Albert Camus and the Human Crisis by Robert E. Meagher

Author:Robert E. Meagher [Meagher, Robert E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary Figures, Rich & Famous, Historical
ISBN: 9781643138220
Google: BNMYEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2021-11-02T23:35:58.169441+00:00

As with Meursault and Marie, swimming occasions their first moment of shared sensuousness. “For some minutes they swam side by side, with some zest, in the same rhythm, isolated from the world, and at last free of the town and of the plague.”24 In The Stranger, Meursault and Marie’s swim was a prelude to their union as lovers. Here, Rieux and Tarrou’s moonlit swim marks the culmination of their bond as friends. Either way it is a matter of communion.

Each of the central melodies in The Plague follows a similar pattern, from consciousness to activism. We hear or see, in real time or memory, how each of the plague fighters, again with the exception of Grand, came to plague consciousness and moved from there to taking action. Rieux and Tarrou each explains that he recognized the plague and resolved to resist it well before pestilence came to Oran and closed the city. Rieux was already a physician, under oath to do no harm and to attend to others’ wounds and afflictions. This much is to be expected of a doctor. What Tarrou wondered at was the intense fervor with which Rieux gave himself to his calling. “Why,” he asked Rieux, “do you yourself show such devotion, considering you don’t believe in God?”IV This is of urgent interest to Tarrou, who aspires beyond all else to be a “saint without God.”25 The point here for Rieux was that “if he believed in an all-powerful God, he would cease curing the sick and leave that to Him.”26 He was “outraged by the whole scheme of things” and was “fighting against creation as he found it.”27 What taught Rieux this was watching people suffer and die in an indifferent universe. The truth was just that simple and obdurate: “Men die and they are not happy,”28 and Rieux’s labors to resist its weight meant, like those of Sisyphus, “a never-ending defeat.”29

Tarrou, too, as a young man outraged by the scheme of things, came to see that his world is “shaped by death.” Not just by mortality, but even more outrageously by murder. This is the death that human beings—driven by hatred, greed, ambition, prejudice, ideology, and ignorance—inflict on each other, counting on a numberless supporting cast of indifferent bystanders. For Tarrou, the founder of the sanitary groups, “the most incorrigible vice” is “that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.”30 To his great horror, it was that same murderous ignorance that Tarrou, in his youth, found seething in his father, who “to all appearances was a kindly, good-natured man… a very decent man as men go.”31 Tarrou’s father, an esteemed prosecuting attorney, apart from mastering the French criminal code, obsessively studied train schedules and committed them to memory. Not that he was a frequent traveler, any more than he was a criminal. He dwelt happily in a world of abstractions, and in the satisfaction that trains ran on time and that the wheels of justice turned smoothly.

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