In any case, my concern was not with arguments. It was with . . . that foul procedure whereby dirty mouths stinking of plague told a fettered man that he was going to die, and scientifically arranged all things so that he should die, after nights and nights of mental torture while he waited to be murdered in cold blood. My concern was with that hole in a man’s chest. And I told myself that. . . nothing in the world would induce me to accept any argument that justified such butcheries. …
I’m still of the same mind. … As time went on I merely learned that even those who were better than the rest could not keep themselves nowadays from killing or letting others kill, because such is the logic by which they live; and that we can’t stir a finger in this world without the risk of bringing death to somebody (P, 226—8, my italics).
This, however, simply formulates the rebel’s essential “no.” But what can be done about it? “‘It comes to this,’ Tarrou said . . . ‘what interests me is learning how to become a saint. . . . Can one be a saint without God?— that’s . . . the only problem I’m up against today.'” The encounter with the plague makes clear the difficulty of this endeavour. To become engage is almost certainly to be guilty of increasing someone’s suffering; but to remain apart, free from involvement, pure, is to be equally guilty of standing idly by while others suffer and die. Tarrou suggests sanitary squads be formed to combat the plague.
1 only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague-stricken, and that’s the only way in which we can hope for some peace or, failing that, a decent death. . . . Only this can bring relief to men, and if not save them, at least do them the least harm possible and even, sometimes, a little good. So that is why I resolved to have no truck with anything which, directly or indirectly, for good reason or tor bad, brings death to anyone or justifies others’ putting him to death (P, 228—9).
With his response to the plague, an essential theme of the novel finds expression: the metaphysical need for collective security.
What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest—health, integrity, purity (if you like)—is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will-power, a never-ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses (P, 229).
If a collective commitment is essential to combat plague, however, the desire to remain pure and not infect anyone makes such a commitment prac-tically impossible. Tarrou feels this deeply. He must always remain something of an enigma, an outsider to the human community, an exile.
Each of us has the plague within him. . . . We must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten infection on him. . . . That is why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of their systems, feel such a desperate weariness . . . from which nothing remains to set us free except death.
Pending that release, I know I have no place in the world of today; once I’d definitely refused to kill, I doomed myself to an exile that can never end. … I leave it to others to make history. I know, too, that I’m not qualified to pass judgment on those others. There’s something lacking in my mental make-up, and its lack prevents me from being a rational murderer. . . . All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences (P, 229).
But that is not enough; to purity must be added a program of not only assisting the victims, but freeing them from their status as victims.
The ground for such a program—only hinted at by the sanitary squads —is suggested by the friendship between Rieux and Tarrou, born of the common struggle with the plague, and sealed by their swim in the ocean. As Tarrou insisted, “It’s too damn silly living in and for the plague. Of course, a man should fight for the victims, but if he ceases caring for anything outside that, what’s the use of his fighting?” (P, 231).
As “they swam side by side, with the same zest, in the same rhythm, isolated from the world, at last free of the town and the plague . . . neither said a word, but they were conscious of being perfectly at one” (P, 233).
Fascinated by the simple details of ordinary life, to which his journal bears eloquent witness, Tarrou nevertheless remains torn between his capacity to celebrate the ordinary and his demand for purity. Riddled with contradictions, he can sense the possibility of a “third category: that of the true healers” but cannot instantiate such a strategy in his life. Programmatically he is at a dead end. He is at one with Paneloux in suggesting that evil is just a privation of good, resulting from inattention, or a failure of lucidity, when he asserts “that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clean-cut language” (P, 230). That implies that the world is acceptable as it is, and thus in no need of a practical and constructive program for collective amelioration. But this is a position he cannot accept. Thus Tarrou incarnates demands for sanctity with an inability to “correct creation” in the relative, which is the perfect complement from a post-Christian perspective of Paneloux’s leap of faith. Striving to be a saint without God, free of complicity in the suffering and death of innocence, he too chooses a path of purity which is not of this world. His death, along with that of Paneloux, dramatically comments upon Camus’s sense of the concrete
future of such transcendent aspirations.
His struggle to remain innocent in a society that exacts complicity in murder suggests, however, a new dimension of revolt that anticipates the struggles of Kaliayev and les justes. What Tarrou faces, and revolt must come to terms with, is the problem of social action. In order to be effective, such action must move out into an external world where the results arc no longer controllable. What is more, the very structure of the social situation will involve one in opposition to, and perhaps lead to the destruction of, other human beings. In short, whatever the limitations of Tarrou’s response, Camus has for the first time in his work directly faced the challenge posed by an evil that is internal to the human world.5
AN ADVOCATE FOR PLAGUE
Cottard is the only one of Camus’s characters who welcomes the plague and anguishes at the prospect of its coming to an end. Yet there is sympathy in Camus’s portrayal of him, for he too suffers the yoke of separation and yearns to belong.
Wanted by the authorities, who are closing in on him at the onset of the plague, Cottard suffers from his isolation from the community and fears incarceration above all. In desperation he attempts suicide, only to be rescued by Grand, out of simple compassion. “I can’t say I really know him, but one’s got to help a neighbor, hasn’t one?” (P, 19).
As plague occupies Oran, the authorities’ attention is diverted, freeing Cottard from the daily pressures of being under suspicion. He relaxes, becomes humorous and friendly, and begins to feel at home with others. “Say what you like, Tarrou, but. . . the one way of making people hang together is to give ’em a spell of plague” (P, 175).
None of this impedes his ability to traffic in the plague’s underground, making money through the black market and off the suffering of others. But without maliciousness. He is merely doing what he knows best. He lives well, but is not without concern for the well-being of others. Perhaps he simply lacks the imagination to conceive of the consequences of his actions. Here he would not differ greatly from most of what could now be called his fellow citizens. The same is true for the authorities—a feeling that well represents Camus’s sense that most collaborators in wartime France were primarily guilty, not so much of evil as of a failure of imagination. It may even be said more generally of Camus—as we have noted with Rieux and Tarrou (hat he does not see as much evil in mankind as narrowness of vision, self-preoccupation, venality, self-interest, and above all an inability to appreciate the meaning and consequences of one’s actions.6
Cottard thrives along with the plague. Of course, that is his condemna-tion: to feel at home in a situation that is wreaking havoc on the community. He is thus in league, albeit not viciously, with the forces of inhumanity. He even profits from their occupation of Oran. It is not surprising, therefore, that a growing sense of anxiety and ultimately panic grips him as the plague recedes. As the state of siege is lifted, the authorities will be free to turn their attention to hunting criminals. This “man who hated loneliness” is once again overwhelmed by the fear of being cut off from the community, not realizing that his fate is an inevitable result of a lifestyle that exists at the expense of others. Nor does he seem able to do otherwise. Camus does not explore how Cottard became the way he is. His actions during the plague seem natural; criminality seems to be his nature, redemption beyond his ken. The significance of this portrayal of criminality is not completely clear.