1.

In late 1938, Camus was in the process of overhauling A Happy Death and re-imagining his approach to fiction – into what would over the next few years become The Stranger. In his notebooks he outlined this new approach, regarding the relation between artist and work of art. This text appeared, in a slightly more refined form, in “Absurd Creation”, published in The Myth of Sisyphus, four years later. In the 1938 notebook version, we read: 

The true work of art is the one which says least. There is a certain relationship between the global experience of an artist, his thought + his life (his system, in one sense – leaving out anything systematic which this word implies), and the work reflecting this experience. This relationship is wrong when the work gives the whole of this experience surrounded by a fringe of literature. It is right when the work of art is a section cut out of his experience, the facet of a diamond in which the gem’s inner luster is reflected but not exhausted. In the first case, there is exaggeration, and literature. In the second, a work which is fruitful because of a whole implied content of experience whose wealth is not directly expressed.

In the same note Camus argues that an artist requires ‘a great experience of life’ – in Sisyphus, he calls an artist a ‘great living being’ – but in the earlier version he adds the following qualification, in parentheses: ‘(it being understood that, in this case, living also implies thinking about life – that living is, in fact, precisely this subtle relationship between a man’s experience and his awareness of it.)’ In Sisyphus, he is more succinct: ‘it being understood that living in this case is just as much experiencing as reflecting.’ But as our reading of Sisyphus has also already shown us, what he means by ‘great’ here is referring to the degree of consciousness.

Even before The Stranger and Sisyphus had been published, Camus was already working on what would become The Plague. Over the previous instalments of this newsletter, I have attempted to sketch out, as best as I can, with the available sources, the global experience of Camus during this period and the resulting work that reflected this experience. To outline the subtle relationship between what he lived through – his memories of growing up in colonial Algeria, and his tuberculosis, the war, his exile in France, his work as a journalist, the purge and its consequences – and his thoughts about these experiences – the body and nature, the absurd, suicide, and hope, rebellion, limits, language and communication, political violence and the death penalty, racism and history, technology, nihilism, abstraction, ideology – each to each transfigured by the imagination. All of which is implied in The Plague, an inner luster reflected, even when it is not directly expressed, as facets of a diamond. 

Reading this work in the present moment is an invitation for each of us to reflect on these implications, but through them to reflect also on our own current global experiences. 

2.

So let’s bring our thoughts back now to our own bodies, in the present moment, where we are reading Camus’ The Plague amidst a pandemic. As the coronavirus first spread around the earth, individuals within each nation have been plunged into a paradoxical situation: each of us is forced into a shared reality at the same moment as we are urged to physically (socially) distance ourselves from one another. Diurnal routines and habits of mind are disrupted, and the world we previously moved blindly through has become one where every action is consciously taken, every interaction deliberate. We read in the novel: ‘No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny.’ But we find in Camus’ notebooks: ‘In practice, there are nothing but solitary people in the novel’ (emphasis in original). There is no contradiction here. For the degree to which we can imagine this paradox, and consciously inhabit it, or the extent to which it has confused us, has shocked us into recoiling from accepting it, is the degree to which the little worlds each of us carried around within our heads prior to this moment was previously divorced from any sense of a shared reality.

In an article in Combat, in December 1944, Camus drew attention to what he thought was a significant characteristic of members of the resistance which had otherwise been overlooked. ‘Resistants have one additional credential, however, which has not to my knowledge been stressed enough,’ Camus wrote. ‘They made their choice in solitude.’ For Camus, this resolved the paradox of their being only solitary people in the novel, their choices being made in solitude, but the consequences of these decisions threading into a collective destiny: this individual choice being whether or not to accept our shared reality and to act and think accordingly, consciously, and without evasion.

It is here the theme of separation and exile is brought into relief: ‘that sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time.’ This is the state of those who could not think on the scale of scourges, those who had settled into the plague as though it were a simple flu, those who lacked the imagination to attend to the reality of the situation, and who, at the end of the novel, celebrated and had already begun to forget what had just happened to them. They longed to return to normal – to return to “doing business”. But it was against this forgetting, and against this lack of imagination, that the narrator decided to write a chronicle of the events.

It is for this reason I have attempted to dislodge the dominant reading of The Plague as being primarily concerned with the occupation and its resistance, but without dismissing it entirely. Instead, I’ve tried to show that what was important to Camus from during the war years was the theme of separation and exile, and its human consequences. But perhaps more importantly it was the immediate post-war period – the failed purge and Camus’ hard earned position against the death penalty, in particular, and political violence, more generally – that was more influential in shaping the ethical structure of the narrative. This also provided a critical remove from which Camus could reassess the war years. 

This is largely why the novel is written in the form of a chronicle, with the narrator being also a figure in the story he later told. The reader is thereby positioned outside of the events, and placed after the fact. This allows for the necessary distance to be achieved between the imaginary world of the novel and the real world of the reader. This distance becomes more difficult to maintain when The Plague is being read during an actual pandemic. By the narrative being structured as a chronicle suggests that The Plague may be even more relevant to read after the pandemic has receded somewhat – or if during it, only if we do so at a critical remove, which requires more effort – in order to ensure we do not forget what we have experienced during this period. This is why so much attention has been given here to remain faithful to the contours and movements of the novel and its composition, as a work of fiction.

Moreover, by creating a symbolic work – and not a work of allegory, tied to some specific historical event – Camus was able to use the perspective provided by a work of fiction to pull back further and address also the immediate post-war period, at a global level. This is what he attempted in texts such as “The Human Crisis” and “Neither Victims Nor Executioners”. Later, in The Rebel, he had the political imagination to put this period into its broader historical context.

In the same way, as readers, we should not so readily collapse the difference between symbol and reality, the metaphoric and the literal, the better to approach both the novel and the world within which we currently sit while reading the novel. This is not simply an obscure literary concern, but has fundamental consequences for the health of our political imagination. To allow this distinction to be collapsed is, at one and the same time, to obstruct our access to reality and the capacity for us to imagine it otherwise.

Communications technologies have increased exponentially since The Plague was published in 1947, but the concerns Camus had then regarding its potential have only been confirmed. We continue, more than ever, to live and die, love or kill, by proxy. With that increased complexity the tendency has been toward greater abstraction of our social reality, and a more insidious form of nihilism that negates both our bodies and the natural world, and with it any sense of the limits we require in order to maintain contact with a shared reality – grounded in the limits of nature – and to achieve a common good – grounded in non-violence, non-domination, and the saving of bodies – as the only source of our political legitimacy. We used to struggle over distinguishing between image and reality, now we conflict over competing images. And the only advance that ideologies from both the right and the left have made over their mid-century antecedents is that they now make it possible, necessary even, for each person to occupy the position of both victim and executioner, simultaneously, and remotely.

We are still in need of finding our words so as to resist this process. The temptation to give up, falling back upon the comforting certainties of an ideology, the jargon of a system, or the hopes of some doctrine, to retreat from our responsibilities and obligations of living in a shared reality, is constant. This daily struggle is best articulated in the novel by Tarrou, where he first deploys the ‘plague’ metaphorically.

I know with scientific certainty (yes, Rieux, I know every corner of life, as you can see) that everyone carries the plague inside them, because no one, yes, no one in the world is immune. And that we must watch over ourselves endlessly so that we are not led, in a moment of distraction, to breathe into another’s face and give him the infection. The microbe is what’s natural. The rest—health, integrity, purity, if you like, is the result of will, and a will that must never stop working. The honest man, he who infects almost no one, is he who has the fewest possible distractions. And it takes all his force of will and all his alertness to never be distracted!

3.

Of all the art forms, reading narrative fiction is already closest to the practice of social distancing. Even when many people are reading the same book – such as The Plague – they are doing so at a distance from other readers. It is a shared activity, albeit one we perform in solitude. But the choices we make in such solitary moments have consequences for our collective destiny. The question is what we do when we put the book down, when we return to the world. Social distancing, too, will come to an end, is already coming to an end, has perhaps already ended¹. But social distancing is a negative action. It is based on not doing certain things. But as we begin interacting with each other again, we could do so in ways that are consistent with the values and practices we learned during this period: with saving bodies, preserving the limits of the natural world, and through doing so, keeping the future open.

Thank you for reading.

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