Countering Martha’s despair, her mother offers a muted expression of a lost hope. “It only proves that in a world where everything can be denied, there are undeniable forces; and on this earth where nothing’s sure we have our certainties. And a mother’s love for her son is now my certainty” (CTOP, 120, my italics).
Martha’s despair suggests the depths to which humans can be reduced by an unjust fate—an emptiness of which nihilism is but a pale theoretical reflection, and from which no theory can provide salvation—while the mother’s belated affirmation suggests the possibility of an existential alternative to nihilism. Yet it falls to Maria, the play’s embodiment of outraged innocence, to intimate the direction of a possibly more constructive response to our absurd condition. Her revolt emerges as a simple and direct expression of the agony of her despair: “Oh, God, I cannot live in this desert! . . . Have pity on those who love each other and are parted” (CTOP, 133). The Old Manservant, misinterpreting her plea to God as a call to him, responds in the negative. Merely one more misunderstanding, perhaps, but the ambiguous suggestion is clear. In our present dead end, wherein reconciliation has failed miserably, the recourse to God is a nonstarter. The necessity for a more openly collective manner of addressing the problem of salvation is evident.
Taking Stock
In the effort to elaborate a constructive frame within which life might have meaning without transcendent justification, the works so far considered have proved singularly unsatisfactory.
Two Sides of the Coin had suggested the importance of the realm of the interpersonal, which had remained more or less muted in Nuptials, The Stranger, and The Myth of Sisyphus, exacting its claim in ritualistic fashion in The Stranger, and being forced to reassert itself against its better judgment in “Caligula.”
With “The Misunderstanding” the demands of the interpersonal now emerge tragically onto center stage. As I have sought to show, the tragedy results from the insistence of individuals that they work out their destiny in terms of their own projects, deaf to the demands of that interpersonal situation that their projects presuppose and from which alone, it is implied, life can obtain whatever fulfillment may be possible. This tragedy of situation demands the recognition of the commonality of our condition. Perceptions need to be explicitly shared if together we are to construct a viable alternative to our lost paradise, in a universe without absolute answers in which, at best, our misapprehended deity only answers, “No.” The inadequacy of solely individual strategies is thus clearly suggested by “The Misunderstanding.” It will be for The Plague to begin to explore the possibilities of a more collective response.
THE BREAD OF EXILE
“With the experience of the absurd, suffering is individual. Beginning with the movement of revolt, it becomes conscious of being collective. . . . The first advance, therefore, of a mind seized by the strangeness of things is to recognize that it shares this strangeness with all men, and that human reality . . . suffers from this distance from itself and from the world. The pain
[mal] which was experienced by a single man becomes a collective plague” (L’HR, 36; R, 22). Could Camus have been more explicit about his intention? The transition from The Stranger to The Plague turns upon the emerging perception “that all . . . were, so to speak, in the same boat” (P, 61). The imprisonment of Meursault has become the shared experience of the citizens of Oran, who are often referred to as “prisoners of the plague.” In fact, at an early stage in the development of the manuscript, Camus had considered calling it “The Prisoners.”
A concern with imprisonment runs through his writings, and with good reason. With The Plague, the metaphor of prison helps to transcribe the traumatic experience that was the German occupation of France during World War II. At a deeper level, however, the continuity with the stage of the ab-surd is maintained by the recognition that in prison our life is finite, time and space are circumscribed, and our liberty of action is constrained by forces beyond our control. Thus the metaphor of prison can be used to depict those aspects of finitude—especially when linked to a death sentence whose date is uncertain—from which the absurd seeks to draw its lesson.2 This image of imprisonment helps to dramatize the tragic vision that pervades Camus’s work. It articulates a metaphysic within which his practical and personal concerns take shape.
Before considering that metaphysic as it finds expression in The Plague, thus locating this novel within the theoretical development of Camus’s work, it is important to note four complementary perspectives from which the novel can be viewed: the personal, the historical, the cultural, and the metaphysical. By considering these dramatically interwoven thematic strands, the sensuously textured tapestry that gives experiential richness to the sparse contours of the chronicle of the plague can be more adequately appreciated.
At its most obvious, ”’The Plague . . . has as its evident content the struggle of the European resistance against Nazism” (TRN, 1965; LCE, 339). It also had its quite personal accent, for Camus was quite literally trapped in occupied France. Rambert essentially transcribes the qualitative feel of this experience, in which Camus found himself cut off from his wife, his family, and his native Algeria when the Allies invaded North Africa. Camus’s feelings during his recuperation in the mountains of central France from an attack of tuberculosis must certainly have been echoed by Rambert when the latter exclaimed that “his presence in Oran was purely accidental, he had no connection with the town and no reasons for staying in it; that being so, he surely was entitled to leave” (P, 77). As Rambert so poignantly exclaimed, “I don’t belong here!” If most people in occupied France felt deprived of their right to live in accordance with their normal habits and expectations,
those . . . like Rambert . . . had to endure an aggravated deprivation, since, being travellers caught by the plague and forced to stay where they were, they were cut off” both from the person with whom they wanted to be and from their homes as well. In the general exile they were the most exiled; since while time gave rise for them, as for us all, to the suffering appropriate to it, there was also for them the space factor; they were obsessed by it and at every moment knocked their heads against the walls which separated their infected refuge from their lost homes (P, 67; TRN, 1236).
Still more, there is “the case of parted lovers,” which includes Rieux and, in another sense, Grand. There was “the trouble they experienced in summoning up any clear picture of what the absent one was doing,” and of reproaching themselves for having paid too little attention to the “way in which that person used to spend his or her days” (P, 68). “Thus, each of us had to be content,” writes the narrator, “to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky. This sense of being abandoned, which might in time have given characters a finer temper, began … by sapping them to the point of futility” (P, 68). The year or so immediately following the Allied landing in North Africa, it might be noted, was certainly not a particularly happy or productive one for Camus.
Camus had resented the war from the outset. It did not make sense to him that such extraneous events, with no direct or perceptible relation to his life and his personal and philosophical concerns, could so wrench him out of his orbit. World historical events, to borrow Hegel’s fine phrase, might be the focus of his theoretical and dramatic activities—even to the extent of his preparing to devote the second stage of his “work” to the theme of revolt— but such events were not really the substance of his personal life. Even his journalistic and political involvements bore witness to a sensibility more in tunc with the demands of immediate experience than with those of historical analysis. What was this drole de guerre and by what right did it rob his life of its personal trajectory?
The initial dialogue between Rambert and Rieux concerning Rambert’s desire to get out of Oran might have taken place within the soul of Camus. Rambert comes to this discussion with “the sulky, stubborn look of a young man who feels himself deeply injured.” Rieux “wished nothing better than that Rambert should be allowed to return to his wife and that all who loved one another and were parted should come together again.” He recognized that Rambert didn’t belong here, but said, “That’s not a sufficient reason. Oh, I know it’s an absurd situation, but we’re all involved in it, and we’ve got to accept it as it is.”
Rambert is bitter. “‘You’re using the language of reason, not of the heart; you live in a world of abstractions.'” To which Rieux responds that he “was using the language of the facts as everybody could see them—which wasn’t necessarily the same thing.” Rambert “was right in refusing to be balked of happiness. But was he right in reproaching him, Rieux, with living in a world of abstractions? . . . Yes, an element of abstraction, of a divorce from reality, entered into such calamities. Still, when abstraction sets to killing you, you’ve got to get busy with it” (P, 78—81). The concern with happiness has clashed with the hard facts of life as well as with the role of abstract forces in structuring that “force of evidence” with which one must come to terms. We thus see dramatically transcribed a deeply personal conversion from the individualism of the Absurd to the emerging theoretical concern with solidarity that is so central to the stage of Revolt.