Volume 67, Issue 3

(Mis)reading in the wake of Trauma: 
Responses and Responsibility

by Dr. Holly Haahr

Albert Camus’ The Plague is the anchor text of the 2002 Yeshiva College book project, “Writing in the Wake of Trauma: Responses and Responsibility.”  Although cast as a chronicle of the bubonic plague in the Algerian city of Oran in the year 194X, from its publication in June 1947, readers have read the novel as an allegory for the Nazi Occupation.   Camus’ personal experience explains in part why he would render it as a plague in Oran.  Born in Algeria to French parents, Camus was a resident of Oran when he first began work on the novel in April 1942.  The nearly 30-year-old writer had been suffering from tuberculosis for all of his adult life, and was obliged, like Rieux’s wife will be, to leave Oran for health reasons.  Camus arrived in France just months before the Nazi invasion of the Free Zone and the ally embarkation in North Africa, events that left him in exile in France, separated from his wife for two years.   In January 1943, he mused in his notebooks as to his literary project:  “I want to express by means of the plague the suffocating and menacing atmosphere and the exile in which we live ... The plague will give the image of those in this war who criticized or remained silent and those who suffered (Carnets II, p. 72, my translation).

As I reread The Plague this summer, I noticed similarities between our recent experience(s) with terrorism and that plague.   I was able to identify with the feelings of separation, exile, fear and revolt, and it would seem that I am not alone.  Tzvi Kahn articulates feelings very similar to those described by Camus when he writes of the “mounting helplessness [of many Yeshiva students] in the face of unceasing Palestinian Arab terrorism against innocent Israeli civilians” (Commentator, Volume LXII, Issue 1, p. 19).    The spirit of solidarity that led the inhabitants of Oran to organize prayer weeks, join sanitary squads or give medical care despite the risk of contamination mobilized the City a year ago and has inspired Yeshiva students to organize accelerated learning programs or to graduate early in order to start work as an EMT in Israel.  The measures taken by the Oranian government --- closing the city, the declaration of martial law, the quarantine or isolation camps  --- and the debates as to their effectiveness and / or legitimacy, have undoubtedly their parallels in the “war against terrorism” and in Israel.   Drawing upon these similarities, the contemporary reader may be tempted to use Camus’ text to support their position.   He should do so responsibly, without making comparisons or assertions that are not supported by the text.

One of the most problematic characters in the text is Rambert, the journalist on assignment in Oran to report upon the “hygienic situation of the Arabs” (p. 12).  We first meet Rambert when he goes to interview Rieux.  The doctor first questions the journalist about the possibility of full disclosure, to find out if “Rambert could or couldn’t state the facts without paltering with the truth” (p. 12).   Strangely, the journalist is less concerned with the truth than the doctor is, and he is also less committed to his professional responsibilities when the state of plague is declared.   Rambert, at least initially, is more concerned with his personal happiness and safety than the “hygienic situation of the Arabs,” and spends his time trying to find a way to escape the city.

Should the reader then conclude that in Camus’ mind a journalist was not morally or ethically compelled to report what he knew to be the truth or that a journalist might be excused from his duties when his happiness calls him elsewhere?   There is no explicit condemnation of Rambert’s early behavior by the narrator, and the various characters in the novel to not judge him harshly.  However, the novel’s extended discussion of heroism makes clear that in a time of crisis, the hero is he who responds, who does what little he can, because “it was the only thing to do, and the unthinkable thing would then have been not to” (132).   It is no coincidence that the chapter on heroism, which sets Grand’s “small daily effort” as an exemplary model, is directly followed by one describing Rambert and the “long, heartrendingly monotonous struggle put up by some obstinate people to recover their lost happiness and to balk the plague” (139).   Moreover, whereas Rambert seemingly has no time or urge to write, the three characters who act most consistently with The Plague’s model of heroism --- Rieux, Tarrou and Grand --- are all three active writers.  

Unlike the novel’s Rambert, Camus did not put his personal interests first when it came to reporting the truth.  In 1935, Camus declared “I must testify,” and through the course of his short life he felt morally obligated to speak out in print against human rights violations and the ideologies, religious dogma and government policies that lent them support.   Throughout the 1930’s he wrote in support of the Popular Front in Algeria, first in Alger Républicain and then Le Soir Républicain, for which he was the managing editor.  After being censored on multiple occasions, his newspaper was closed by the government.   He did not remain silent during the Nazi Occupation:  he was active in the Resistance movement and wrote editorials in the clandestine journal Combat, activities that could have led to his own death or deportation.   After the war he continued his combat against injustice, even when his “cause” was unpopular.  In 1949, Camus condemned Sartre and his collaborators in Les Temps modernes for their ambivalence toward the Soviet labor camps, an issue that they were skirting by means of an ““independent communist position.”   Camus went further in his work L’Homme Révolté (1951), condemning any ideology, dogma or “cause” that supported violence, terrorism or the abuse of human rights.   He held true to this stance, condemning violence even when it came of “causes” that he supported like Algerian nationalism. 

Because Camus chose to show what some might call “egregious lack of respect,” “unabashed indifference” or “complete irreverence” (Commentator, vol LXVII, Issue 1, p. 3) toward the opinion accepted by many French intellectuals of the time, including the formidable Jean-Paul Sartre, Camus found himself ostracized by his intellectual peers for the last 10 years of his life.    It is for this reason that I would assert that it is contrary to the spirit of Camus to use The Plague as a springboard to the condemnation of an intellectual who stands up against popular opinion.   In a plague, or in “the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts,” the rats are not those who offer unpopular opinions as to how to “prevent its killing off half the population.”

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