Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (42 page)

All too often Camus is simply dismissed as Sartre's lesser sibling, the "other" existentialist, and what this gets most wrong is the generosity and warmth that we find in Camus's best work, a kind of creatural seriousness about the goodness of being alive, of inhabiting a body, of living on the earth. (You'll search in vain for any of this in Sartre.) Hence, Defoe's quarantine is reconceived by Camus as separation, as if plague were a sys-temwide assault on love: "Thus, for example, a feeling normally as individual as the ache of separation from those one loves suddenly became a feeling in which all shared alike and—together with fear—the greatest affliction of the long period of exile that lay ahead" (67).

In this book, as in
The Stranger,
Camus emerges as a writer who richly understands the sensuous, material world, who gives flesh its due. Hence, the character of Rambert, the journalist separated from his lover, is especially poignant, for he has just come to the discovery that he is meant for love, that love is his actual vocation: "The truth is I wasn't brought into the world to write newspaper articles. . . . But it's quite likely I was brought into the world to live with a woman" (85). I can imagine very few novelists capable of this remark. Plague brutally crushes this newfound calling, as we watch Rambert initially seek ways of fleeing the diseased city before finally realizing that his personal happiness must be sacrificed ("it may be shameful to be happy by oneself" [209]), that he must remain with the dying and play what role he can. The pathos of the novel stems from Camus's understanding of the
gravity
of personal happiness—the preciousness of bodies, of human tenderness, of the frail world of love that we construct—and it is, of course, this basic orientation that illuminates the horror of plague. Both Sophocles and Defoe seem, by contrast, untouched by the human tug that animates Camus's novel. Suspicious of postures and posing, the French writer respects tenderness and intimacy, and his people appear in their humbleness, fragility, and low-to-the-ground courage.

The Plague
is a sober narrative, and its commitment to human life is all the more profound because the tonality is matter-of-fact and unsen-sationalist. The body counts in this book: the priest Paneloux, who des-

perately seeks to bring this reign of death into some kind of alignment with God's will by claiming it to be God's punishment meted out to a secular world, suffers enormously in his struggles, suffers physically, dies of the plague. Camus makes us understand the immense "stretching" and dislocation meted out to this decent man of the cloth who is wrecked by the rift between conviction and experience. The little man of the people, Grand, with his ridiculous literary project and his utterly pedestrian willingness to work for the public good, is proposed as the book's hero, if hero there must be: "the narrator commends to his readers, with, to his thinking, perfect justice, this insignificant and obscure hero who had to his credit only a little goodness of heart and a seemingly absurd ideal. This will render to the truth its due, to the addition of two and two its sum of four, and to heroism the secondary place that rightly falls to it, just after, never before, the noble claim of happiness" (137-138). Note Camus's words:
happiness
—not, say, "wisdom" or "truth" or "soul"—is our noblest claim.

The major protagonist, Doctor Rieux, who cannot accept the religious view of plague as punishment (" 'I've seen too much of hospitals to relish the idea of collective punishment' " [125]), says that the priest would change his views had he ever seen enough dying people. Rieux is the book's pragmatic humanist, the one who does not have time for metaphysics: " 'I have no idea what is awaiting me, or what will happen when all this ends. For the moment I know this; there are sick people and they need curing. Later on, perhaps, they'll think things over; and so shall I" (127). Pure research also must await its turn; late in the book, he says, "a man can't cure and know at the same time. So let's cure as quickly as we can. That's the more urgent job" (210). Once again, Camus's priorities show: metaphysical (or scientific) inquiry must take a backseat to aiding the living. Camus's doctor works feverishly, to the point of sickness, in his uphill battle to save Oran's sick, even when no medical solutions are at hand.

Tarrou, the text's most enigmatic and poetic figure, the one who intuits more deeply than the others what this incursion of death is really about, weakens and lessens before our eyes, dying also at book's close

even though plague is finally receding. His is perhaps the most memorable discourse of the novel, as he recounts his past to Rieux and articulates Camus's largest ethical vision: the simple but massive requirement not to be a murderer. In this line of reasoning, all living creatures bear the plague within them, are the cause of others' deaths, and this collusion is insidious, goes by the name of civilization, hence mandating an ethic of resistance: " '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'" (253-254).

The allegorical dimensions of Camus's novel are adumbrated in these lines, and some may feel that actual plague is thereby diminished, loses its true virulence by being equated with generalized murder. But one can also see it the other way, as Camus's intuition that collective disease and dying bring an unbearable focus and precision to the human project by illuminating the generic duty of the living to be on the side of life. Such an injunction may seem Olympian and highbrow, but how many of us have truly pondered the reach of such a command: to be on life's side? Who rises every day to this? Plague forces just these issues.

But the match can be horribly unequal, and Camus does not flinch when it comes to bearing witness. To be on life's side means to hallow human flesh, flesh that is essentially tortured by the onslaught of plague. The novel's moment of greatest pathos revolves around the death of the child, a close-up sequence of plague's might and the futility of human defenses, this time focused in the true slaughter of the innocent. The dying child, described with unblinking physiological realism, characterized symbolically in its "grotesque parody of crucifixion" (215), emits a scream that, for the purposes of this study, continues the dirge of human pain that we have seen elsewhere: Blake, Munch, Baldwin, Bergman:

In the small face, rigid as a mask of grayish clay, slowly the lips parted and from them rose a long, incessant scream, hardly varying with his respiration, and filling the ward with a fierce, indignant protest, so little childish that it seemed like a collective voice issuing

from all the sufferers there. Rieux clenched his jaws, Tarrou looked away. Rambert went and stood beside Castel, who closed the book lying on his knees. Paneloux gazed down at the small mouth, fouled with the sores of the plague and pouring out the angry death-cry that has sounded through the ages of mankind. He sank on his knees, and all present found it natural to hear him say in a voice hoarse but clearly audible across that nameless, never ending wail:

"My God, spare this child!"

But the wail continued without cease and the other sufferers began to grow restless. The patients at the far end of the ward, whose little broken cries had gone on without a break, now quickened their tempo so that they flowed together in one unbroken cry, while the others' groans grew louder. A gust of sobs swept through the room, drowning Paneloux's prayer, and Rieux, who was still tightly gripping the rail of the bed, shut his eyes, dazed with exhaustion and disgust. (217)

This long citation is not easy going, yet I feel that it reveals what is deepest in Camus. The term
humanist
is frequently applied to him, and I have emphasized the warmth of his vision, but there is also a raw courage that surfaces in his work, a refusal to avert one's eyes or to escape into grand phrases. This courage is anything but steely; on the contrary, it strikes me as arduous, hard to sustain, at the very edge of composure. The author forces us to look head-on at horror because his ethics acquire their meaning in no other way: happiness and life are precious because pain and torture are horrible. This "death-cry that has sounded through the ages of mankind" is little less than an indictment against God, a recognition that all of us live in the penal colony, and that the death of a child is at once natural and intolerable.

Camus's writing in this novel seems largely straightforward and artless, but in this passage, he achieves an unusual eloquence. The power—and the sacrilege—of this event are imaged in almost natural terms as a cry that becomes a plaint that becomes a wave that becomes

almost tidal in its sweep and reach. Once again we see how utterly the scream goes through the house. The priest's prayer is blotted out by the force of this child's cry, and the doctor, exhausted and even disgusted, can only struggle for balance and bear witness.
Disgust
in the face of such obscene suffering is, I think, Camus's humanist trademark, his principled rejection of
any rationale
that could justify plague. The great challenge for mankind, stated early on in the story, is entirely secular: how to be a saint in a world without God.

If Defoe is everywhere present in this story of plague, most evident in the novel's sobriety, so too are Poe and Artaud behind the scenes here, as Camus shows us what a necropolis looks like, how anarchy is always kept barely at bay, how much horror subtends this text's even manner. Early on, as if to salute Defoe, we hear of a raving man, marked by the disease, racing outside to leap on the first woman he sees, embracing her, screaming to her that he is the plague. Some rioting occurs, and people are executed, but what force can execution have during plague?

The most Poe-like touch comes as the narrator recounts a performance of Gluck's
Orphee
in the plague-stricken city, at which Eurydice's flight from her lover, her return to the realm of death, catalyzed a remarkable exodus beginning with the exit of the singer himself, as he collapsed in the midst of the pastoral decor, and closing with the increasingly hysterical evacuation of all parties:

For at the same moment the orchestra stopped playing, the audience rose and began to leave the auditorium, slowly and silently at first, like worshippers leaving church when the service ends, or a death-chamber after a farewell visit to the dead, women lifting their skirts and moving with bowed heads, men steering the ladies by the elbow to prevent their brushing against the tip-up seats at the ends of the rows. But gradually their movements quickened, whispers rose to exclamations, and finally the crowd stampeded toward the exits, wedged together in the bottlenecks, and pouring out into the street in a confused mass, with shrill cries of dismay. (201)

In a novel marked by dignity and composure, this baroque scene of collective panic and hysteria stands out for its virulence, and also for its glaring collusion with myth and fable, as if the ancient Orphic story of the battle among love and death and art had jumped the border from representation into reality, had—like the plague—shown itself to be un-containable. To perform the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in a plague-struck city is perhaps to defy the gods. It is one thing to dine at a fine restaurant before taking in an evening at the opera or theater, to witness onstage the grand gestures of fable and history, and then to take a cab home and go to sleep. But what happens when the carnage and horrors onstage—the sort of fare to which we assign the label of
art
—are of a piece with the world outside the theater?

One remembers Susan Sontag's decision to stage
Waiting for Godot
in Sarajevo, or, for that matter, still earlier stagings of
Godot
back in the 1940s at the prison in San Quentin, all of them moments when the most extreme performances of art come into striking (and sometimes dreadful) synchrony with the places where they are shown, with the people to whom they are shown. We have been told frequently that artistic and media images of violence and pornography can have real social impact, can alter behavior.
Orphee
pushes the Oran audience over the edge; how bearable would the books discussed in this chapter be to us if we were experiencing catastrophe or mass destruction? We are all familiar with the idle question, what book would you want if you were a castaway on a desert island? But what about its opposite number, what would you read if plague or nuclear war struck?

But what we most remember
The Plague
for is the quiet but vulnerable humanism of its vision. Plague is, in every sense,
reductive.
Human happiness—a richer thing by far than heroism—is scuttled; memory is cashiered, made useless, by the new regime of quarantine and separation; love and its life-sustaining egoism are suffocated in the narrow war against lethal disease. The city of plague is a lessening in all ways, a shrinkage of human possibility that goes beyond the actual death tolls.

Camus's reverence for human life shines through this story of systemic butchery, helping us to a sense of how disease dirties us, despoils us, robs us not only of health but of the small, natural miracles that imbue daily life with richness.
"Les hommes meurent et ne sont pas heureux'
"
("Men die and are not happy") is the theme song of Camus's absurdist play
Caligula,
but in this book about physical suffering, plague replaces the despotic emperor, and we measure, as a kind of nostalgic backdrop, the immense capacity for happiness and pleasure that life offers the living.

Hence, the late scene, when plague is withdrawing, of Rieux and Tarrou swimming together, breathes a kind of wistful but pagan cosmic order into this text: two men floating in the sea—sustained both by their own efforts and by the tug of the elements, in harmony and solidarity (not only with themselves, but with the planet), swimming soundlessly at the same pace—offer us a radiant image of Camus's belief system. It is a belief system that is sorely tried by plague. Some few may be changed for the better, and Rambert, the journalist for whom love was a vocation, for whom this diseased city was an absurd accident in time and space, actually discovered solidarity: " 'But now that I've seen what I have seen, I know that I belong here whether I want it or not' " (209). Yet, can personal happiness "return," we wonder, as Rambert desperately embraces his lover, who, at story's end, at plague's end, at last has entered Oran? The journalist himself is far from sure, for he senses that he has been permanently altered, that the citizens of this city are deluded in their stubborn belief "that plague can come and go without changing anything in men's hearts" (295).