French Literature Archives - Mostly About Stories

Smart Smut? De Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir

This is one of the trickier books I’ve had to review here. As it was a gift from my girlfriend, I really have no choice in the matter, however. It is certainly interesting, being the only philosophical porn book I’m ever likely to read, while also advocating philosophies that I have little personal interest in. I have read some Anais Nin, which is as close as the canon seems to get to proper erotic fiction, but de Sade is more complicated than that. Here, he is trying to make philosophical arguments and at the same time describe fairly non-standard sexual practices in as explicit and shocking a way as possible.

The two are linked, of course. Any work of philosophical fiction gains its power from using the fiction part as much as possible to bolster and enhance the philosophical part. Dostoevsky’s and Camus’ characters put their ideas into practice. In the Magic Mountain we can see the irony of the lengthy philosophical discussions being only possible because the real world is elsewhere, down the valley. So, it seems to me that the best way of writing about Philosophy in the Boudoir is to ask whether it is effective as a work of philosophical fiction. Does the “plot” work with the ideas?

De Sade himself does not really need an introduction. We know that from his name comes sadism. Even if he got up to only a fraction of what he describes in his books, he would already well deserve his poor moral reputation. A glance at his biography on Wikipedia is quite the ride.

As for Philosophy in the Boudoir, it is, as seems from my knowledge of his others, a relatively milder work. Eugenie, the girl who is gradually corrupted by the older characters, is both a willing student and at the age of 15 in most countries just around the age of consent. Nobody is murdered, though there is plenty of (consensual) whipping, and the story does end with some rape and torture which only seems mild to me because I expected something far worse!

The Story

“I’m committing both incest, adultery, and sodomy, and all that from a girl who only got devirginized today!”

At least de Sade simplifies the summarising of his tale by barely having anything to it. Madame de Saint-Ange, a libertine, meets the girl Eugénie at a convent retreat and invites her round for a debauched weekend with her – the Madame’s – brother, Chevalier, along with Dolmancé, another libertine. Over a day Eugénie is introduced to pretty much every sexual act you can imagine – from anal sex to a wide variety of poses available when there are plenty of participants. She not only loses her virginity but also learns a lot about her partners’ libertine morals. Sodomy, incest, and blasphemy are just some of the sins they all commit which today may be slightly more (some of them) acceptable than they were in late 18^th century France, but which are still more than a little spine-tingling for the moral-minded among us.

Structurally, the story is almost like sex itself, with built-in refractory periods. We get “tableaux”, where the characters are arranged by Dolmancé for maximum pleasure, then they do the deed, and once they have finished and need to rest, they discuss philosophy. Rinse (I wish! – nobody washes here) and repeat.

I may not have spent time closely reading the philosophy as I would with another philosopher, but I think I have enough of a sense of the gist of it to be able to talk about it. The book is dedicated “to the libertines”; the goal is pleasure. “Listen only to those delicious passions; their source is the only one that will lead to happiness.” Essentially, the whole thing is about pleasure, which here is equated with happiness. Since pleasure is natural and nature is good, we must act in a way that aligns with nature. Pretty much everything that we deal with regularly – laws, religion, social customs – is the work of humans, and hence unnatural and ought to be the object of scorn.

Because we do not know other people, we can only trust our pleasure and ignore their pain and cries for help. Because nature does not care for us, we being tiny and irrelevant on a cosmic scale, it provides no higher guide for right conduct and no consolation for it either. Once we are old and can no longer have sex or engage in gratuitous violence, we should at least aim to have a store of pleasurable memories to look back on. The death of another is meaningless, for we all become mulch for nature to create a new life upon our deaths, so the overall balance of the living and the dead never changes. Hence murder is legitimised, including of our parents and children, as are the (alleged) pleasures of the sexual acts of things like incest and paedophilia. As soon as we recognise the absence of any authority except our own sensory pleasure and deny the existence of others’ inner worlds, we create a simplified world of pleasure available for those with the strength to take it. This is de Sade’s world.

Need I say that there’s plenty wrong with it?

I want to begin by undermining all of this using the work itself, before moving on to a more direct engagement with the significance of the ideas. The primary problem with Philosophy in the Boudoir is that its two parts, the smut and the philosophy, do not work together. This does not seem obvious at first. The philosophical text advocates for hedonism, and the story shows some people having the wildest of orgiastic pleasures, after all. But the problem is that the sex is utterly dreadful, and the characterisation so lax, that every opportunity for proving the truth of the philosophy within the bounds of the story’s world ends up doing the opposite – the story makes the philosophy look silly.

Allow me to explain. There is nothing wrong with hedonistic characters, or monsters, depending on how you look at them. Bad people exist, so that when Dolmancé declares he lit a bonfire for joy when his mother died, we can accept that. We can accept also, even, when someone says of Eugenie “What a delight to corrupt her, to suffocate in that young heart all the seeds of virtue and religion that were planted in her by her tutors!”. We’re all guilty of hamming things up from time to time.

Eugenie

But the problem, one of them, is Eugenie herself. We were all once teenagers – and many of us will have been horny teenagers. So we might think she really could be immediately corrupted by being removed from a convent and masturbated and abused for hours at a time. She might regret it afterwards, but who hasn’t, in the heat of arousal, done or thought things that the cooling water of the aftermath makes sting? No, we can tolerate that and still find her an utterly unbelievable creation. This comes across in the joints, the seams where de Sade is trying to stitch the two parts of the work together. Here is an example of one such shoddy transition:

“I’m dead, I’m shattered… I’m devastated!… but please explain two words that you’ve used and that I don’t understand. First of all: what does “womb” mean?”

Readers, I don’t know. I can accept orgiastic pleasures just as much as I can accept that a young girl in the 18^th century may know very little about her own body. But the juxtaposition, this switch from post-coital exhaustion to notebook-on-lap schoolgirl is too sharp. It is laughable. Or, several orgasms later, how about: “What do you mean by that expression “whore”? I apologize, but I’m here to learn.” I know and you know damn well too. But in case readers of this blog post have become convinced that the poor girl really is just an innocent ingenu inducted rapidly into the world of physical pleasures and trying to catch up on the theory, I present the most egregious example:

“I’d like to know whether a government truly needs a set of morals, whether they can really influence the essence of a nation.” This, I am afraid, is too much for post-coital discussion. I was an annoying 15-year-old, but even I wasn’t that bad – and that was without getting laid!

The Pamphlet – a moment of realism?

By showing the pleasures of constant orgies, we might come to believe that a good life really is one where we can say with Eugenie, that “Lust is now my only god, the single measure of my conduct, the sole basis of all my actions.” Instead, de Sade is constantly undermining himself. This is nowhere more obvious than in the pamphlet that appears halfway through the book.

This is a really interesting moment. I love texts-within-texts because they can do a lot to reflect and refract what goes on around them. Purportedly a pamphlet found on the street, Dolmancé reads it to the gathered pleasure-fiends. (Allowing for the reading out of lengthy texts is a concession to unrealism I can always allow – it gave us Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, and a lot of lovely German novellas.) The pamphlet could, like the sex, bolster the philosophical arguments. By providing something similar, it could legitimise them by making them seem more widespread. By providing a, for example religious, alternative, it could allow the characters to create more finely formed counterarguments. Instead, and this is de Sade’s perennial problem, he can only talk like himself.

It begins well, or at least, it does not advocate violence, and it talks about republican virtues – virtue being hitherto a dirty word. It shares with the characters the simpler things, like a rejection of religion, for example. It is also boring and long, which has the singular advantage of making it seem more like a real pamphlet. But then de Sade’s restraint falls away, and this text too starts talking about the need for murder to be allowed, and the importance of pleasure. It just means that we are listening to the characters all over again, without the sex to make us laugh. It fails, in other words.

Concluding Complaints about Realism and Effectiveness

There are a few other things that Philosophy in the Boudoir does against itself. Its ending, where Eugenie rapes and tortures her mother, then infects her with syphilis, is unpleasant to read. It may be milder than the violence of the summary of the 120 Days of Sodom, but it still makes a reader interested in pleasure who may have enjoyed at least some of the sex go “this is too much.” To put it more simply, if de Sade wanted to be persuasive, he should have stopped earlier – instead, it seemed he was too interested in getting himself off. And it costs the book, and by extension us. But then again, perhaps de Sade didn’t want to convince – he probably just didn’t care, if he was doing his own philosophy properly!

Good bits

Now that I’ve got all that off my chest, I want to mention some qualities of the book that do make it interesting and not only the unrealistic, unrewarding picture I painted of it earlier. For one, the book is aware of its context. Written during the French Revolution, we have a sense of the Enlightenment and its consequences quite forcefully here. Eugenie has come “to be taught” – like Rousseau, de Sade is interested in education, good and bad, and is trying to advocate for a “right” version. We have a sense at times of the advancement of science and world exploration (Captain Cook is mentioned) and how these are destabilising a Eurocentric, Christian worldview.

At times, de Sade sounds a lot like Nietzsche or Freud. He has a keen, if probably more intuitive than reasoned, sense of the origins of social rules. For example, he claims incest is only considered bad because it allowed wealth concentration within families – hence people had to find a way to prevent people from marrying their siblings. By showing how other people practice murder or casual sex, (in Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder the section on Tahiti is extraordinary – and very sad) de Sade does successfully make his ideas seem more reasonable or acceptable. He also uses the Bible to show how incest has been acceptable or practised at one point or other, letting him both devalue the Bible a little and legitimise incest in the same swipe.

What is here would understandably be shocking to a reader in the 18^th century, and is often shocking to me in the 21^st. But what is exciting at the same time is how de Sade really does fall into an intellectual tradition by showing its more extreme points. He is a fool, for example, when he says that despotism in bed and despotism in the halls of power are not linked. But precisely by being that fool, he presages the fools that eventually did gain power and placed violence on a pedestal. By revealing the tendencies of the Enlightenment towards the extinguishing of ultimate truths, he’s like a horny Max Weber.

And the real problem, intellectually rather than in the sense of quality as before, is that it seems the closer to the present we get, the more de Sade seems to be saying something almost true. Sodomy and blasphemy are now well tolerated in my country. Sex is mass-marketed and widespread – you can buy toys and lube in any supermarket. Contraception means that coitus and reproduction are now divorced. Apps make casual sex even more widespread than before, while recent trends towards step-sibling porn are merely a slope that ends eventually in simulated sibling porn, and then real sibling porn.

For example, it seems to me, intellectually, that there really is no good argument against incest, provided the people involved are over the age of consent and are not groomed before then (these are gigantic if’s), and conception does not take place. It may take people out of society because of the taboo and hence social discrimination, and also the way that having a partner within one’s own home gets in the way of going out to find a mate. But we value choice, and let people legally ruin their lives in many other ways. I am not sure we will be happy with this – but what I mean by bringing it up as an example is that de Sade taught us long ago that we don’t really have good arguments against it, only feelings. Likewise, with books like Open being reviewed in the New York Times, the nuclear family continues its dissipation into a startling – or refreshing? – array of alternatives.

I am not about to say what I think of this – a piece like this is not the place for moralising. To repeat, what I am saying is that seems de Sade saw where we are going. We may get there in my lifetime or yours, but society really does seem to be slipping towards a kind of freedom where we can do everything we want, with whomever we want, provided power is sufficiently evenly distributed (through the mutual consent of people in a position to give it). It is only this check, consent, that separates the future world from the world of de Sade’s dreams. Is it a good world? I’ll admit I may have some doubts.

Another thing we must grant de Sade is that by being wrong but different, he still has value in the context of women’s rights. Women certainly were not made just to have fun having sex, but at least by questioning what women were made for de Sade makes us think women may not just be made for whatever most people thought they were made for (babies), back in the 18^th century. He loosens our ideas of what is right and wrong, and if we may not like what he puts in their place we at least can get started with thinking of what we ourselves might put in their place. This, the challenging of received ideas, is never unwelcome, even when it comes in so strange a guise as here.

To conclude, then, there really are some interesting thoughts in this book. The problem is that de Sade was not willing to make his fiction and philosophy work together. He was too much writing for himself in the sex/plot scenes, to be able to allow them to speak to the rest of the work in a way that enhanced it. Do I regret reading it? At 170 pages in the Penguin translation by Joachim Neugroschel, it’s not too bad. But I cannot see myself reading de Sade again. Readers, I believe I can say I have saved you the trouble too.

Thank me later.

The Letters of Simone Weil

Simone Weil is probably my favourite thinker, alongside Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. What makes her work so brilliant is the way she manages to combine a real earthiness of focus on real problems and real solutions with an understanding that the reason why we care is because what is at stake is nothing less than the soul. Writing during the Second World War and passing from pacifism to accepting violence in battling Hitler, she has a great deal to teach us as we go through yet another time of suffering and mass slaughter. With her eye on human dignity and the way that humans get caught up in violence, revenge and justifications for murder that cannot handle scrutiny, she is essential reading.

But, as hinted above, Weil was also a thinker who could and did change her mind. One of the most striking things about her is that she had a religious awakening at the beginning of the 1940s with an intensity and results that went far beyond even Tolstoy’s. As a result, there are almost two ideas of Weil in competition with one another. The one I’ve preferred – the heroic woman who in spite of physical frailty and constant headaches (she is almost a mirror of Nietzsche, with an almost diametrically opposed philosophy: “even when he is expressing what I myself think, I find him literally intolerable”) – worked in factories and on fields, and even volunteered with the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War to get close to the working class so she could truly understand the struggles they faced.

What best encapsulates this Weil is her riposte to Simone de Beauvoir when the latter once said in conversation that the main thing in life was finding meaning. Weil immediately countered by saying that it was obvious de Beauvoir had never been hungry.

But then there is another Weil, the one after her conversion. She has not abandoned her practical concerns, but the balance has shifted. To a sceptic, this Weil deserves de Gaulle’s remark, made when he came across her while they were both working in London on the war effort – “elle est folle!” (“She is mad!”). The soul is now key, the solutions to our human problems seem considerably less practical, a little less rooted in the world. This is ironic, because her most beautiful book, The Need for Roots, stems from this period. Still. It is this Weil that made the extraordinary choice to die through voluntary starvation mixed with tuberculosis, denying to eat anything more than the rations allowed her had she lived in France. Such a decision certainly would not be compatible with her earlier views and is only dubiously compatible with her later ones. That this happened is amazing, nevertheless.

Reading her Seventy Letters: Personal and Intellectual Windows on a Thinker translated by Richard Rees is interesting first of all as an encounter with the person behind the thoughts. Do we find more continuities or discontinuities here between the Weils above? Readers hoping for such will be disappointed. Although the letters have a kind of internal coherence between time periods, the lack of annotations is unhelpful given the casual reader’s knowledge (or strictly speaking, lack thereof) of Weil. To give an example, her correspondents are rarely introduced. Some of them, when googled, draw a blank too.

For those trying to create a full picture of Weil, this book is not entirely sufficient. Its subtitle, “windows on a thinker”, is quite apt. We are peering into Weil’s world through various windows, but at no point can we shuffle backwards to get a good view of the house itself. We have biographies for this, of course, but it is still something of a disappointment. The book is short – just under two hundred pages – so there was certainly scope for adding more missives. One glaring, if certainly deliberate omission, is the Letter to a Priest (Édouard Couturier), which is published separately. Reading the selected letters, we are suddenly thrown from an atheistic, if sympathetic, to an obsessively religious Weil who is mentioning God at every turn, without the key stopping points in between. It’s certainly jarring.

Still, we get our windows. Let’s peer in. We begin with various letters to schoolchildren she had once taught, filled with advice (“suffering doesn’t matter, so long as you experience some vivid joys. What matters is not to bungle one’s life. And for that, one must discipline oneself”) and a deep understanding of the political challenges of 1933-34 when the National Socialists had just gained power in Germany and Soviet influence on French communist agitators was growing. Various letters to trade unionists detail her understanding of the effects of factory life upon the individual, in particular the loss of dignity caused by repetitive work and constant submission.

In the letters describing her factory experiences, what is most impressive is her curiosity. “Because I don’t feel the suffering as mine, I feel it as the workers’ suffering; and whether I personally suffer it or not seems to me a detail of almost no importance. Thus the desire to know and understand easily prevails.” Her curiosity strikes us, as does a certain raw honesty, perhaps naivety. Weil had what today we might call “no filter.” The longest series of letters, to “B”, a factory manager, ends because Weil shares her delight at the victory of the French left in the elections of 1936, which unsurprisingly her correspondent does not.

This incident is quite typical, as far as I can make out for Weil. She puts in real effort in the letters first to make the manager appreciate the suffering of his workers, and how the workers’ lot could be improved without challenging the existing order (Weil was no fan of revolutions but expected revolutionary change to happen through achieving general consent to it): “It is very difficult to judge from above, and it is very difficult to act from below. That, I believe, is in general one of the essential causes of human misery.” She wrote articles for the factory newspaper, was a visitor there, and regularly spoke to B. She asked for such simple, practical things as an anonymous suggestion box for workers. This is what I mean when I describe Weil’s earthiness – real solutions to real problems.

For those of us familiar with Weil’s work on oppression, the letters contain much of the first germs of ideas regarding the effects of the work on people which later made their way into her essays: “my experience taught me two lessons. The first, the bitterest and most unexpected, is that oppression, beyond a certain degree of intensity, does not engender revolt but, on the contrary, an almost irresistible tendency to the most complete submission. … The second lesson is that humanity is divided into two categories – the people who count for something, and the people who count for nothing.” What they also do, quite clearly, is indicate her political leanings, or rather clarify her attitude towards things like revolutions, which are often only implicit in her other writings.

Further letters before the war detail a trip to Italy, where she met some fascists and had discussions with them to understand their views, which she condemned utterly (“if I had any choice in the matter I would prefer hardship and starvation in a salt-mine to living with the narrow and limited horizon of these young people”), and of course saw some old buildings and paintings. We see Weil’s mastery of languages as she quotes Greek, Latin, and Italian poetry to her readers. But one thing that is worth noting is that we get the odd, brief look at a Weil who could possibly be described as happy. For most of the remaining letters Weil is so full of self-loathing and guilt that her joy only comes through almost self-pitying laments: “Why have I not the n existences I need, in order to devote one of them to the theatre!”

By far the most interesting letter of this period was to the French writer Georges Bernanos, where she shares her experience in the Spanish Civil War as a volunteer. Fortunately, she was injured in an accident involving cooking oil (passion, seriousness, and a certain awkward incompetence seem to be the hallmarks of Weil), which almost certainly saved her life, given she would pick quarrels with people who, her own letters show, saw very little value in life and would easily and probably gladly have rid her of hers. But this letter, anyway, is a single, tantalising exception beside various reasonings on the war, only some of which are interesting.

The next series of letters concerns algebra, in particular as it was done in ancient cultures. Weil’s brother, André, was a famous mathematician (who lived to 92 – how much of Simone we likely lost…!) and she herself was at ease discussing the theories. It is not my area. But Weil’s interest is infectious, and like with Wittgenstein, maths is for Weil very much a mirror of the soul, or perhaps a key to it, but certainly not some irrelevancy. It made me think of a beautiful moment in her essay “Human Personality” where she says that perfection is impersonal, because a correct equation is always correct and undifferentiable, while an incorrect equation bears the mark of its writer in how exactly it is wrong. Although, again, some footnotes would have been helpful. Weil was not a systematic thinker, and wrote brilliantly on a whole range of subjects, but that means that specialist academics or your blogger are unlikely to be comfortable in every single one of the fields she was.

In 1942 we witness the aftermath of her religious awakening through a letter to a man wounded in the Great War, Joe Bousquet. I had a sense that something was off about Weil here, and sure enough it did not take many paragraphs for her to start discussing “the nuptial consent to God.” The problem is not God, but what comes after for Weil. If she was harsh to herself before, there is little forgiveness now. She talks about how daydreaming is an evil because it distracts us from the pain we need to reach God. And then, for those unaware of more indirect expressions of it, she states “my attitude towards myself… is… a mixture of contempt and hated and repulsion.”

Compare the above to a phrase only two years before: “there are so many modern people … in whom sadness is connected with a loss of the very instinct for happiness; they feel a need to annihilate themselves.” Weil has come to see, as far as I can make out based on the letters and her essays, that annihilation is precisely what we should aim for. I am not, all told, with her. I am not sure her recipients are necessarily either. But in the annihilation of her personality she found God waiting, so how are we to blame her? We must trust to her feelings, and the sense of a task from God that she gained, even if we struggle to follow her in her beliefs. But if we are reading her letters, we are probably at least slightly sympathetic to her.

The final section of the Selected Letters sees Weil go from exile in the United States to living in London. She regretted leaving Marseilles, where she had been after French capitulation, feeling too distant from the war. Unfortunately, she found work in London supporting the Free French unrewarding too: “The work I am doing here will be arrested before long by a triple limit. First, a moral limit; because the ever increasing pain of feeling that I am not in my right place will end in spite of myself, I fear, by crippling my thought. Second, an intellectual limit; obviously my thought will be arrested when it tries to grasp the concrete, for lack of an object. Third, a physical limit; because my fatigue is growing.”

What Weil wanted was “any really useful work, not requiring technical expertise but involving a high degree of hardship and danger.” She wanted to be parachuted into France, perhaps to sabotage something. It is from this period that her famous “Plan for an organization of front-line nurses” originates. This idea of unarmed women airdropped onto the front line to provide first aid, has a reputation for being silly and impractical (it was what prompted de Gaulle to call her mad), so I was interested to read it. The criticism, I think, is somewhat unwarranted. There is symbolic beauty in the idea of a group of angelic carers fighting ideologically against the beasts of the SS, as Weil is keen to emphasise. And as for the impracticality of providing first aid at the front and taking people’s last messages home, I’m not sure that’s entirely without its practical value, and certainly has some moral value. Regardless, she was unable to get it supported.

The war concern fades into the background with the remaining letters, which are for Weil’s family. These are some of the least pleasant to read in the whole collection. What I like about Weil, whether in her essays or in her letters, is her authenticity. She was terribly naïve at times, but always true and earnest.

In April 1943, Weil left her London lodgings to enter a hospital, and was later transferred to a sanatorium. “I cannot eat the bread of the English without taking part in their war effort”, she wrote. But, working with the Free French, she was working. It was just that her self-loathing meant that she couldn’t allow herself to believe that she had done enough.

What would be merely silly had it not killed her, becomes disgusting when we learn, in one of very few notes the editors provide, that Weil still addressed her parents as if she was living at her old lodgings. And the lies go further, with her pretending to a knowledge of the ongoings of London life, which was obviously denied to her in bed, and to a health denied her too. “There’s been a misunderstanding. There’s no change for me, and none in prospect, so far. I still live quietly in my room, with my books distributed between it and the office.” This is extraordinary stuff to read, less than a month before she died, from a woman who it seems was pathologically compelled to tell the truth.

Extraordinary, and utterly, crushingly, depressing. “Au revoir, darlings. Heaps and heaps of love,” her final letter ends. No doubt she lied to her parents out of a desire to conserve their happiness, already challenged by the war. But the whole thing is just too sad for words. Weil’s heroism, her bravery, her desire to help, are all annihilated by a self-loathing that allows her just to float away from the life she had once spent trying to improve for others, as if she had never cared about such things at all.

And so, finishing the Selected Letters, I must be honest and say that if anything they lowered my opinion of one of my few philosophical heroes. If before I had thoughtlessly accepted the hagiographic view of Weil, too angelic to live, accepting a self-imposed starvation out of a magnanimous love of her countryfolk, now I think of her sacrificing honesty, common sense, and her goals for ideas that are either incomprehensible or, when I can understand them, unacceptable. Her intelligence and passion are awe-inspiring, and my respect for them both only grew reading the letters. But it is only the early Weil whom I can anymore say that I like.

For more letters, I read some of Joseph Conrad’s here.

Camus’s The Plague on Evil and Human Decency

Every classic is supposedly timeless; The Plague is one of those books that are fortunate enough to have the world remind us of their timeliness every so often. I did not return to it during the Covid years, but I have returned to it now, at a time when occupation and diffuse evils are once again relevant to our own lives – or at least to those whom we may feel are close to us. Camus began the novel in 1941 and saw it published in 1947, at a time when the French and the rest of liberated Europe wanted to understand how to perceive themselves. There were some who were undeniably heroic freedom fighters, and Camus was one of them, while on the other side of the spectrum were those who had collaborated with the occupants willingly. Besides these two groups, however, there was a great mass of people who were neither willing collaborators nor resistors and wanted to know what to think.

To these questions, Camus brings his philosopher’s eye, which makes The Plague an intellectually stimulating work, if not necessarily an emotionally stimulating one. My interest in it comes from its treatment of the ideas of decency and responsibility, which are explored through the character of Tarrou in particular.

The novel’s story is fundamentally simple. In the port of Oran in Algeria, a plague breaks out. The population are quarantined and endeavours to live within those conditions as best it can. Some men (and all the characters are men), for varying reasons, fight the plague and help its victims. Others do not. After some time, the plague leaves the town and things return to normal. The Plague is a curious work because we are used to having antagonists, villains, and a corresponding neat and clearly signposted moral taxonomy. Here the enemy is a plague, thoughtless and inscrutable. And just as there are no villains, Camus’s story does not give us much by way of heroes either.

We do have Dr Rieux, handsome and hardworking. He is “a man weary of the world in which he lived, yet who still had some feeling for his fellow men and was determined for his part to reject any injustice and any compromise.” His first action is to refuse to provide a report to a visiting journalist, Rambert, about the state of the healthcare in the region, on the grounds that he cannot tell the full truth. His philosophy is simple: “we must help one another.” It carries him through the book in spite of the challenges that the plague places upon him.

As a doctor, Rieux is at the forefront of the efforts to defeat the plague, tending to its victims, lancing boils and administering painful injections. But there are other people who join him in helping stem its tide. Joseph Grand, a civil servant, helps out with the more administrative side of things. The narrator considers him a hero, even while describing him as “insignificant and self-effacing”, with “nothing to recommend him but a little goodness in his heart.” There is also another man, Tarrou, who is in Oran attempting to work out his life philosophically and who comes to fight the plague as a result of the conclusions he reaches from his questionings through creating bands of volunteers.

The journalist, Rambert, is not from Oran. He is a visitor from Paris, and when the town is quarantined, he attempts to flee it to return to his partner across the seas. Various attempts to smuggle himself out go awry, but when one scheme finally works, he abandons it at the last moment and decides to commit himself to helping the sick. His change of heart, as he tells it to Rieux, comes down to a sudden sense of guilt at the thought of pleasure while others suffer: “there may be shame in being happy all by oneself.” Where once he had protested that the fate of the town is of no connection to him, as an outsider there, he comes to realise that by being there he is already a part of the whole, and thus must bear his share of responsibility for its wellbeing.

All of these characters and plenty of others who do not even receive a name act to resist the plague. They are not doing their job, as Rieux is, but doing something they are not obliged to do. The doctor, however, denies that it is a matter of heroism. Instead, the word that sums up the feeling of these men is “decency”. “The only way to fight the plague is with decency.” Why decency? For one, because the book is quite equivocal about whether any of the efforts to fight the plague, from the doctors’ serums to the efforts of the assistants, actually work. As Rieux at one point quips, “the burial is the same, but we keep a card index. No one can deny we have made progress.” It is not heroism if your efforts are for nought, after all, save the impression they produce.

The second reason for “decency” is that in times of quarantine and occupation, we humans grow lax. We need not consult Camus’ novel to know this, merely our recent memories. I do not refer to wearing tracksuits to work, or even a general sloppiness of manner, which are small sins, if they are sins at all. Rather, in a time of stress, we change as people. Our awareness of others decreases. We become selfish, callous, and cold. There is something lost in us which may provide temporary strength, just as Rieux discovers his growing hardness allows him to see “men dying who were made for life” without losing heart, but when we allow this feeling of humanity to be absent from us for too long, the crevice in our souls that houses it seals up. And at that point, it cannot easily return.

The characters of The Plague are not philosophers, in the sense that few of them are animated by a clear world view. They are just people who do not want to lose themselves in petty compromises and mindlessness. Their variety – from the civil servant, Grand, to the priest Paneloux – speaks to the truth that everyone is capable of action in the face of evil. There are no effective excuses, whatever people actually do. As long as we have a common enemy – death – then we should find common ground with every decent human being on earth in the struggle against it.

Of all the characters, the most interesting is Jean Tarrou. He, like Rambert, is not of Oran, but immediately joins forces with Rieux against the disease, and the volunteer medical squads are in fact his suggestion. The most philosophical of the characters, early on he tells Rieux that his aim is “to find inner peace”, but it is only towards the novel’s end that we get close to him. Only then does he recount the story of his philosophical awakening. As a young man, he once accompanied his father, a prosecuting counsel, to the law courts. Here, rather than being in awe, Tarrou found himself identifying with the accused man instead. He realises that the people in the courtroom “wanted to kill this living man” and that such a thing was completely impossible for him to support in any way. He soon leaves home and begins the wanderings that eventually bring him to Oran.

Did the people in the courtroom really desire the accused man’s death? This is unlikely. But what is true is that when you find yourself becoming a representative of a thing or an idea you start to embody it yourself. This process is almost impossible to perceive objectively, but it is fatal. Because the process of becoming a thing takes away the responsibility – indeed, obligation – to know what one does and the consequences of what one does. For if there is an enemy in The Plague, it is the ignorance as much as the plague itself. St Bernard of Clairvaux once wrote that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In The Plague, it is those good intentions unmatched by the knowledge that are fatal.

This is what Camus’ novel has to say about this:

“The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightened. People are more often good than bad, though in fact that is not the question. But they are more or less ignorant and this is what one calls vice or virtue, the most appalling vice being the ignorance that thinks it knows everything and which consequently authorizes itself to kill. The murderer’s soul is blind, and there is no true goodness or fine love without the greatest possible degree of clear-sightedness.”

In Tarrou, we have a character who is not blind. He has broken through the thick crust that conceals from us the true moral nature of things. That nature is that people die and we, through our actions and inactions, are more responsible for this than we would wish. “I learned that I had indirectly supported the deaths of thousands of men, that I had even caused their deaths by approving the actions and principles that inevitably led to them.” We can read Tarrou’s understanding of “actions and principles” according to our own beliefs. One may think of the slogan that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, or that by supporting a government that wages war, however, it may seem moral, we are complicit in the deaths of those innocents who inevitably die as the war is waged.

Awareness is isolation. Of other people, he notes: “I was with them, yet I was alone.” I feel the truth that Tarrou describes, this incredible complicity of breathing, of being alive in an unjust world. But this is not a general view. Upon confessing this feeling to another I have rarely found a sympathetic ear. As a rule, we do not want responsibility, we do not want to see. There is no joy in that, and certainly no peace. But the problem is that once we see, we cannot unsee without an avalanche of guilt. The knowledge of complicity forces one into a terrible decision – either to knowingly do bad or to endeavour as much as possible to do good. If we choose, even once, to do bad, then something happens to us, morally speaking. We surrender our obligations, we give ourselves up to the systems whose evil we acknowledge, and in doing so become destroyed:

“I decided that if one gave way once, there was no reason to stop. It seems that history has shown that I was right; nowadays it’s a free-for-all in killing. They are all carried away by a fury of killing and cannot do otherwise.”

Here, in Tarrou’s speech, we return at last to the plague itself. But not the bacillus that kills our lungs and covers us in boils. Instead, the plague that Tarrou sees is the potential lying dormant in all of us for surrendering to the evil actions we are forced by life to make: “we cannot make a gesture in this world without taking the risk of bringing death.” If we try to blind ourselves to this knowledge, once it is known, we spread the plague, we spread a moral contagion far worse than the disease that strikes Oran: “I know that we must constantly keep a watch on ourselves to avoid being distracted for a moment and find ourselves breathing in another person’s face and infecting him.” Goodness, then, is a combination of watchfulness and good action.

This is the simple conclusion that Tarrou reaches: “All I say is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims – and as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence. This may seem rather simple to you, and I don’t know if it is simple, but I do know that it is true.” And so, he fights the disease, he fights cowardice, he fights death. And he attains, so far as is possible, the “hope of peace.”

The messages of The Plague are simple, though that does not make them untrue. We must be decent. We must do good. We must be aware of the consequences and complicities of our actions, and we must do what we can to avoid bringing evil and death into the world.

The challenge with such ideas is bringing them into our own lives. The weight of the knowledge of the evils of life is even greater than it was in Camus’ day. One cannot buy a piece of fruit without thinking of the distance it has travelled and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with it, emissions causing suffering by increased drought or wildfires. One cannot buy some chocolate without considering the palm oil it contains and the land use change and deforestation almost inevitably entailed thereby, no matter what the suppliers say. One cannot eat a fish without considering the depletion of the ocean’s stocks through wasteful trawling practices. There are other issues you may or may not acknowledge depending on your preferences, such as systematic racism and things connected to LGBTQ+ rights and so on. Even one who styles themself a “conservative” still has plenty to consider themselves responsible for within this scheme.

To acknowledge these things rather than hiding from them is one thing; to act upon them is yet another challenge on top of that. And then there is this question of decency. The poet, W.H. Auden, writing the 1930s, wrote that “we must love one another or die,” which is a good place to begin. But how do we assess decency? We come back to a moral scheme that is reliant upon our consciences, like that of Tolstoy after his religious crisis, with all the issues that entails. It is impossible to determine what is decent, and if we have a perfectionist bent in our moral judgements, we are likely to find ourselves forever lacking. I wrote a little about this in my piece on Peter Singer and Turgenev.

I have to ask myself whether I myself am decent. Last week I was interviewed by a local news channel about the initiative to help Ukrainian child refugees that my girlfriend and I created. We found that there was very little support being given to the refugees at English schools and filling that gap by providing extra lessons online seemed the moral thing to do, especially since we had experience teaching and could speak the children’s language and thus help those most in need. We even had several volunteer teachers working with us at first, but one by one they dropped off, citing the busyness of their own lives, while my girlfriend and I carry on as best we can, though we ourselves do not lead empty lives either.

I give several hours each week to do a little with various groups and individuals, but it is easy to feel like I am not doing enough. At times, it feels like I am just doing the bare minimum to make my soul sit at ease. It is certainly not a heroic thing we’ve done, just a decent thing. But it does feel at times that there are lots of people who are not entirely interested in doing even that. And that, it seems to me, as it does to Tarrou, is hard to stomach. It is terribly isolating too.

This question of decency has become particularly relevant in my own life for other reasons as well. What I have in mind is my relationship with my remaining Russian acquaintances. When your country, or rather its armed forces and its civil and military leadership, is committing or ordering things so awful that I find myself resorting to the language of sin and evil just to begin to describe them, the bar for decency seems to be set a bit higher than it is here in the UK, itself not a spotless country by any means. A few times I have been made angry by the lightness with which a few of them live as if the decent thing to do is to suffer. Which it is not. The decent thing is to act, with knowledge, against evil. Suffering alone never ends evil.

One family that I am close to sheltered a family fleeing Mariupol on their way out to Europe. One friend, now in Canada, helps refugees enter that country and settle there. Another, now in Israel, works with an American lawyer to help those fleeing with the immigration process, including persecuted individuals from Russia itself. But many have just emigrated, and how many others still sit in silence in Russia itself, in fear, alone. Is it decent to leave Russia, rather than resist it from within? Or is leaving alone insufficient – does it need to be matched with action taken once one is in exile? These and other questions need to be asked, but more by individuals of themselves, than by us of them. It seems to me a certain truth that there is enough to be known and done by ourselves for us not to gain much, if anything, from attacking others for their moral failings.

In my reading on the question of guilt, my favourite view is that of Karl Jaspers, which I have written about here. But what Camus suggests in The Plague is another important contribution to our considerations of responsibility because it establishes a kind of baseline for our actions through this idea of decency, and through having a clear enemy in the form of all that which dehumanises and destroys the individual. As a novel, I actually found The Plague a little too cold and clinical, and somewhat too formulaic and structured in its approach. But never mind. The novel is sustained by its curious lack of an obvious enemy, and by its philosophical passion. Whether these ideas are too simple, as Tarrou suggests, is not altogether important. As he himself notes, all that matters is that they are true. It seems to me that they are.

Category: French Literature