1.

One of the conclusions of Albert Camus’ first cycle of works, which he completed in 1942, is that of rebellion; which Camus then took up as the central theme for his second cycle of works, which includes The Plague and The Rebel. In this latter book, Camus expands upon his thoughts pertaining to literary fiction, in terms of rebellion, style, and the unity of form and content. As he argued elsewhere in The Rebel, rebellion is differentiated from revolution to the degree that rebellion is born of the discovery of certain limits – associated with the value of the body and nature – and it is enacted by a defence of these limits against forces which seek to deny, destroy, or otherwise overcome them. In this, rebellion seeks unity, while revolution aspires toward totality. The former attempts equilibrium, while the latter requires subjugation. For Camus, such rebellion is enacted in the literary field through the creation of a work of art that has achieved a similar sense of unity, complete within its own limits, while avoiding totality. This unity is achieved, and maintained, through style, in which an artist gives reality the unity it otherwise lacks, and by rebelling against what it always already, absurdly, is. ‘Real literary creation… uses reality and only reality with all its warmth and its blood, its passions and its outcries,’ Camus writes in The Rebel. ‘It simply adds something that transfigures reality.’ 

Camus describes this rebellious style, this sense of unity, in terms of a balance between form and content, with each providing the limit for the other. This balance is broken, this limit breached, when one gives too much weight to either aspect. This is a situation which Camus accounts for in terms of its extremes, what he calls the ‘heresies’ of either formalism or realism (naturalism). For Camus, formalism is predicated upon the total rejection of reality. ‘It then represents formal escapism,’ Camus argues, ‘of which our period has furnished so many examples and of which the nihilist origin is quite evident.’ Realism, or naturalism, on the other hand, is an ‘incomprehensible idea’, an attempted and failed subordination to reality. As he states:

what is commonly called the realistic novel tries to be the reproduction of reality in its immediate aspects. To reproduce the elements of reality without making any kind of selection would be, if such an undertaking could be imagined, nothing but a sterile repetition of creation… To be really realistic a description would have to be endless…

A kind-hearted parody, of sorts, of this struggle for unity at the level of literary language is enacted in The Plague in the figure of Joseph Grand. The impetus for the first sentence of Grand’s literary project being endlessly rewritten is in the way Grand swings from concern with the formal aspect of the sentence, to concern with the substantive reality the sentence aims to describe, and back again. And yet, as Camus states in The Rebel: ‘Great art, style, and the true aspect of rebellion lie somewhere between these two heresies.’

We can see here once more traces of Camus’ reading of Brice Parain’s work on language, particularly the distinction between the idealist and sensualist hypotheses, and the creative tension between them which Camus transposed into an argument for literary language itself being a tool of rebellion. This also helps orient us closer toward the contours of The Plague, as a literary work, a work of unity.

As we’ve already seen – at the level of content – the novel is presented as a written chronicle of events which occur in the town of Oran. The first character introduced is Dr Rieux. After the number of deaths from a mysterious disease begins to increase, Rieux suspects plague and urges the administration to instigate appropriate prophylactic measures, including quarantining the town. The paucity of the background plot to the novel is as monotonous as the rise and eventual fall of the plague’s hold on the town. In the foreground we follow the happenings of the town, in particular a small group of men, in one particular public health squad – of which there are many, but the story only focuses on the activities of this primary group – to struggle against the effects of the spreading disease upon the populous. Finally, with the plague in retreat, the gates are open and the chronicle ends. Only at the conclusion of the chronicle is it revealed that the narrator, who until then, for reasons of propriety and ‘objectivity’ had remained anonymous, is revealed to be none other than Rieux himself.

On the final page of the novel, the character Rieux resolves to write a chronicle of the events in which he had just participated. This account, which he aims to write, is, of course, the very account which the reader has just completed. Thus a formal loop is created back to the beginning of the novel, in which the character at the end becomes the anonymous narrator at the beginning, who, in turn is revealed to be one of the main characters who participated in the events narrated: Dr Rieux. The formal aspect of the work – the narrator and narrative – is thus balanced by the content of the novel – the character and events narrated.

2. 

At the centre of this unity is the symbol of the plague itself. Its arrival causes Rieux to urge the administration to quarantine the town. So the events narrated are confined solely to the town itself, a closed space which is thus balanced by the self-imposed limits of the narrative itself, and of a narrator who, out of a sense of propriety and ‘objectivity’, confines his narration to only these limited events known to him, directly or indirectly. ‘But after all, a chronicler can’t be bothered by these contradictions. His task is simply to say, “This happened,” once he knows that this did, in fact, happen…’ This propriety and restraint, this process of selection in material, based upon available sources, thus reflects the style of narration which follows. It is a style in which the content of the novel is incarnated in its form. And it is around the symbol of the plague (‘which is the most concrete of all forces’) that this incarnated form is actualised, and the work finds its internal movement.

Within the context of the chronicle, the plague is a literal event. But there are two obstacles that block the populous from confronting the reality of this event, two forms of evasion. The first evasion is from individuals violating the necessary confinement of the town. Individuals who escape the town risk carrying the disease with them into the outside world. The second evasion is by succumbing to abstraction, which is another form of escape, of violating the necessary confinement of the town, and avoiding direct engagement with the plague. The former is initially enacted in the novel by Rambert, the latter by Paneloux.

Once more, these substantive aspects of the novel, at the level of content, have their formal corollary. When Tarrou deploys the term ‘plague’ metaphorically, to connote abstraction and nihilism, as an evasion of the concrete, he incarnates and reinforces the narrative strategy of creating a literary unity that urges against abstracting from the novel to something outside of it, or else resists the imposition of ideological readings beyond its own self-imposed limitations. In this sense, the plague-as-symbol is not a device to lead the reader away from the novel, to something outside it – be it some philosophy or ideology, or as an allegory for some discrete historical reality (say, a war or an occupation) – but rather as the point of entry into the novel, a focal point to keep our attention trained therein, without distraction or evasion. Only then is the challenge of the work met. ‘For the work to be a challenge,’ Camus wrote in his notebooks around the time he first decamped to Paris in late 1943, with his early drafts of The Plague, ‘it must be finished (this is why one must say “without sequel”). It is the opposite of divine creation. It is finished, thoroughly limited, clear, molded to the human requirement. The unity is in your hands.’

For the characters within the novel, such attention is necessary in order to adequately confront the plague, in order to save bodies. For readers of The Plague, cultivating the habits of such attention, resisting evasion and abstraction from the work before us, is equally necessary – but for us, in the context of reality, the stakes are higher.

3.

For Camus, resistance to nihilism and abstraction – an act which brings thought back to the body, to the surface of the natural world – requires imagination. Another way of saying this is that abstraction and nihilism are born out of a lack of imagination. In The Plague, the doctor, Castel, levels this charge against the administration of the town, when they first present inadequate orders to counter the plague: “Orders! And it will take imagination.” Later, when Tarrou first approaches Rieux with his plan to begin a program of unofficial sanitation groups, he also criticises the administration on similar grounds: “What they lack is imagination.”

This charge of a ‘lack of imagination’ is also frequently made by Camus in his Combat editorial and articles, written concurrently with drafting The Plague. Throughout his career with the newspaper, it becomes a critical refrain. ‘It would be nice to be able to spur the imaginations of those whose actions have direct repercussions on the individuals for whose lives the government is responsible,’ he writes, for example, in an editorial on April 5, 1945. ‘But imagination, like food, is in short supply these days.’

Most pointedly, this charge appears in his 1946 series of essays, “Neither Victims Nor Executioners”, levelled against those from opposing ideological camps who had argued that Camus was being unrealistic in making the saving of bodies – his opposition to the death penalty, his non-violence, and his non-domination – a motivating principle for his own politics, and a case for the legitimacy of all politics:

This argument was forcefully presented. But the people who presented it expressed themselves with such force, I believe, because they lack imagination when it comes to other people’s deaths.

In the same article he even slips in a reference to his forthcoming novel, which by then he had been working on for over six years, to illustrate this lack of imagination: ‘You cannot cure the plague with remedies for a head cold.’ This line refers back to a note Camus made previously during the drafting of the novel. ‘Develop the social criticism and the revolt,’ he wrote. ‘What they lack is imagination. They settle down in an epic as in a picnic. They do not think on the scale of scourges. And the remedies they imagine are scarcely worthy of a head cold.’ This image ended up in the novel itself, put into the mouth of Tarrou, in the moment when he told Rieux that the administration of Oran was short on imagination. “They’re never at the level of these scourges. And the remedies

they imagine are barely advanced enough to cure a head cold. If we leave it up to them, they’ll die, and take us with them.”

It is this prompt to the imagination that the narrator of the chronicle wanted to evoke in their readers when, at the end of the novel, the conclusion to his chronicle, he cites his decision to write about what had happened in Oran during that plague year.

4.

Remarkably, Camus only began actively focusing on the role of the imagination in early 1943 – that is, after The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus had been published – albeit recognising in retrospect the importance it had played in his life up until that point. ‘What bothers me in the exercise of thought or the discipline necessary to the work of art is imagination,’ he confided in his notebooks at the time. ‘I have an unbridled imagination, without proportion, somewhat monstrous. Hard to know the tremendous role it played in my life. And yet I never noticed that personal peculiarity until the age of thirty.’ He goes on to describe how whenever he is on a train or a bus – and it may be recalled that he was at this stage exiled in Le Panelier, making fortnightly trips to Saint-Etienne for his pneumothorax treatment – he becomes completely lost in his imaginings. ‘Tired of having constantly to call my thought to order, to bring it back to what I need to feed it on, there comes a moment when I let myself go, flow would be more correct: the hours rush by and I reach my destination before I am aware.’

That same year Camus begins to sketch an initial outline of what would become, several years later, The Rebel. But he does so through retroactively considering the role of imagination in his previous cycle of work, and how that acts as a bridge to his current cycle of work. From his notebooks:

Essay on Revolt. The absurd world in the beginning is not analysed rigorously. It is evoked and it is imagined. Hence that world is the product of thought in general, in other words of precise imagination. It is the application to the conduct of life and to aesthetics of a certain modern principle. It is not an analysis. (emphasis in original)

In the same note, however, Camus entertains the temptation toward philosophy, which his previous work had argued against:

But once the world is sketched out, the first stone (there is only one) put in place, philosophizing becomes possible – or rather, if you have fully understood – becomes necessary. Analysis and rigor are required and brought back in. Detail and description win out.

It is a temptation which he alluded to in Sisyphus: ‘At this point I perceive, therefore, that hope cannot be eluded forever and that it can beset even those who want to be free from it.’ But this initial sketch for his essay on revolt was made in the very months before his full engagement with the work of Brice Parain – which enabled him to reinvigorate his earlier criticism against philosophy in terms of language and its imaginative, rebellious possibilities. And it was also before his move to Paris, his tenure at Combat, the purges, and the Brasillach case, which changed everything. It is only during this period, from 1944 onwards, that we begin to see the imagination being consciously invoked more often in Camus’ writing, his journalism, his essays, and, finally, in his fiction. 

5.

And so, in 1946, Camus reorients his initial sketch for his essay on revolt by bringing it into closer alignment with Sisyphus. In his notebooks, he suggests an opening line for this new project:

Revolt. Beginning: “The only serious moral problem is murder. The rest comes after.”

This, of course, echoes the opening lines of the first section of Sisyphus: ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide...’ In making this connection, he allows for the expansion of his previous argument against ‘philosophical suicide’ to also include a charge of philosophical murder, thus overcoming his momentary lapse, his temptation.

As it happens, this does not become the opening lines of the final version of The Rebel, but the import remains the same, and is sharpened. Camus instead opens that work with a distinction between crimes of logic and crimes of passion, with his concern being with the former: ‘Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and they have a perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose – even for transforming murderers into judges.’ It is in this context that Camus then retrieves the thread of one of the most consistent lines of thought that runs through his work: the necessity of thinking and acting without the prop or support of abstract systems, doctrines, or ideologies, which operate through the false promise of alleviating from the individual the responsibility of their own life – as well as their responsibility for the lives of others. Here, in the opening paragraphs of The Rebel, he links this threat once more to the alibi of philosophy. ‘But as soon as man, through lack of character, takes refuge in a doctrine, as soon as crime reasons about itself, it multiplies like reason itself and assumes all the aspects of the syllogism.’

Camus begins to carve out a counter-position to this state of affairs in the fourth part of The Rebel, which addresses the relationship between art and rebellion, but with particular focus on the literary form of the novel. He is once more, as always, concerned with keeping art free from the temptation toward intellectual suicide, toward its conformity, subordination, or totality. ‘What does it matter!’ Camus states here:

The trial of art has been opened definitively and is continuing today with the embarrassed complicity of artists and intellectuals dedicated to calumniating both their art and their intelligence. We notice, in fact, that in the contest between Shakespeare and the shoemaker, it is not the shoemaker who maligns Shakespeare or beauty but, on the contrary, the man who continues to read Shakespeare and who does not choose to make shoes — which he could never make, if it comes to that.

Toward the end of this section, Camus returns to this analogy, and with it, he provides a précis for his whole essay on revolt:

It would be unjust, and moreover Utopian, for Shakespeare to direct the shoemakers’ union. But it would be equally disastrous for the shoemakers’ union to ignore Shakespeare. Shakespeare without the shoemaker serves as an excuse for tyranny. The shoemaker without Shakespeare is absorbed by tyranny when he does not contribute to its propagation. Every act of creation, by its mere existence, denies the world of master and slave. The appalling society of tyrants and slaves in which we survive will find its death and transfiguration only on the level of creation.

This ‘appalling society’ of victims and executioners is one predicated upon the domestication of such creation, and the control of the imagination. Camus opens this fourth section of The Rebel by outlining the long history of revolutionary action – predicated and authorised by philosophy – which has been hostile toward art: from Plato to Rousseau, the Reformation to the French Revolution, the German philosophers of history, Hegel and Marx, to the Russian nihilists. This begins Camus’ argument against not only those who rejected art outright, expelling it form their ideal cities, but also those artists who abdicate their imagination, subordinating their art to becoming mere illustrations of whatever system, ideology, or doctrine, they feel sure of possessing – and thereby feel justified in imposing on others.

If philosophy can be said to have an origin story, it is as a consequence of Socrates being subject to the death penalty by the city of Athens. Plato fled the city and retreated into the safety of his academy. Philosophy is born of this retreat from the reality of politics, and it does so through developing a discourse antithetical to the discourse of literary creation. Camus would have us rather choose to remain in the polis, and to oppose the death penalty, in all its forms – to save Socrates – and in doing so to deploy a literary discourse that rejects such evasions and retreats, a discourse grounded in the limits of the human body and the natural world, without being subordinated to either, transfigured by the possibilities of both.

‘Thus, I ask of absurd creation what I required from thought,’ Camus states in Sisyphus, ‘— revolt, freedom, and diversity.’ Such an act of creation is underwritten by a language animated by imagination, and not foreclosed by the jargon and cliché of ideology, the political slogan, or the concept. The challenge set by such an act of creation requires a reader capable of meeting it, to cultivate one’s own attention, resisting evasion and abstraction from otherwise reading the very work before us; and, in that act, to make our imaginations precise. If a literary work is vital, and if this challenge is met, then this imagination will continue to reverberate through it, and find a deeper resonance, with each reader it attracts, not as a solitary echo, but as a rising chorus. From its underlying structure, endless improvisation will spring, and new possibilities emerge.

And it is toward this end, and by these very means, that Camus offered to us, among other works, The Plague.

This marks the end of this series that has attempted a slow, background reading of Albert Camus’ The Plague. Next week we will provide a brief epilogue.

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