Only slowly did Camus come to terms with his own situation, resume his writing, and make contact with resistance forces, most particularly the Combat network. Ultimately he became the chief editor of the underground network’s newspaper. Combat. This position, when made public upon the liberation of Paris, contributed significantly to his becoming a major public figure in postwar France. In much of this, the resemblance to Rambert is close—though far more as a transcription of feeling than of action.
Camus did, however, deepen his appreciation of the efforts of ordinary people to make sense of their life, faced with a daily routine that leaves little place for imagination and hope. No doubt his own origins among the poorest of French North Africans left him with a profound respect for the quiet dignity of those whose condition does not let them aspire beyond the simple pleasures eked out from, and the silent sufferings endured within, the daily struggle for subsistence. In such circumstances, simply doing one’s job may embody nobility. Certainly the young Camus knew such poverty, as is borne witness to by much of his early work, especially Two Sides of the Coin and A Happy Death. The central theme of the latter, for example, concerns the need to have money in order to free oneself from the habitualized routine of a subsistence job, buy the time to be happy, and thus escape from the inevitability of a natural death to the passionate lucidity of a conscious one.
“‘Oh, doctor,'” exclaimed Joseph Grand, that nondescript clerk in the municipal office who “had suffered for a long time from a constriction of the aorta” (P, 17), “‘how I’d like to learn to express myself!'” (P, 43). If only he could “find his words” he would be able to tell his lost love, Jeanne, what he feels. It would be “hat’s off,” and he could achieve that minimal acknowledgment that would reconcile him to his life. Throughout the turmoil of the plague, Grand sticks to his work in the municipal office, while working with the sanitation teams in off-hours, and in the evenings continues his project of writing the perfect novel.
” ‘There lies certainty,'” observes Rieux, ” ‘there, in the daily round. . . . The thing was to do your job as it should be done'” (P, 38). Yet the routine of such a life tends to wear one down. ”
‘Oh, doctor,'” Grand exclaims somewhat later, “‘I know I look a quiet sort, just like anybody else. But it’s always been a terrible effort only to be—just normal'” (P, 237).
In his ability to continue at his work with care and concern for others, in the shadows of anonymity, Grand incarnates Camus’s sense of the nobility of the ordinary. “In short, he had all the attributes of insignificance” (P, 41). No doubt, it is this that Camus wishes to celebrate by having Rieux observe that “Grand was the true embodiment of the quiet courage that inspired the sanitary groups,” and, thus, “if it is a fact that people like to have examples given them, men of the type they call heroic, and if it is absolutely necessary that this narrative should include a
‘hero,’ the narrator commends to his readers . . . this insignificant and obscure hero who had to his credit only a little goodness of heart and a seemingly absurd ideal” (P, 123, 126).
It was in order to bear witness to the intrinsic nobility of the efforts of the average person that Rieux (and Camus) “resolved to compile this chronicle . . . so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done to them might
endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise” (P, 278). In this, Camus uses Rieux to express one of the more profound sources of his art: the felt obligation to give voice to those whose quiet dignity speaks loudly in action and in suffering, but who cannot find their own words with which to do it justice. From this source, Camus feels, artists can draw creative and vitalizing energy, as well as a justification of their work.
BUSINESS AS USUAL
But if, through the person of Grand, Camus wishes to pay tribute to the quiet courage displayed by his compatriots during the occupation and in The Resistance, and by most of the world’s poor and working people in their daily effort “just to be normal,” his attitude toward the behavior of his fellow Frenchmen is more complex. They certainly did not deserve what befell them, but they were not without responsibility for it. In fact, on this nuanced perception of their complicity in the pestilence-occupation hangs the deeper meaning of this tale and its place in Camus’s work. What was it about Oran or about the Third Republic that made it the appropriate host?
Why Oran? Why this “treeless, glamourless, soulless” town that seems restful but puts you to sleep? (P, 5). In 1939 Camus had called it a spiritual desert, “without soul or resources” (LCE, 111). “Compelled to live facing a glorious landscape,” he wrote then, “the people of Oran have overcome this formidable handicap by surrounding themselves with extremely ugly buildings” (LCE, 116). Their “statues are both insignificant and solid. The mind has made no contribution to them, matter a very large one” (LCE, 125), “while the streets of Oran reveal the two main pleasures of the local young people: having their shoes shined, and promenading in these same shoes along the boulevard” (LCE, 113). Little wonder that “the Oranais are devoured by the Minotaur of boredom” (LCE, 116). “‘To be nothing!’ . . . Without knowing it, everyone in this country follows this precept” (LCE, 131). With the forces of nature in possession of the spirit of the town, one is at times tempted “to defect to the enemy! … to merge oneself with these stones, to mingle with this burning, impassive universe that challenges history and its agitations” (LCE, 130).
Clearly, here is the spiritual meaning of Oran for Camus. Beyond a certain subliminal metaphysical ambivalence in which that negative temptation to merge with nature reverberates with the echoes of a more positive temptation to transcend the limits of one’s individual destiny, to which Camus had given expression in A Happy Death and in Nuptials, there is a positive critique embedded in the spiritual failure that is Oran. That critique reappropriates, at the level of community, the theme of the failure of lucidity that is Meursault’s root error in The Stranger. To this issue, and its metaphysical significance, I will turn shortly. But there is a more mundane source of “dehumanization” to which we must attend if we are to appreciate the historical, cultural, and sociopolitical resonances that reverberate throughout The Plague, and help it assume its place within the work of Camus.
“The truth is that everyone is bored,” notes the narrator, “and devotes himself to cultivating habits. Our citizens work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich. Their chief interest is in commerce, and their chief aim in life is, as they call it, ‘doing business'” (P, 4). It is not that the citizenry of this mythologized version of the Third Republic are evil or malicious; they don’t aspire so high. “What they lack is imagination. They take their place in the epoque as if at a picnic. They do not think on the scale of pestilences. And the remedies which they imagine are hardly adequate for a head cold” (TRN, 1948). “Really, all that was to be conveyed was the banality of the town’s appearance and of the life in it. But you can get through the days there without trouble, once you have formed habits. And since habits are precisely what our town encourages, all is for the best” (P, 5).
And what was the pervasive character of the experience through which they lived? Preoccupied with their practical concerns and their personal satisfactions, they took life for granted.
In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves: in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn’t made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t pass away, and from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven’t taken their precautions. Our townsfolk . . . went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences (P, 35).
“It will be said, no doubt, that these habits are not peculiar to our town; really all our contemporaries are much the same. Certainly nothing is commoner nowadays than to see people working from morn till night and then proceeding to fritter away at card-tables in cafes and in small-talk what time is left for living…. In other words [Oran is] completely modern” (P, 4). The Oranais have lost contact with passion, love, nature, and art. Habit rules the day, under cover of propriety, in the service of business. No wonder that the primary concern of the officials is to hide the reality of plague: to deny the evidence, to reject the possibility, and above all to avoid taking any ex-traordinary measures—even precautions to preserve the public’s health—