Abdeldjalil Larbi Youcef
Faculty of Foreign Languages, University Abd el Hamid Ibn Badis. Email: lyoucef27@gmail.com
Special Issue on Diseases, Death and Disorder, 2020
Abstract
With the outbreak of Covid-19, The Plague, penned more than seventy years ago by the Algeria-born philosopher, Albert Camus, is presently one of the most read novels. This renewed interest can be explained by the fact it provides the reader with a strikingly accurate picture of how Oran city dwellers coped with that epidemic and either survived or simply were reaped by death. It should be pointed out that this famous piece of work has for chief merit of unveiling the décadence and grandeur of human nature in a time of pestilence. This article draws on most of his novel. The argument is that Camus also intends to show that notwithstanding the unimaginable speed with which one could pass from life to death, social inequality, loathsome materialism, yellow journalism, and hypocrisy insofar as the existence of God is concerned to name a few, did not disappear.
Keywords: Camus, Algeria, Plague, Materialism, God, Yellow Journalism
In 1940, a plague befell the city of Oran, where Albert Camus located his story. The latter soon turned out to be a famous bestselling novel. The reason lies in the fact it gives thought to the future and continues to challenge and to question us. In passing, it is the cholera epidemic of 1849 that Camus had in mind when he wrote his novel. Regarding the allegorical side, by the plague, he meant Nazi Germany. But, be it literal or allegorical, central to his enterprise stood a resolve, that of raising still pressing issues. They concern social inequality, the sacrosanct materialism, yellow journalism, and human hypocrisy insofar as the existence of God is concerned. Broadly speaking, Camus tries to show that during his time and at all times, death “by its impartial ministrations” appears to be the sole prone to hear the demands for justice.
Camus was born in 1913 to a poor family in Drean, a small village near the city of Annaba (eastern Algeria; renamed by the French Mondovi and Bône respectively). His father, Lucien Auguste, worked as a cellarman for a vineyard owner. He participated in WWI but was soon sent to the hospital due to a piece of shrapnel he received on his head. He did not last long. He died one week after his arrival; his son Albert was one year old. Camus, thanks to what his mother told him describes his father as “a hard, bitter man, who had worked all his life, had killed on command, accepted everything that could not be avoided, but who, sometimes in himself refused to be started. Finally, a poor man. Because poverty cannot be chosen, but it can be kept” (Camus 1994, 67). His mother, Catherine Hélène Sintès, worked as a housemaid. The fact that he was born and raised for much of his youth in poverty was not of a big concern. On the contrary, the poverty he explained was “never a misfortune for [him]”. In this light, his demonstrating humility throughout his life has to be rooted in his origins.
Although Camus stood against the independence of Algeria, he nevertheless was among the few pieds-noirs, the name given to the settlers, to denounce the injustice that plagued the natives during French colonization, 1830-1962. Determined not to remain a silent witness, he embarked upon telling their story and all that had to be done to end their suffering. Agnès Spiquel, President of the Society of Camusian Studies points out:
Camus talks about Arabs. He does, of course, in his journalistic texts; one can see it by browsing Chroniques algériennes, where, in 1958, he gathered all that he had written since 1939….Whether he speaks of Arabs, or Arab-Berbers, or-according to the terminology of the time-natives or Muslims, he denounces their misery, engendered by the colonial system (Spiquel 2013).
After a short stay in Kabylia, a region eighty kilometers far from the capital, Camus having become more aware and more committed, settled upon writing a series of articles for the anti-colonial daily Alger Républicain, titled Misery of Kabylia, June 5-15, 1939. In this series, he informs his readers about the people’s unspeakable poverty. He writes that they were cold and hungry and that their children had to fight with dogs for bits of food. Shocked by all that he saw, he pledged that he would not “mince his words” even if fellow pieds-noirs and the colonial authority would label him a bad Frenchman; he says:
These days, it seems that one is not a good Frenchman if one speaks of the misery of a French territory. I must say that it is hard to know nowadays what one must do to be a good Frenchman. So many people, of so many different kinds, boast of this title, and among them, there are so many mediocre minds and self- promoters, that one can easily go wrong. Still, it is possible to know what it means to be a just person. And my prejudice is that France is best represented and defended by acts of justice (Camus 1939).
Even though Camus made it plain “that France [was] best represented and defended by acts of justice”, much to his surprise, he noticed that even the epidemic which hit the city of Oran did not succeed in “promoting equality” he had been demanding for, let alone instill in people a semblance of humanism. Thus, even though northern Algeria is a farming territory, during French colonization poverty roamed all over the country. It touched not only the natives, who had been dispossessed of their lands, but also myriad settlers of French, Italian, Spanish, Maltese, and German descent that did not make it. In actuality, the country had turned into the preserve of a handful of landlords and moneyed individuals.
In Oran, those at the bottom of the social ladder, in addition to the specter of death due to the plague stood the one due to hunger because of an unprecedented food shortage. The epidemic exacerbated the prevailing inequalities for “profiteers were taking a hand and purveying at enormous prices essential foodstuffs not available in the shops. The result was that poor families were in great straits, while the rich went short of practically nothing” (Camus 2017, 115). It could not be denied that death showed her readiness to be just and to promote equality regardless of one’s status but, Camus observes, “Nobody wanted that kind of equality.” (115)
In The Plague, Camus heavily criticizes what he calls the “loathsome materialism.” To presumably make the world fairer, a man deemed he could do without a supreme Creator (Moussé 22). Therefore the materialism which he “invented through lies” (Roduit 79) was shaped in such a way that it came to mean it was the sole path to salvation. Camus points out that its conspicuous characteristic is that it “attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die” (Camus 2017, 139). And this could be noticed in the Happy City of Oran in which all that people had within them forever died. No matter the epidemic, nothing seemed more important than devoting one’s life to acquiring wealth. In Oran, “making business was the chief object in life and getting rich”, (Camus 2) and despite very alarming news of a dramatic increase of victims, “the whole population, sitting in cafes or hanging on the telephone, was discussing shipments, bills of lading, and discounts!” (2) Individualism and materialism foreshadowed reality and induced to delude in:
A tranquility so casual and thoughtless. . . giving the lie to those old pictures of the plague: Athens, a charnel-house reeking to heaven and deserted even by the birds; Chinese towns cluttered up with victims silent in their agony; the convicts at Marseille piling rotting corpses into pits; the building of the Great Wall in Provence to fend off the furious plague-wind; the damp, putrefying pallets stuck to the mud floor at the Constantinople lazar-house, where the patients were hauled up from their beds with hooks; the carnival of masked doctors at the Black Death; men and women copulating in the cemeteries of Milan; cartloads of dead bodies rumbling through London’s ghoul-haunted darkness, nights and days filled always, everywhere, with the eternal cry of human pain (Camus 20).
Camus denounces in his novel yellow journalism. The reader is acquainted with one Raymond Rambert, whom he introduces as a journalist for one of Paris dailies. Himself a journalist, Camus used this tool to resume dialogue between the natives and the settlers; to denounce injustice, etc. Seen from this angle, he “could rally to the aid of the ‘average’ man and the weaker members of society” who had fallen victim to the “indifference of politicians and the greed of the privileged” (de Gramont 10). Rambert was in Oran for a presumed investigation of poverty and sanitary conditions. But Dr. Bernard Rieux to whom he wanted to ask a series of questions refused to play the game. He knew that people in Oran buried their fellows but a certain kind of journalism sold “news” and buried the truth. In other words, for Dr. Rieux in Oran “….rats died in the street; men in their homes. And newspapers were concerned only with the street.”
Camus also raises humans’ attitude towards the spiritual in time of pestilence. For many people, as the number of victims reached dizzy heights, a visit to the church became timely. The hope was to see God spare lives and forgive dedicating them solely to worldly matters. There, the “faithful” meet one Father Paneloux, “a learned and militant Jesuit.” Angered to see the church unexpectedly almost full, Father Paneloux spells some truths to these flocks, who only in time of need, realized that God existed and that He could help:
Yes, the hour has come for serious thought. You fondly imagined it was enough to visit God on Sundays, and thus you could make free of your weekdays. You believed some brief formalities, some bendings of the knee, would recompense Him well enough for your criminal indifference. But God is not mocked. These brief encounters could not sate the fierce hunger of His love. He wished to see you longer and more often; that is His manner of loving and, indeed, it is the only manner of loving. And this is why wearied of waiting for you to come to Him, He loosed on you this visitation; as He has visited all the cities that offended against Him since the dawn of history (Camus 47)
Camus’ novel, fortunately, also shows human grandeur. He was certain that in “a time of pestilence…. there [were] more things to admire in men than to despise.” And there was much to admire in his key character, Dr. Rieux. He was young, thirty-five, and a doctor. His youth symbolized the future; his job was illustrative of hope when life came to hang only by a thread. And so many lives hung by a thread during those hard times; so many do now. Even if it implied risks, he was always present for the sick, be they poor like “the invalid old Spaniard with a hard, rugged face” living in Oran poor outskirts, or rich, in its upscale neighborhood.
Camus ends his novel with good news; there were indications that the war against the epidemic had been won. The news goes along a question he wants the reader to answer. Has the lesson that could be gained from the plague been understood? In truth, Dr. Rieux’s job transcends what one can expect from a doctor as he takes care of both the body and the soul of the sick. At this juncture Dr. Rieux’/Camus’ concern is to figure out whether, in a materialistic, individualistic, hedonistic world, those who were happy to be alive would show a disposition to reconsider their approach regarding the issues he raised because:
….as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the BANE and the ENLIGHTENING of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a HAPPY CITY.
Camus’ The Plague is a novel that should be read between the lines. Beyond a description of an epidemic and its ravages, it is indeed a model of society put into the spotlight and which must be rethought. Camus warns that the plague will reappear as long as humans keep following the same path. And like Sisyphus, they will be forced to eternally roll the society they created and ensure it does not crush them. In this regard, it would be interesting to know whether the Covid 19 pandemic and the devastation it is causing will constitute a source of inspiration and action for a more humanist, more united world, or a golden opportunity to build the much-maligned new world order in the global village of ours.
References
Camus, Albert. Noces. Paris. Edition Charlot, 1939.
__________ Le premier homme. Paris. Gallimard. 1994.
__________The Plague. Modern Library. 2017. Https://archive .org/details/pague02camu.
Gramont, Alexandre de. Between Hell and Reason: Essays from the Resistance Newspaper Combat, 1944–1947. Wesleyan University Press, 1991.
Moussé, Jean. Se libérer dans le monde qui passe: le réel, l’imaginaire et le sens. Moussé Ivry. Editions de l’Atelier, 1998.
Roduit, Mathieu. Entre Misère et Grandeur, L’Homme sans Dieu selon Pascal et Camus. Université de Lausanne, 2010.
Spiquel, Agnès. Albert Camus parle des Arabes. 2013. https://max-marchand-mouloud-feraoun.fr/articles/albert-camus-parle-des-arabes
Abdeldjalil Larbi Youcef currently teaches in the department of English at the University Abd el Hamid Ibn Badis University, Mostaganem, Algeria. Although he specializes in the history of the United States, he has published on such subjects as Nelson Mandela and the Algerian Army, The Black Panthers in Algeria, Algerian youth, and French citizenship, anti-Semitism in colonized Algeria, etc. He completed his doctoral studies at the Centre of the History of Ideas in the Anglo-American World at the Sorbonne University.