PARTISAN REVIEW
Albert Camus makes plain enough, in
The Plague,
that his objective
is philosophical and moral. But he has the ability, and has taken the
trouble, to write a novel. There is nothing fancy about his methods. He
has chosen a form as rigorous and conventional as that of a play by
introduction describes the scene, the town of Oran in Algeria.
How to conjure up a picture, for instance, of a town without pigeons,
without any trees or gardens, where you never hear the beat of wings or the
rustle of leaves-a thoroughly negative place, in short? ... Perhaps the easiest
way of making a town's acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work,
how they love, and how they die. In our little town (is this, one wonders, an ef–
fect of the <;limate?) all three are done on much the same lines, with the same
feverish yet casual air. The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself
to cultivating habits.... It will be said, no doubt, that these habits are not
peculiar to our town; really all our contemporaries are much the same....
Then the rats appear, and the plague begins. The gates of the town
are closed, the inhabitants walled into exile. The plague, and the strug–
gle against it, reach their climax; the plague suddenly begins to recede.
The town is liberated, the gates opened, the victory celebrated. The nar–
rator, finally identified, ends with a short, meditative coda.
The sentences, superbly translated by Stuart Gilbert, are grammatic–
ally finished, elegant in syntax, precise, almost austere. As in Kafka, by
whom Camus has surely been influenced, there is seldom, in the style,
any showiness, and never any drop into vulgarity. The irony, a tone
implicit in the word order rather than declared, completes the trans–
mutation of the whole from personal expression into art, an object made.
The strong girders of his basic structure permit Camus an effective
freedom in interior arrangement. He is able to introduce the grotesque,
and to be sure that the grotesque will function as it so often does in art
to deepen the sense of conviction: the little old man on the balcony,
who attracts the street-cats below in order to spit on them; the burial
problems as the plague expands; the family dining habits of M. Othon,
and his stiff collar in the quarantine camp; the colored chalks and the
"one fine morning" phrase of Joseph Grand's; the asthmatic patient
who tells time by shifting dried peas in two saucepans.
The strength of the general form of Camus' story is not surprising.
It is the story, is it not, of the sun which sets, to rise again after the
perils of the night; of the war against Troy, so carelessly begun, so long
and painfully fought, and at last so bitterly won; of the trial, and the
initiation ceremony; of Dante, who must journey through the lowest
depth before he can be brought from a slave to liberty; of the labors
of Herakles, the voyage of Odysseus, the underground exile of Persephone
and Osiris.
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