Albert Camus’ Plague of Human Abstraction

Some of you likely noticed that there have been no scribblings for the past couple of weeks— this is because I have spent the latter part of August travelling to various places, and so had little time to write anything of note. I did, however, have plenty of time to read, and because one of the locations that I visited was the city of Paris, I brought with me a book by one of France’s greatest thinkers, Albert Camus. Today, I would like to spend a moment considering his masterpiece The Plague, specifically the plight of amateur writer Joseph Grand.

A little context may be in order. Whilst some deem it suitable to lump Camus in with the other French existentialist thinkers of the time, most prominently Jean-Paul Sartre, there are in fact so many crucial distinctions between the two philosophers that Camus is also thought to have founded an entirely different school of thought altogether, Absurdism.

One of the key differences between Camus and Sartre was the way that they viewed large-scale historical movements in human society. For Sartre, such violent and bloody events as the Russian Revolution and the Algerian Crisis could be justified by the overarching social movement that they were emblematic of— the shift away from the tyrannies of colonialism and dictatorship, and towards liberty and justice. On the other hand, for Camus, even the most glorious and utopian of ends could not justify such horrific means, that caused the pain, suffering and death of so many individual human lives.

Where Sartre sought to view the bloodshed of such uprisings from afar, as abstract, necessary historical evils across the vast tapestry of human progress, Camus instead could only see them from up close, one corpse at a time.

Much of Camus’ writing displays this disdain for the abstraction of human suffering, and The Plague is no exception. In the novel, Doctor Rieux fights the titular malady that is laying waste to the Algerian village of Oran, whilst also struggling against the various distancing techniques that certain Oranians use to emotionally isolate themselves from the immediate moral duties of the mounting death toll. These range from religion, to self-preservation, to grand notions of romantic love. In the end, though, all of these mighty ideals are dashed against the human tragedies occurring in the here and now.

In the face of such an existential threat, it may seem odd to include in his book the plight of a civil servant named Grand, who is finding it difficult to progress past the first page of his novel manuscript. Indeed, Rieux himself struggles to figure out how such trivial obsessions could possibly have ‘fitted into the context of the plague’. However, later on it becomes clear that the very problem Grand finds in his approach to writing, is also the issue that Camus locates in his fellow Frenchmen’s approach to human suffering.

When we first meet Grand, there is merely the slightest hint that he is spending his free time working on something personal to him. Soon, we find that it is the manuscript of the novel, and that he is struggling to find the right words to properly convey his intended meaning. In fact, he hasn’t even made it past the first line;

‘On a fine morning in the month of May, an elegant woman was riding a magnificent sorrel mare through the flowered avenues of the Bois de Boulogne’.

Upon asking Rieux what he thinks, the doctor replies that it is a beginning that ‘makes him curious to know what would follow’. As far as opening lines go, that is the ideal reaction; but one gets the sense that Rieux speaks merely out of politeness, for there is nothing in this sentence at all that could evoke anything more than a momentary glance of mild acknowledgment. There is nothing eye-catching or idiosyncratic about its subject, the language is bland and prosaic, and the structure is plodding and artless. Indeed, it very much strikes as a sentence that exists simply for the author to advance to the next one, then the next, so that they can gain a greater understanding themselves of where the story will take this ‘elegant woman’— once the rough first manuscript is completed, then they will return to this lacking opening sentence and fashion it into something better.

At least, that is how the process should continue. But as The Plague progresses, Grand is never able to move on from that opening line. Instead of allowing the narrative to naturally unfurl, he is intent on making sure that every aspect of this sentence is absolutely perfect, before he can even think about what comes next— as he himself claims, he is determined to ‘describe precisely the picture’ that he has in his imagination and to capture the ‘same movement as that trotting horse’ in its rhythm. It seems that it has not even occurred to him that the rest of the novel can be written before this primary piece of prose has been made flawless. 

Thus, as the plague steadily curls its festering tendrils around Oran, Grand becomes more and more fixated on this first line. Twenty pages later, we find he has changed the adjective ‘elegant’ to ‘slender’, for he has decided it is more ‘concrete’. Then, ‘On a fine morning in the month of May’ has become ‘On a fine May morning’. After that, he obsesses about whether or not ‘magnificent’ is the correct first descriptor for the horse; he considers ‘Plump’ and ‘Lustrous’, then settles for ‘black’, until Rieux reminds him that a horse cannot be ‘black’ and ‘sorrel’ at the same time. Eventually, it is Tarrou who supplies him with ‘resplendent’.

Contrasted against the backdrop of the mounting plague, this nitpicking over niggling semantics may seem entirely superfluous. When there is so much illness and death, why on earth should anyone care about whether a fictional woman is ‘slender’ or ‘elegant’, or if there really are or are not flowers along the Bois de Boulogne? A real woman next door is dying and needs comfort, after all. However, a bizarre moment happens at the beginning of the novel’s end, that seems to directly correlate (if by mere coincidence) Grand’s plight with that of the town as a whole.

By the time that Grand falls ill, we as the reader have grown so accustomed to the onslaught of death in Camus’ novel that we immediately resign ourselves to the demise of another beloved character. Like Rieux, we steel our weary hearts to the inevitable decline of his appearance, the teary goodbyes to his hopes and ambitions, the last, rattling breaths before his lungs fail and his heart is claimed by the plague. In what feel like his last moments, with his ‘skin greenish and his eyes dull’, he asks Rieux to read the manuscript that he has worked tirelessly on throughout this entire ordeal. The doctor opens it, and it is as we have feared— it is fifty pages all containing merely ‘the same sentence, copied out over and over, reworked to make it richer or poorer’. Aside from a brief other scrawling on the final page, it seems that Grand never managed to progress on from that first sentence— the woman, elegant, slender or otherwise, was never able to trot on from the Bois de Boulogne into the rest of her life.

And so Grand instructs Rieux to burn the manuscript, said with ‘such suffering in his voice’ that the doctor has no choice but to accept. That, perhaps, should have been the last burst of passion in the existence of the civil servant, the final rising of the flames before they cool to ash. However, the next day, Grand shows signs of recovery, and by that evening he ‘could be considered saved’.

This is notable for a number of reasons, primarily because it is the first time in the novel that anybody has managed to fight off the encroachment of the illness, and secondly because there were no unique factors to Grand’s succumbing that could suggest why his fate differed to so many others. Indeed, Rieux ‘could not understand this resurrection’. The scientific reasoning for this is left unexplained, but in the context of the thematic trains of thought that Camus is exploring within his novel, I believe that I can give a reason as to why Grand recovered so soon after the destruction of his hapless, futile project.

It is important to note the words that Grand was so focused on editing in his first line. ‘Elegant’, ‘Magnificent’, ‘Plump’, ‘Slender’… these are all adjectives, and so are used merely to describe the subject of the sentence, not to introduce anything truly of substance to the narrative. They are immaterial words, grounded in semantic connotations that we have arbitrarily invented for our language, and yet despite them we learn nothing real about Grand’s woman. She may be slender, but is it because she exercises each morning in the flowered streets of the Bois de Boulogne, or because she foregoes second helpings in favour of her figure, or because she has a natural disposition that is the envy of her siblings? Her horse may be ‘lustrous’ and ‘plump’, but is this because of the excellent care that the woman takes of it, or was it the creature’s God-given beauty that made her choose it in the first place? And come to think of it, how did she come about this wonderful mare? And on top of that, what is the woman’s name?

One may say in response that this is a ridiculous assertion, for nobody could answer all this in a single first sentence (nobody, I suppose, except Virginia Woolf). But to that I say, that is precisely the point. All of this information would naturally make itself known after the first sentence, as pages follow pages, chapters follow chapters, and we become steadily acquainted with the individual life of this mysterious woman. But whilst Grand continually fixes himself in the doldrums of this semantic musical chairs, swapping one adjective out for another without ever actually fleshing out the character of his character, the woman will only ever remain an abstract entity.

This, as I wrote earlier, is exactly the kind of thinking that Camus despised in his fellow French intellectuals. He sought not to view human beings as abstract things, immaterial ideas subject to the progression of a wider, transcendental narrative (and as thus disposable to the whims and necessities of said narrative) but as tangible individuals, each of whose lives must be viewed as the most valuable things in the world. Grand is so caught up in the abstract technicalities of his writing, that he has forgotten about the human heart at its centre, without which there would be no story at all.

Camus himself, fortunately, is not subject to the same shortcomings that Grand is— and within The Plague, he demonstrates exactly why a focus on the individual is so important both to one’s own philosophy, and to the stories that one tells. It has been a good few weeks since reading this startling and awe-striking work of fiction, and I can tell you exactly which two sections have most stuck with me— the death of the judge’s child, and the death of Tarrou. The former is explained in such blood-curdling, yet also human detail, that one would be hard-pressed to find a more harrowing and affecting extract within modern literature. The latter is heightened in its tragedy by both the nearness it has to the end of the plague (Tarrou is one of the final victims) and the affection that we as the reader have for his gentle and insightful character.

And both are positioned meticulously in the novel to combat the kind of abstract thinking that Grand falls prey to. The gruesome and purely immoral death of the child occurs after the preacher Paneloux attempts to portray the pestilence as a divinely ordained (and therefore righteous and ultimately just) suffering; after seeing the most tragic of deaths imaginable, that of an innocent child, even he can no longer rationalise the village’s plight as merely the good word of God. Tarrou’s death, meanwhile, happens just as the reader feels that the plague is lifting and they have room to breathe, cutting down perhaps the most likeable character as a reminder that the deaths of every person in Oran, mentioned or unmentioned, are no less tragic now that the curse is ending.

Camus never once allows the reader to be anywhere but blisteringly close to the horrors of his plague, and it is this unrelenting humanity that makes the book at once so unbearable, and yet utterly unforgettable.

Perhaps, then, this is why Rieux is uniquely able to sidestep the temptation to find some higher, abstract excuse to distance himself from the suffering of his fellow townspeople too. At the very beginning of the novel, before even the first rat has died, he sends his ill wife out of Oran to receive treatment elsewhere. When the town is locked down in quarantine, he is unable to ascertain her condition (one that is surely dwindling) and yet her stark memory is what allows him to remember that every victim is a spouse, a sibling, and a parent. While his wife is struggling with her own illness, it would be impossible for him to forego the complete care of even a single patient— to do so would be to turn his back on his wife as well.

When he finally receives a telegram of her death, then, a mere day after the passing of Tarrou, Rieux finds it impossible to will any more grief up from his tired bones. It is, after all, a ‘continuation of the same pain’.

By the novel’s end, we are left with the question as to what exactly is the plague that Tarrou spoke of, that lies not in fleas, but in the minds of human beings. It is one that existed long before this particular illness, and is also, as the novels’ final lines tell us, always at risk of rising in society once more. But when considering Grand’s plight, and how it relates to Camus’ belief as a whole, it seems that we may have an answer— the true plague is the creeping tendency to make the human individual an abstract idea, and to distance ourselves from the suffering of others with grandiose notions of history, God and love, rather than to stare it in the face and fight against it with everything we have. 

 Thank you for reading,