The Plague: How Camus Makes Us Wait

Part of: The Deep Reader

A man waiting to return to the woman he loves has only one record to play. Up to the point when we hear it with him in Albert Camus’s The Plague, he has played it about ten times that day. Around the music, an ambulance approaches and recedes; shots sound somewhere outside. The record ends, but the waiting continues. Camus gives an audible form to the impasse shared by his character and his novel:

how do we go on when another day brings us no closer to the event that would give the day its purpose?

The man is Rambert, a visiting journalist trapped in Oran when an epidemic closes the city. Much of the book’s second part follows his efforts to escape. We meet intermediaries, wait for introductions, keep appointments and lose contact with people who were supposed to help. Camus makes us spend some of the patience that an efficient chronicle of Rambert’s predicament would save.

This essay discusses the novel in full, including its ending.

How repetition takes over The Plague

Ordinary narrative expectations work against an experience like this. A new acquaintance should open a possibility; a second meeting should advance it. Camus keeps those small promises alive while making their fulfillment unreliable. The clandestine route out of Oran sends him on errands whose completion does not accumulate into freedom. Rambert can be busy throughout a day and end it where he began.

We might initially want the novelist to shorten the business. Rambert’s record lets us hear what those delays have done to his days. Tarrou, one of the men organizing the voluntary health teams, asks whether he likes it so much. Rambert explains that it is the only one he has. Affection for the music has ceased to account for its recurrence. The same action, performed again, now measures the poverty of available alternatives. His repeated explanation that plague consists in starting again joins the stalled escape to the music in his hotel room without requiring the narrator to explain the connection for him.

This narrowing has already reached language. With ordinary correspondence prohibited, separated lovers and families search for intimacy in ten-word telegrams. A shared life has to fit a form that leaves scarcely any room for a sender’s own idiom. Some people continue writing letters, copying their appeals until the words lose the force that first made them necessary. Camus follows the practical restriction into the sentence: when there is no answering letter, even an honest declaration becomes something its writer has already heard too often.

This verbal exhaustion threatens the intimacy Rambert hopes to recover. Rambert’s wish to leave is given sustained room, and Dr. Rieux, who treats the plague patients, acknowledges his claim to personal happiness. Repetition can erode an attachment, yet caring for someone can also sustain the will to repeat a task. Camus keeps both possibilities in view. Even after Rambert chooses to remain and help, his desired reunion belongs to the future he hopes to recover. A shared task is becoming possible without making the individual loss dispensable.

When the chronicle stops following individuals

At the opening of Part III, the narrator announces that individual destinies have been overtaken by a collective history. The novel acts on the announcement. Personal plots recede while the account follows the management of streets, burial space, labor and supplies. The city’s continued functioning depends on repeated tasks, among them the disposal of its dead.

The burial sequence gives this change a disturbing precision. Camus describes a representative funeral through the French imperfect tense: relatives would sign, the vehicle would depart, the coffin would descend. One account can now stand for many occasions. As the procedures accelerate, the mourners are carried through the same sequence as the body, with scarcely an interval in which to mourn the person they have lost. Before they have found a way to inhabit the ceremony, they are back at home.

Then the shortage of coffins changes the object we have been following. Five coffins circulate between Rieux’s hospital and the cemetery; emptied and disinfected, they return for another load. What previously accompanied one person into the ground becomes reusable equipment. The narrative advances through improvements in capacity, and the prefect congratulates the organization. The prefect’s satisfaction follows the handling of the bodies so closely that his compliment reads as an obscenity. The irony comes from the discrepancy between the work’s successful completion and everything that successful completion leaves out.

Such passages complicate the narrator’s declaration that he has scarcely altered events through the “effects of art.” His apparent modesty deserves attention as a persuasive choice. In Peter Dunwoodie’s study of language and memory in the novel, the chronicler’s self-effacement helps his moral authority appear to arise from the record itself. The funeral sequence betrays the chronicler’s shaping hand: its grammar repeats the routine, its organization accelerates it, and its irony guides our judgment. We are reading an intricately composed account of what routine can make seem tolerable.

There is a cost when this authority extends from public procedures to everyone’s interior life. The narrator can trace the circulation of coffins; to pronounce everyone incapable of love requires access to lives no administrative record could supply. He qualifies the claim: exhaustion spreads unevenly, and feeling can revive without warning. Even with these concessions, everyone is presumed to succumb to the same emotional depletion. Camus sometimes completes the collective psychology more thoroughly than the varied lives available to him warrant. When the chronicle tightens to a child’s bedside, the suffering body resists the tidiness of that account.

The time a single death requires

For the death of the magistrate Othon’s young son, Camus makes the reading slow down. A room converted from a classroom gathers the doctors and volunteers around a child who has received an experimental serum. The light grows strong enough for old equations to become visible on the blackboard. A hand tightens on the bedrail; someone puts away his cigarettes. These actions occupy the waiting that a summary would compress into the interval between treatment and result.

The observers have already seen children die. Here the narration obliges us to follow the suffering “minute after minute.” The boy stiffens and relaxes, then stiffens again; each apparent easing offers a hope the next contraction withdraws. Earlier repetition blurred one day into the next. At this bedside, each contraction renews our attention and detains us through another minute.

Rieux takes the child’s pulse although the gesture is medically unnecessary. For a moment, he feels the agitation of the boy’s blood mingling with his own, as though his remaining strength might sustain it; then the rhythms separate. The doctor returns to his place. Camus has given helplessness a sequence of contact, imagined participation and physical separation. Its force depends on the limit within the gesture: another person’s suffering can occupy Rieux completely while remaining beyond his power to stop.

The scene, on the other hand, shows how insistently Camus can direct a response he has already earned. Around the bed he has assembled doctors, a priest, a journalist and a municipal employee, bringing several of the novel’s principal attitudes toward the epidemic into one confrontation. The narration compares the child’s posture to crucifixion, then enlarges his cry until it seems to come from “all men at once.” The other patients join in, and their cries cover the prayer of Paneloux, the priest whose first sermon had presented the epidemic as punishment.

The symbolic expansion sets this small body against a doctrine vast enough to excuse its destruction. Yet the accumulating signals can leave too little for us to discover. The prolonged agony has already made the general number of deaths inadequate; crucifixion and the voice of humanity then tell us how far to enlarge the particular suffering we have just learned to attend to. At this point, the scene risks using the child as a decisive argument almost as thoroughly as it protests against explanations that would absorb him. Paneloux’s later hesitation gives the priest a less settled position. Within the death scene, the bodily detail remains more convincing than the orchestration of universal significance.

Othon’s reappearance admits a grief the preceding scene’s symbolism cannot encompass. His stiff collar is unchanged, but a shoelace is undone, his hair is disordered, and he avoids the visitors’ eyes. He asks whether Philippe suffered very much. Tarrou notices that he has never before heard the father use his son’s name. The brief encounter gives us no childhood history with which to fill that name. For a moment, we hear the bereaved father through the magistrate’s habitual reserve.

Tarrou tells him that the boy did not suffer. Having stayed through the agony, we cannot mistake the kindness for an accurate report. Solicitude for the father conflicts with the novel’s obligation to testify to the pain; the smaller scene leaves us with a moral dilemma that the grander one had nearly resolved into an accusation.

A city recovers while a friend dies

In the final part, Camus sets a prolonged private ordeal against a city returning to ordinary life. Tarrou falls ill as the epidemic recedes, and Rieux nurses him at home. The scene requires us to listen across the room’s boundary. Outside, footsteps pass and fade. Ambulance bells are absent. For the first time, the noises outside tell Rieux that an ordinary night has returned, although the friend before him remains gravely ill.

The absence that announces relief to the city makes the vigil more desolate. Camus brings the two experiences into the same audible world, where nothing guarantees that their meanings will agree. Even Tarrou’s temporary improvement is denied an easy narrative use. When he asks whether easier breathing signifies anything, Rieux explains the familiar morning remission. They must wait. After so many pages of postponed hopes, we know how much can be contained in this small refusal to promise.

Tarrou dies, and the silence around his body coincides with the quiet of a city released from plague. A shared sensation carries incompatible experiences: outside, relief; beside the bed, the end of a particular companionship.

Rieux’s late disclosure that he has written the chronicle asks us to reconsider the restraint through which we have received these events. The doctor who repeatedly speaks for the town has also been limiting the space given to his own pain. Even where his generalizations overreach, the choice exacts a cost. A strictly private record would lose the repeated labor and administrative violence through which the epidemic became a public experience; a wholly collective one would merge the street’s welcome quiet with the silence of Tarrou’s death.

Sources

Albert Camus, The Plague (La Peste, 1947), French text, Ebooks libres et gratuits digital edition, February 2011. Selected passages were checked against the Les Classiques des sciences sociales transcription. Short quotations are translated directly from the French.

Peter Dunwoodie, “Language and the ‘duty of memory’ in Albert Camus’s La Peste”, author-uploaded manuscript, on the chronicler’s self-effacement and the authority of testimony.