that might interfere with doing business. “‘Take prompt action if you like,'” says
the prefect, “‘but don’t attract attention'” (P, 44). Nor is it any wonder that into this world of the everyday, plague entered with such devastating force: destroying routine, undermining habit, separating people, and rendering vain their normal hopes and expectations.
All this had, of course, its educational side. Being cut off from the future, the people of Oran found themselves thrown back upon their personal resources. They were forced to attend to the present with a heightened sensibility to the most minute details. No longer able to take tradition as a self-evident guide to action, they had to reconstitute their sense of the meaningful. The poignant transformation of the relation between Dr. Castel and his wife suggests these revitalizing possibilities. They were aging, time was now so palpably finite that they had better not let it any longer slip away through the interstices of their daily life. A new love was thus able to take hold, by which they were able to celebrate their day-to-day existence together.
At a more general level, the social order was put, as it were, to the metaphysical rack. Values had to be forged, and personal relations too, into the teeth of a much constricted sense of time.
This need for a “transvaluation of values,” to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, was lived by each and every citizen in the crucible of a very personal suffering. Thus emerged the sanitary squads—at first, simply to aid the citizens in combatting the plague. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, they began to resonate communal values, like the resistance movement itself, pointing toward the need for a social and political transformation whose outlines remain unclear. Before attending to these constructive possibilities, let us explore more fully the cultural ramifications of the life of the Oranais.
Oran is a thoroughly bourgeois town. And it is the quality of its social life that constitutes the dramatic setting for the invasion of the pestilence.
Having cut themselves off from nature and from one another, the citizens of Oran have succeeded in reducing passion and spirit to the habitualized pursuit of material success and physical satisfaction. Care and concern for others, for the quality of public life, or for the possibilities of human excellence, have simply been lost in the shuffle. There is no sense of the deeper significance, the “sacredness,” of the everyday. Rather than seeking to “exhaust the field of the possible,” habit and routine have become the order of the day; propriety its rules and regulations; diversion and leisure its sustaining satisfaction; and material success its aim and crowning achievement.
The forces of dehumanization may thus be said to have crept into the hollowed core of bourgeois society long before the arrival of plague. With its public life so pervaded by the concern with doing business, personal relations inevitably suffer. Concern for others and for the collective well-being cannot compete for attention with business or pleasure. Naive faith in material progress – guided perhaps by the unseen hand of the market—
that has so marked modern bourgeois society, leaves little place for collective efforts to shape our destiny. The human community is thus desensitized to human values and lacks direction and purpose. It is thus that plague might be said to have already crept into the life of this mythologized Third Republic, its presence so pervasive and “natural” that the people could not recognize it. In a sense, they were already the unwitting and even innocent carriers of the germ. With their resistance to the forces of dehumanization so weakened, their personal relations so desensitized, and their sense of the human collectivity so attenuated, they were well-prepared to receive in full force the invasion of this most virulent and destructive pestilence.
PRELIMINARY RESPONSES
The response of the citizens to the pestilence is itself highly instructive. Initially they withdrew even more into their private lives. It was as if they viewed the plague as an intrusion for which they had no responsibility. The threat simply came from others. They resented it, and rejected it. But it did not lead them, at least initially, to take stock of their own lives, habits, routines, or values. They saw it as an imposition from which they would protect themselves by cutting off all but the most practically necessary ties. This initial privatization led to a further disintegration of civic life—reducing Oran to the basic necessities of daily life and commerce. Ironically, this made the citizenry collectively more vulnerable to the onset and sweeping occupation of the city by the plague. Taking stock collectively and developing a communal response were impossible. There is an infernal dialectic at work here. As collective action becomes impossible and public deterioration inevitable, it becomes increasingly rational for individuals to look to their own resources for their immediate preservation. But this “rational”
response only makes each in his or her own solitude more vulnerable to the pestilence in the long run—hence, at each stage, rationally reinforcing the individualist imperative.
Meanwhile, the task of public safety fell even more upon the shoulders of a bureaucracy suited only, at best, to maintaining business as usual. Anything threatening the normal flow of business is anathema to such public officials. They do not routinely address human concerns. They have their regulations, their standardized ways of processing information and of making decisions. Pacts that do not fit the prescribed molds cannot be processed. If they cannot be processed, for the bureaucracy they do not exist. So it is at first with the plague. They deny the evidence.
While the administrators, and Dr. Richard in particular, well express the officialdom of mercantile society, Judge Othon embodies both its self-righteous posture and Camus’s sense of its hidden humane potential. Echoing themes that recur throughout his work, Camus invites us to consider what it
means to be a judge. Is not a judge one who claims the right to pass judgment upon others? Is it by chance that society places its judges on perches high above the rest of us? Do not those who comfortably occupy that role tend to assume they are better than those upon whom they so freely pass judgment?
Judge Othon seems literally to clothe himself in respectability, to be above reproach, to be bourgeois respectability and propriety incarnate. Feelings of tenderness and affection, tolerance of personal idiosyncrasies, enjoyment of the spontaneity of children, all seem alien to him. The executor of eternal values, he speaks only of them, not of us, as though he were of another race. No wonder Tarrou calls Othon “‘Enemy Number One'” (P, 134) and later wonders, “How can you help a judge?” (P, 219).
Implicated, however, in his wife’s quarantine after she cared for her mother, Othon is no longer above suspicion. Even a clerk is now free to challenge a judge. Turning the tables, the clerk suggests that Othon is infected and should be excluded from the community of humans. That even a judge cannot avoid infection reveals our natural vulnerability. The pretentious cloak of bourgeois respectability is stripped off, laying bare its eternal values as but an ideological cover for privilege and a rejection of the commonality of our condition. With the death of his son, this fact is brought crashing down upon Othon.
Commenting upon the significance that Nietzsche saw in the death of God, Camus will later write in The Rebel that with this insight “the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, ‘the most painful, the most heart-breaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?'” (R, 70). How continuous this is with the narrator’s description of the Oranais, “who drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories.” Othon is forced to live like all the others who are under suspicion, in the decontamination camps. When he is released, the judge rises to unexpected heights, returning voluntarily to the camp to work with and to serve those whom he now considers his equals. He now makes common cause with his fellows. The transformation of Othon may be taken as pointing the way toward our “relative salvation,” a path Camus will develop elsewhere. As the narrator observes, and as Othon’s life after infection corroborates, the Oranais behaved “like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress” (P, 66). With this interweaving of dramatic scenario and philosophical vision we reach the metaphysical significance of this chronicle: Solidarity is born out of metaphysical solitude.
THE ACHE OF SEPARATION
The significance of finding ourselves in a post Christian world is fell in the ache of separation that dramatizes the experience of exile. Here again, Rambert carries the burden of the metaphysical theme, thus facilitating the transition from Camus’s personal experience to its theoretical expression. Echoing existentialist philosophy—as expressed, for example, in Martin Heidegger’s notion of thrownness—Rambert “explained that his presence in Oran was purely accidental, he had no connection with the town” (P, 78). But is this not the condition of all of us on spaceship earth, in a seemingly infinite universe, subject to the impartial laws of nature in which human beings are but random products of natural selection?