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.