the rats which were in your face.
The invisible bullets of the plague
aren't initially as newsworthy.
Official notices posted around town don't have much effect. One had the feeling that many concessions had been made
to a desire not to alarm the public i.e., for the sake of political expediency.
Even the doctor is
mentally affected by the plague.
On two occasions, he enters crowded cafes. Like Cottard,
he felt a need for friendly contacts, human warmth, and so forth which Camus calls a 'stupid instinct'.
That is, a
stupid instinct to break the social distancing needed to slow the transmission of the plague.
It quickly becomes clear that the measures that the officials have taken proved
totally inadequate, and the only hope is for a spontaneous
disappearance or
natural death of the disease itself. Isolation words
quickly fill up, new measures have to be taken - even with regard to burials.
Doctors await the arrival of a new serum to combat the disease from a lab outside the city.
But it will take a long time to synthesize, to create any kind of
medicine like; a
vaccine or serum that could
avoid, or inoculate, or
even
cure the plague is
just a distant hope.
Eventually, the prefect is forced to act and to enact real
quarantine measures. Part one ends with instructions coming from colonial administrators;
"proclaim a state of plague and close the town". By the time we read those words
this actually seems to be a kind of relief, almost like good news, as if reason is triumphing over
the ignorant and incompetence so frustratingly depicted throughout this first
section - as we see the bungled
responses to this crisis.
