On Albert Camus’s The Plague: Part Two.
Part One.
Condensed version in The Plague Years: Reflecting on Pandemics. Routledge: 2022.
Podcast with Bongani Kona, The Empty Chair, for SA PEN.
Believe me when I tell you that Algeria is where I hurt at this moment, as others feel pain in their lungs.— Albert Camus, ‘Letter to an Algerian Militant’.
for D.B. (1981-2020)
1.
In March 1900, a ship called the SS Kilburn arrived in Cape Town from the grain-exporting port of Rosario, Argentina. It was carrying fodder for the horses of the British army, then fighting against the Boer republics in the South African War: the late imperial catastrophe that would incubate Afrikaner nationalism in the 20th century.
Five crew members were ill and the captain had died a day before docking. A quarantine camp was set up in Saldanha Bay and the crew taken there under armed guard. But by September 1900 large numbers of rats were dying in the Cape Town docks. ‘The stench was unendurable’, an officer reported to the Plague Advisory Board: ‘they had to have the floors up to remove the dead rats. He himself had seen numbers of sick rats coming out to the open in daylight, in a dazed state so that you could catch them with your hand’ (cited in Phillips 42-3).
In early 1901, a number of cases were reported among dockworkers who had been unloading the grain and fodder that harboured rats (and their fleas carrying the plague bacillus.) Tented camps were set up: first on the beach, then at Uitvlugt Forest Station, a few kilometres away from the city centre. Using a Public Health Act introduced in 1883 after a smallpox epidemic, the city’s Medical Officer ordered that over 6000 black Africans living in the city centre were to be forcibly removed from their homes and marched there.
Untouched by the sixth-century Plague of Justinian and medieval Europe’s Black Death, southern Africa was now part of the so-called Third Pandemic. It began in Chinese ports in 1894 and encircled the globe for the next decade, a seaborne epidemic carried along the global shipping routes established by European colonialism. Burgeoning trade, growing ports, bigger ships and cargos – all these made it easier for rats and their fleas to cross oceans. The medical and official response was also ‘uniquely imperial’, write Beinart and Hughes in their history of environment and empire (169). Plague outbreaks were met with segregationist controls ‘which had less to do with epidemiological requirements than socio-political ones. Everywhere it went, plague triggered a crisis in both state medicine and relations between rulers and subjects’ (169).
The southern African story, as told by Howard Phillips in Plague, Pox and Pandemics, makes for grim (and grimly predictable) reading. The outbreak provided authorities with an ‘unchallengeable opportunity’ to effect rapid, large-scale social engineering (60). At a time when the germ theory was radically changing ideas of disease transmission (but had not yet vanquished more nebulous ideas of plague being transmitted through miasmas and bad sanitation), authorities could draw on the ‘richest genealogy of fear in the Western psyche’ as a tool of political expediency (Phillips 40, quoting Cradock 124). All of which was now further infected by the most harmful elements of colonial ideology: racial pathology, prejudice, scapegoating, stigma and paternalism.
In Cape Town, the tented camp at Uitvlugt became Ndabeni, the first ‘native location’ in the city. Special legislation was rushed through, preventing those detained there from living anywhere else. This was met with widespread protest, including rent and train boycotts. Slum dwellers in the city centre tried to prevent the removal of bodies; Cape Town’s Islamic community opposed the isolation of patients, and especially the handling of their dead by non-Muslims. Mounted police were called in to break up mass meetings against forced removals. ‘By what legal process or right of law or equity have you acted?’ asked community leader Alfred Mangena in 1901: ‘Natives are sensitive human beings and therefore capable of feeling as well as a white man of any grade. Let us assume a vice versa position and what would the white man feel and say?’ (cited in Phillips 60).
In retrospect, the arrival of plague in Cape Town can be seen as a catalyst and trial run for the political project – continuing throughout the 20th century via different methods and in different guises – which sought to unscramble a creolised port city into fixed racial blocs and then lock these down spatially. Responding to this prototype of apartheid’s Group Areas legislation, the Cape Argus speculated that the outbreak might have been ‘a blessing in disguise’ (cited in Phillips 61). In telling similar stories about other South African cities (the original Klipspruit Location in Soweto also traces its history back to 1904 forced removals in the shadow of plague), Philips remarks that ‘probably the only anti-plague measure on which all humans in southern Africa were at one was the need to kill rats’ (58). Rat catchers, rat bounty and rat poisons proliferated; but paradoxically, ‘epidemiologists nowadays hold that, in the midst of a plague epidemic, the killing of rats causes their infected fleas to desperately seek out other mammals on which (or on whom, if they are humans) to feed, thereby spreading the disease more widely’ (58).
To tell the story of a deadly bacillus, parasite or virus – whether Yersinia Pestis, malaria, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, or COVID 19 – is to reveal, unerringly, the fault lines and psychopathologies of human societies. The question of disease is always political – and hardly (contra Jameson) a flight into disembodied allegory or apolitical moral fable. This is why The Plague, when read in the time of coronavirus, ‘doesn’t need the lens of metaphor to maintain its resonance’ (Williams 8). It is a work that has been re-literalised by global events and comes across, in one sense, as an all-too-plausible account of life under lockdown: ‘a malevolent holiday’ in which ‘a jittery simulacrum of normal life persists’ (Williams 8).
And yet for all its verisimilitude, Camus’s book retains a great silence about its Algerian setting, and about the way that an epidemic would actually have played out in a colonial city like Oran: who would have been treated, and treated humanely, and who not.
Plague in Cape Town is just one entry in a long history of European imperialism as a story of reciprocal illness: of biology intervening in, and sometimes exceeding or outstripping, human action. From 1492, what biologists call the ‘Columbian exchange’ led to an unprecedented scrambling of peoples, pathogens and biota across the Atlantic. With no immunity to the zoonotic diseases that had jumped from domesticated animals to humans in Europe, Native American and Amerindian societies were devastated by diseases like smallpox. From 1652, the same virus began arriving regularly at the southern tip of Africa. In 1713 it was brought ashore in the clothing of Dutch mariners returning from Batavia (Jakarta) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). It first sickened the laundrywomen of the Cape garrison, then devastated the Khoekhoen societies throughout the region. In his Description of the Cape of Good Hope, the clergyman François Valentyn wrote that people ‘died as if by hundreds, so that they lay everywhere along the roads as if massacred as they fled inland with kraals, huts, and cattle’ (cited in Phillips 19).
Vice versa: European mariners, missionaries, settlers and soldiers were subject to the fevers that people in the tropics had developed more resistance to. In his history of the Haitian revolution, C. L. R. James shows that this successful slave revolt endured – as a kind of historical anomaly – partly because of yellow fever. An epidemic in Saint Domingue and the Caribbean decimated the Napoleonic army sent to quell Toussaint L’Ouverture’s uprising in 1802, killing four fifths of the expeditionary force and permanently altering the geopolitics of the New World.
James’s title, The Black Jacobins, distils the great paradox lying at heart of the French Empire after 1789: that its Enlightenment values of liberty, equality and fraternity were not extended to its colonial possessions; that its humanism did not encompass all human beings. 150 years later, these complications – this cluster of disease, resistance, contradiction, contra-indication – will continue to afflict Camus’s life and work. They make themselves felt in the prose surface of The Plague, as strange symptoms of its political unconscious.
2.
In The Wretched of the Earth, dictated to his wife as he was dying of leukaemia, Frantz Fanon evokes the spatial apartheid of the colony:
The settlers’ town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about. The settler’s feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you’re never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and even, with no holes or stones. The settlers’ town is a well-fed town, an easy-going town; its belly is always full of good things. The settlers’ town is a town of white people, of foreigners. (30)
In the translation above, the scene is partly focalised by a resentful onlooker (‘you’re never close enough’), so that mundane details about feet and shoes come to hold so much charge. When Fanon turns to how the other half lives, the viewpoint swivels round like a gun emplacement:
The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. (30)
Now the language is partly coloured by racial and colonial stereotypes. It is a very literary performance in this way: Fanon’s voice on the page is caustic, provocative, deliberately unreliable, discomforting – particularly in a city like Cape Town. ‘Thus in South Africa now it is very expensive to be poor’, wrote Steve Biko, who was deeply influenced by Fanon: ‘It is the poor people who stay furthest from town and therefore have to spend more money on transport to come and work for white people; […] it is the poor people who use untarred roads, have to walk long distances, and therefore experience the greatest wear and tear on commodities like shoes’ (I Write What I Like 96-7).
Why do we get no narrative access to this divided reality in The Plague? Why does Rieux refuse to help Rambert with his investigations into ‘the Arab quarter’? Why is the matter raised – and in the context of an insistence on the whole truth – only to be dropped? When Rieux and Rambert wander together through ‘the African quarter’, it is ‘curiously deserted’ – only the colourful Moorish facades are there to provide some local colour (also popular with the Instagrammers getting their shots of Cape Town’s Bo Kaap). Why are the 100 000 Muslim Algerians of Oran in 194- left off the team, and out of the story?
For Conor Cruise O’Brien, writing in his 1970 Fontana Modern Masters series on Camus, the answer is simple. To include them (and so to frankly acknowledge the colonial setting) would cause the allegory of a resistance against oppression to break down. O’Brien suggests that it came naturally to Camus, because of his background and education, to think of Oran primarily as a French town, ‘and of its relation to the plague as that of a French town to the Occupation’:
But just below the surface of his consciousness, as with all other Europeans in Africa, there must have lurked the possibility of another way of looking at things – an extremely distasteful one. There were Arabs for whom ‘French Algeria’ was a fiction quite as repugnant as the fiction of Hitler’s new European order was for Camus and his friends. For such Arabs, the French were in Algeria in virtue of the same right by which the Germans were in France: the right of conquest. The fact that the conquest had lasted considerably longer in Algeria than it was to last in France changed nothing in the essential resemblance of the relations between conqueror and conquered. From this point of view, Rieux, Tarrou and Grand were not devoted fighters against the plague, there were the plague itself. (47-8)
O’Brien’s short book lands a tremendous polemical blow. It did much to dislodge the Western idea of Camus as a kind secular saint, and to reveal how his works – most often read as universal, existential parables – are actually riven by the paradoxes of the colony. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said extends this idea of Camus as a late imperial writer who, in assuming the ordinariness of a place like Oran, comes to naturalise what was really a vast geographical and ideological fiction: that Algeria was part of France, even down to its French postcodes (the remote island of Réunion still retains them). For Said, Camus is someone who could never quite face the historical reality of Algerian nationalism, and whose work is profoundly marked by this imaginative failure.
O’Brien’s critique has the force but also the limits of a polemic. It was, after all, precisely the length and duration of the French presence that did change everything in the analogy – in that it created a whole society of pieds noirs born in Algeria (and if anything is distasteful, it is O’Brien’s charge that Camus’s work subjects the Arabs of Oran to an ‘artistic final solution’.) The timbre of Said’s account is different: slow, dense, almost symphonic in the breadth and resonance of its historical awareness. It is less an accusation than a deep and rueful acknowledgment of the paralysis and ‘negative vitality’ of Camus’s oeuvre, particularly when counterpoised with ‘the decolonizing literature of the time, whether French or Arab – Germaine Tillion, Kateb Yacine, Fanon, or Genet’ (224). Camus’s narratives, Said concludes, ‘express a waste and a sadness we still have not completely understood or recovered from’ (224).
In one sense, such charges are unanswerable. Oran does become, as O’Brien suggests, a ‘partly unreal’ place, a ‘never was’ city in which the stuckness of quarantine might be figuring another kind of paralysis (49, 47). In the decade after the Second World War, Algeria enters a political stalemate where the old is dying and new cannot be born: the kind of political interregnum in which (as Antonio Gramsci wrote in his prison notebooks) ‘a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’ – a line often applied to South Africa in the dying days of apartheid.
Yet it is simply wrong to say that Camus was disengaged from the reality of a dying colonialism, and the question of what would come after it. He started his career as an investigative journalist for Alger républicain, writing exposés about how French policy had caused poverty and famine in Kabylia (and his journalism on behalf of Algerian Muslims led to him being blacklisted and drummed out of the country). Camus, in other words, was well aware of the unequal geography of the colony, and had done more than most French Algerians to bring this to public attention (it had even led to his early break with the Algerian Communist Party). And the analogy between Nazi occupation and French colonialism was not (as O’Brien claims) beyond the horizon of his awareness: he had made the point himself in an editorial following the Sétif massacres of 1945.
On 8 May of that year, the very moment that Europe celebrated VE day and the defeat of the Nazi order, a protest march was held in the Algerian town of Sétif. It spiralled into violence, and then the murder and mutilation of French Algerians. This was met in turn with pitiless reprisals from the French army: the bombing and execution of entire villages, and a death toll that has been put at anywhere from 15 000 to 45 000 civilians. It was at Sétif, the Algerian poet Yacine recalled: ‘that my sense of humanity was affronted for the first time by the most atrocious sights. I was sixteen years old. The shock which I felt at the pitiless butchery that caused the deaths of thousands of Muslims, I have never forgotten. From that moment my nationalism took definite form’ (cited in Horne 27). For many Algerians, Sétif was a turning point, a moment of radicalisation. It demonstrated the impossibility of political moderation and reform, and is sometimes regarded as the first salvo of the Algerian Revolution that would begin in 1954. ‘Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe’ (251) – so writes Fanon in the conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth (1961), a work forged in the crucible of Algeria’s violent decolonisation: ‘When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders’ (252).
In a piece of 10 May 1947 for Combat, Camus denounced the ‘methods of collective repression’ used by the government in Algeria, along with torture and all forms of racism: ‘Three years after having experienced the effects of a politics of terror, the French received this news with the indifference of people who had seen too much. Yet the fact is there, clear and hideous as the truth: we are doing in these cases what we reproached the Germans for doing’ (Actuelles I 28). The editorial, appearing in the same year as La peste, was titled ‘La contagion’.
So one can adduce a lot of evidence to refute the charges levelled by O’Brien and Said, and to defend Camus’s honour – but that is not really the point. The real quandary that The Plague presents is its ethic of non-violence. And this as its author is enmeshed in the three most violent fault lines of 20th-century history: the struggle against Fascism, against Soviet totalitarianism, against colonialism.
‘Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them…’ After Fanon, is Camus’s vision of human fellowship credible, or culpable? And how does his steadfast refusal to justify ‘the necessary murder’ or glorify any form of killing read today, at a greater historical distance, and from a different part of the world?
3.
In 1961, Nelson Mandela, the ‘Black Pimpernel’ who was banned and in hiding from the apartheid regime, travelled to Morocco. In Oujda, just over the border from Algeria, he received his first military training from the armed wing of the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN). As with Sétif, the events at Sharpeville in 1960 had made the African National Congress abandon its strategy of non-violent resistance: they were one of the last liberation movements in the world to do so. In Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela wrote that the situation in Algeria ‘was the closest model to our own in that the rebels faced a large white settler community that ruled the indigenous majority’ (298). After his release in 1990, Algeria was the first country that Mandela visited; he never forgot the support that the FLN offered to the South African liberation struggle.
In this photograph from 1962, we see the future icon of peace and reconciliation receiving guerrilla training from the revolutionary movement which had sworn to erase utterly the French Algerian culture into which Camus was born – such was the cruelty, bitterness and ideological polarisation of the Algerian War of 1954 to 1962. Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers, takes one into the extremity of that conflict. In a famous scene, three Algerian Muslim women of the FLN cut their hair in order to look French, so as to pass through military check and plant bombs in cafés of la cité européenne. The man who gives the orders is played by Saadi Yacef, a veteran FLN commander, and so even as it takes violence as its main subject, Pontecorvo’s cinematic style – meticulously re-enacted documentary in black and white – has a strange affinity with The Plague, as a novel impersonating a chronicle.
This was a political climate in which Camus’s call for a civilian truce (delivered as pieds noirs hardliners shouted for his death outside the venue in Algiers) was regarded by many on the Paris left (De Beauvoir and Sartre among them) as hopelessly naïve and ineffectual considering the momentum of the conflict, and the scale of atrocities on each side. Camus had already fallen out with Sartre and his circle by publishing The Rebel (1951), a historical study of revolutions which argued that they had inevitably led to increased authoritarianism and a consolidation of state power. Like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Camus argued that the Terror (whether that of Robespierre or of Stalin) was not an aberration from, or a corruption of, the revolution: it was the inevitable and logical consequence of it.
‘Arrests rolled through the streets and apartment houses like an epidemic’, wrote Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago (composed between 1958 and 1968, published in 1974). It is a passage which seems, whether consciously or not, to be echoing the metaphors of The Plague:
Just as people transmit an epidemic infection from one to another without knowing it, by such innocent means as a handshake, a breath, handing someone something, so too, they passed on the infection of inevitable arrest by a handshake, by a breath by a chance meeting on the street. For if you are destined to confess tomorrow that you organized an underground group to poison the city’s water supply, and if today I shake hands with you on the street, that means I, too, am doomed. (75)
Like Solzhenitsyn, like George Orwell (whom Camus narrowly missed meeting in a Paris café), like the Polish dissident Czesław Miłosz (whom he befriended at a time when no-one else in Paris was interested), Camus’s writings are suffused with a deep suspicion and disgust for any ideological programme that rationalises killing. This made him, like Orwell, a contrarian rebel rather than a doctrinaire revolutionary. He was early critic of Stalin’s empire, and of those on the Left who tried to deny or explain away his crimes.
But here was the impossible crux thrown up by 20th-century history: being a convincing and honourable anti-Communist made him (for Sartre and De Beauvoir at least) a dubious, vacillating anti-colonialist – and someone who was giving ammunition to the forces of reaction as the Cold War set in. And whereas Orwell the ex-colonial policeman was unstinting in his critique of British imperialism, Camus’s attitude to the French empire was more ambivalent, hesitant, sometimes muddled – and deeply personal.
Camus’s language ‘had never sounded hollower than when he demanded pity for the civilians’, wrote De Beauvoir: ‘The conflict was one between two civilian communities’ (cited in Horne 125). When she heard Camus’s statement after winning the Nobel Prize in 1957 – ‘I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice’ – De Beauvoir was ‘revolted’ (cited in Horne 235). ‘Between justice and my mother, I choose my mother’: this was what Camus’s words were soon reduced to in the press, a formulation for which he was roundly mocked and condemned.
What he actually said was different from either of the two versions above. At a press conference in Stockholm, Camus had been heckled by an Algerian student who asked why he signed petitions on behalf of East European dissidents but not the FLN, and then ‘prevented the writer from speaking, and insulted him in the crudest terms’ – so reads a report by Le Monde of 14 December 1957 (Algerian Chronicles 214). ‘Camus faced this harsh polemic, which scandalized the Swedish audience, without for a moment losing his poise or dignity’, and then replied that ‘I have never spoken to an Arab or one of your militants as you have just spoken to me in public…Let me finish my sentences, because the meaning of a sentence isn’t often clear until it ends’ (Algerian Chronicles 214). He then gave a statement that ended with the following words:
I have always condemned terror. I must also condemn the blind terrorism that can be seen in the streets of Algiers. People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother. (Algerian Chronicles 216)
The whole meaning of the statement was held in the conditional premise and its falsity (‘If that is justice’), but this did not survive the paraphrase and subsequent polemics. ‘He was not sentimentally exalting his mother above justice’, writes George Scialabba in a review of Camus’s Algerian Chronicles, ‘he was rejecting the equation of justice with revolutionary terrorism’. I think it is also worth quoting what Camus wrote in a letter to Le Monde after the Nobel Prize incident:
I would also like to say, in regard to the young Algerian who questioned me, that I feel closer to him than to many French people who speak about Algeria without knowing it. He knew what he was talking about, and his face reflected no hatred but despair and unhappiness. His face is that face of my country. (Algerian Chronicles, 216)
After the failure of his 1955-56 campaign for a civilian truce, and holding steadfast to his position – that no values can remain after a justification of torture or terror – Camus lapsed into public silence on Algeria, a silence seen as culpable by his detractors on the Left. In private, he campaigned against the death sentence for Algerian freedom fighters, intervening in over 150 cases (Todd 399). But he could never accept the FLN’s version of nationalism, or the idea of Algeria as an essentially Arab nation. He viewed his native land as a polgyglot society – partly Arab, African, Mediterranean, Jewish, indubitably French – and argued for a federation that would recognise and reconcile these elements: ‘The Hungarian problem is simple: the Hungarians must have their freedom back. The Algerian problem is different: the freedoms of two groups of people must be guaranteed’ (Algerian Chronicles 17). He believed that 130 years of French settlement in Algeria had rendered the society like the one he grew up in ‘an indigenous population in the full sense of the word’ (Algerian Chronicles 3) – a comparable but more plausible claim lies at the heart of the white Afrikaans experience in South Africa. And finally, the poverty of his upbringing in Belcourt meant that he could not easily imagine himself or his family as colonial elites or oppressors. In Algiers, the telegram bringing news of his Nobel had to be read aloud to his illiterate mother.
‘Yes, there is beauty and there are the humiliated’, he wrote in the essay ‘Return to Tipasa’: ‘Whatever difficulties the enterprise may present, I should like never to be unfaithful either to the second or the first’ (Selected Essays 153). It is one of several gnomic formulations in which one senses, even in the syntax, the impossibility of the undertaking – it can only be broached negatively, conditionally, hypothetically. After these lines, the essay continues: ‘But this still sounds like ethics, and we live for something that goes beyond them. If we could name it, what silence…’ (153).
In his 2016 biography, Robert Zaretsky suggests that Camus’ silence over the war ravaging his native Algeria ‘did not transcend ethics. Instead, it flowed from his recognition that the humiliated were on both sides in this conflict: the great majority of pieds noirs as well as Arabs’ (86). This is, perhaps, something like the understanding that Nelson Mandela evolved during his long incarceration: of white Afrikaner nationalism as emerging from British imperialism and the humiliation of the South African War. This late imperial catastrophe would incubate apartheid thinking across the 20th century, with black South Africans becoming (as Edward Said wrote of the Palestinians) the victims of the victims.
4.
At the back of my mind when reading The Plague is always this sense that the histories of Algeria and southern Africa mirror each other in some ways – even as their paths out of colonialism and white minority rule are in another sense diametrically opposite. For a number of years as I tried (and failed) to teach the question of Camus and Algeria at the University of Cape Town, student radicals were quoting Fanon, excoriating ‘liberal humanism’ and dismissing Mandela as a sell-out – but what does the historical record show?
In one case a suspended revolution and negotiated settlement; in another an eight-year war of liberation, one of the most violent and brutal of all the decolonial conflicts, in which between 400 000 and 1,5 million people lost their lives. In South Africa, a project of national reconciliation, based on the assumption that erstwhile victims and beneficiaries of apartheid were ‘condemned to live together’: a phrase from Camus’s 1955 ‘Letter to an Algerian Militant’, his friend Aziz Kessous (Algerian Chronicles, 114). In north Africa, the expulsion of virtually the entire population of French Algerians (and Algerian Jews) after the FLN government took power in 1962 (and warned the pieds noirs that they could leave either via la valise ou le cercueil: with a suitcase or in a coffin). The torture, atrocity, spiralling violence, reprisals and the targeting of civilians on both sides of the conflict had by that time made any negotiation or reconciliation unthinkable.
In a 1996 preface to his book on the Algerian conflict, A Savage War of Peace (1977), Alistair Horne begins at Tipasa, the site of the Roman ruins where Camus had asserted the ‘invincible’ or ‘unconquerable’ summer that lay at the heart of his being. Horne points out how the beauty of the place ‘casts a deceptive cloak over a much more ferocious past’, as the violence of the Algerian Revolution spills, retroactively, into Camus’s lyrical essay:
For it was on a sunny beach close to Tipasa that French women and children, as well as men, were machine gunned as they bathed by freedom-fighters of the Algerian FLN. At Zeralda, just a few miles to the east, Algerian suspects died in a French torture camp; and it was from the barracks of Zeralda that rebel units of the elite French paras launched a nearly successful coup against President de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic in April 1961. (12)
In the same year, 1961, that la guerre d’Algérie almost precipitated a right-wing coup on French soil, Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth appeared with a preface by Sartre. The preface seems partly addressed to his old adversary; though one wonders if Sartre would have published it in this form, had Camus still been alive:
In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are massacred at sight. It is the moment of the boomerang; it is the third phase of violence; it comes back on us, it strikes us, and we do not realize any more than we did the other times that it’s we that have launched it. The ‘liberals’ are stupefied; they admit that we were not polite enough to the natives, that it would have been wiser and fairer to allow them certain rights in so far as this was possible; they ask nothing better than to admit them in batches and without sponsors to that very exclusive club, our species; and now this barbarous, mad outburst doesn’t spare them any more than the bad settlers. (17-18)
How different this is to Sartre’s earlier reflections on occupied Paris, and the ‘instinctive humanitarian helpfulness’ that Parisians found themselves offering, despite themselves, to German soldiers. In writing about what he had lived through, Sartre’s language is measured, reflective, humane, alert to moral complexity, ambiguity and failure – what Primo Levi, in his reflections on Auschwitz, called ‘the grey zone’. But in addressing violence far removed from his own experience, Sartre’s prose has taken on another tone:
They would do well to read Fanon; for he shows clearly that this irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself. I think we understood this truth at one time, but we have forgotten it – that no gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy them. The native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the settler through force of arms. (18)
Sartre’s preface is torrential, passionate, scornful. It brought Fanon’s work to a wider European audience, but perhaps also traduced it. Fanon wrote from the experience of a psychiatrist treating those damaged by the violence of the colony, both as victims and perpetrators, and on both sides. The last section of The Wretched of the Earth is a harrowing catalogue of ‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders’. ‘The extent and degree of atrocities on both sides, carried out on men, women and children alike, makes sickening reading’, writes Robert Young, a translator and biographer of Fanon: ‘Violence, in many ways, is too clean and cerebral a word, too surrounded with the dignity of philosophical conceptualization, to describe the raging, sadistic and sickening butchery of what went on in Algeria’ (277).
Nothing in Fanon’s writing approaches the kind of relish Sartre shows here: a malevolent glee in violence seen and celebrated from afar. Out of a self-appointed sense of historical necessity, it is working – polemically but also with a sense of unmistakeable rhetorical self-satisfaction, even pleasure – to justify the death of innocent people. In other words, it is infected with the plague bacillus.
Contrast this with the preface that Camus wrote to his 1958 collection Algerian Chronicles, his last published statement on his native land. The book was met with deafening silence at the time. The author’s embattled humanism seemed impotent and irrelevant in the wake of revelations of widespread torture by the French army. But how does it read today?
The truth, unfortunately, is that one segment of French public opinion vaguely believes that the Arabs have somehow acquired the right to kill and mutilate, while another side is prepared to justify every excess. Each side thus justifies its own actions by pointing to the crimes of its adversaries. This is a casuistry of blood with which intellectuals should, I think, have nothing to do unless they are prepared to take up arms themselves. When violence answers violence in a mounting spiral, undermining the simple language of reason, the role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other, yet this is what we read every day.
On the right, we hear France’s honour repeatedly invoked to justify what is most damaging to that honour. On the left, we hear justice repeatedly cited as an excuse for affronts to any authentic idea of justice. The Right has thus ceded the moral response entirely to the Left, while the Left has ceded the patriotic response entirely to the right. France has suffered from both reactions. The country needed moralists less joyfully resigned to their country’s misfortune and patriots less willing to allow torturers to act in France’s name. Metropolitan France has apparently been unable to come up with any political solution other than to say to the French of Algeria, ‘Die, you have it coming to you!’ or ‘Kill them all, they’ve asked for it.’ Which makes for two different policies but one single surrender, because the real question is not how to die separately but how to live together. (Algerian Chronicles 28-29)
Sartre, De Beauvoir and their followers ‘won’ the battle with Camus at the time. And more broadly, their Marxian insistence on supra-individual processes and systemic injustice as the key to human meaning – this is still the ethos that holds sway in much academic discussion, where phrases like ‘structural violence’ are the trump cards in any argument. The result is a worldview that is, perhaps, broadly true: no amount of well-meaning or individual moral behaviour matters within a fundamentally unjust system: there are no good colonists or bad colonists, just colonists (switch with another word, as required). But it is a worldview that is often far removed from the complex and compromised moral terrain where people must live their lives.
Whatever can be articulated is falsely put; whatever cannot be articulated must be lived through – a thought from the Magistrate of J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, another ‘colonizer who refuses’ (to use a phrase that the Tunisian Jewish writer Albert Memmi had applied to his French Algerian contemporary). In Camus’s letters and notebooks, it is this sense of what it means to actually live through the pain and contradiction of history, of its on-going damage, which comes across so powerfully. Many times, he runs together the metaphors of his country and his illness, reaching towards something not quite articulated, or articulable, but deeply felt, and deeply embodied: ‘Sometimes I think of health as a great land full of sun and cicadas which I have lost through no fault of my own’ (cited in Todd, 153). ‘Believe me when I tell you’, Camus writes to his radicalised friend Kessous, ‘that Algeria is where I hurt at this moment, as others feel pain in their lungs’ (Algerian Chronicles, 113).
Only violence, writes Sartre, never gentleness, can efface the marks of violence. The diagnosis, the whole tonality of The Plague could not be more different. Ultimately it is a pacifist text (and unexpectedly, given that it emerges from the French Resistance). Whatever violence there is occurs in the background, heard as distant gunshots through the window as Rieux and Grand discuss the endlessly trotting horsewoman, or listen to Louis Armstrong sing ‘St James Infirmary’ one more time. This makes The Plague partly unreal, but also unfinished, in the sense that it is never finished saying what it has to say.
When Camus read Roland Barthes’ critique – that the allegory of The Plague evades questions of human conflict, responsibility and malevolence – he responded in a letter that he found it ‘difficult and, let me say this is all friendship, a little depressing’ (Selected Essays 221). Barthes’s question – what would the fighters against the plague do when confronted with the human face of the scourge? – was, Camus wrote, unjust:
[I]t ought to have been couched in the past tense, and it would then have received its reply, which is a positive one. What these fighters, whose experience I have to some extent translated, did do, they did in fact against men, and at a cost which you know. They will do it again, no doubt, when any terror confronts them, whatever face it may take on, for terror has several faces. This, once again, justifies me for not having named any particular one, in order better to strike at them all. (221).
Camus gives a hopeful reading here (and a more complex idea of what reading literature entails than many of his critics). Today, The Plague also stands as prescient of a darker, more painful historical irony borne out in so many postcolonial and post-conflict societies: that when no limits are placed on the means being used to resist injustice, then the form of resistance to one form of the plague can become the carrier for the next outbreak.
In 1991, Algeria entered another ‘dark decade’. When the FLN government seemed poised to lose elections to another party, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), this was forestalled by a military coup. With the banning of the FIS, various Islamic guerrilla forces launched attacks against the state (and then each other), promising to restore the Algerian Revolution that had been ‘confiscated’ by Marxist and secular forces of the FLN following independence. The result was a bitter civil conflict – ‘the blind war’ or ‘dirty war’ – in which over 100 000 people died, many of them women and children. Massacres broke out throughout the country, ‘and the chaos was so great that no one knew who was responsible’, writes Alice Kaplan in her introduction to Algerian Chronicles: ‘Murders were committed by the army and by the Islamic Front, and the army disguised its own violence to make the Islamists look worse. Hundreds of intellectuals, artists and teachers were murdered; many other were forced into exile’ (9-10).
Writing in 2013, Kaplan goes on to record her discussions with several Algerian professors of literature on a recent trip to the country. An unnamed speaker, N–, suggests that in the 1990s, many Algerians who were menaced by fundamentalism realised that there might be a distant parallel with the experiences of French Algerians in the 1950s and 60s: they ‘recognized themselves in Camus – whose Algerian dimension was denied, whether it was in his novels, in his refusal to take a position, or in the positions he did take – the constant vacillation, the hesitation, the not being able to figure out what is going on or take a clear position. I remember how we felt threatened in our Algerian identity: what, we were supposed to leave Algeria now?’ (Algerian Chronicles, 10)
A colleague objects that this equivalence is false, and serves a revisionist agenda: it suggests that the FLN was guilty of acts equal to French colonial violence, and so erases the just cause for which they had fought. But all agree that, even while Camus has officially been unwelcome in the classroom for some time, many of Algeria’s writers continue to be in an intimate literary dialogue with him: from Mohammed Dib, Maloud Feraoun and Kateb Yacine to a more recent work like The Meursault Investigation (2014) by Kamel Daoud. It tells the story of the unnamed ‘Arab’ killed on the beach in The Stranger from the point of view of his brother Haroun, but is by no means a simple repudiation of Camus’s work. The narrator remarks of a PhD scholar, Meriem, who is seeking to understand the Algerian dimension of Camus: ‘She taught me to read the book in a certain way, tilting it sideways as though to make invisible details fall out’ (132).
For the exiled Algerian writer Assia Djebar, Camus is a Mandela-like figure: she reads his campaign for a civilian truce as a moment in which Algerian history might have gone differently, a last chance for reconciliation instead of bitter violence. This is very different to Edward Said’s idea of Camus as a late imperial writer unable to imagine a postcolonial future. In Algerian White (1995), Djebar keeps circling back to the unfinished manuscript of Le premier homme found in the car wreck that killed him. In Fantasia (1985) she classes him (with Fanon) as an annunciator of a history that never came to be, a herald of a lost possibility that he died too young to see so utterly lost.
5.
‘A literature of failure is not a failure of literature’, wrote Albert Memmi, reflecting on the French literature of the Maghreb. Ultimately, The Plague fails to resolve its internal contradictions or the noise within its allegorical schema. But Camus’s failings can seem preferable to the success of those intellectuals who justified murders and massacres from afar. He himself judged La peste a failure. But perhaps the ability to perceive this, and the inevitability of this, and then to write from within it, is what carries the book’s wisdom.
‘I was already suffering from the plague long before I knew this town and this epidemic’ (189). In Tarrou’s confession to Rieux, just before they take a night swim together, the idea of a ‘healthy carrier’ is broached by the work – another moment when the text seems to half-acknowledge the unspoken, colonial occupation that flickers on the edge of awareness. Within the story, Tarrou is talking about living in a society that condones the death penalty. But his words reach further than that, and continue to reach out in a world where so much of what passes for politics rests on the desire to construct a simplified, less-than-human Other – and then to argue for their removal, expulsion, cancellation, disappearance or death. ‘And this is why’, Tarrou concludes, ‘I have decided to reject everything that, directly or indirectly, makes people die or justifies others in making them die’ (195).
When we hear, in the final section of The Plague, about the death of Tarrou, Rieux reflects that his friend ‘had lost the game’: ‘But if so, what has the narrator of his history won?’ In his measured way (and how difficult to have brought off a novel with such a restrained narrator), Rieux answers:
All he had gained was to have known the plague and to remember it, to have known friendship and to remember it, to have known affection to have one day to remember it. All that a man could win in the game of plague and life was knowledge and memory. (224)
The work moves to close with a double ending (much as it had a double beginning). There is the hopeful motto about there being more in men to admire than to despise. And then the foreboding cadence of the bacillus never disappearing or vanishing entirely – a kind of suspended sentence hanging over the whole work. The last lines loop back into the work we have finished, a Moebius strip of text, inviting rereading: ‘He knew that this happy crowd was unaware of something that one can read in books…’
But much of the book’s life is actually held in the smaller, less quotable moments. ‘Next thing they’ll be wanting a medal’, says the old man who Rieux has been treating, watching the townsfolk celebrating, ‘But what does it mean, the plague? It’s life, that’s all’ (236):
‘Tell me doctor, is it true that they’re going to put up a monument to the victims of the plague?’
‘So the papers say. A pillar or a plaque.’
‘I knew it! And there’ll be speeches.’
The old man gave a strangled laugh.
‘I can hear them already: “Our dead…” Then they’ll go and have dinner.’
January 2019 – March 2021
Works cited
Barthes, Roland. ‘La peste: Annales d’une épidémie ou roman de la solitude’ in Oeuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Eric Marty. Paris: Seuil, 1993.
Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero [1953]. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968.
Beinart, William and Lotte Hughes. Environment and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Biko, Steve. I Write What I Like. London: Heinemann, 1987.
Camus, Albert. The Outsider [1942]. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946.
Camus, Albert. The Plague [1947]. Trans. Robin Buss. London: Penguin, 2001.
Camus, Albert. The Plague [1947]. Trans. Stuart Gilbert [1948]. London: Penguin, 2010.
Camus, Albert. Actuelles I (Chroniques 1944-1948). Paris: Gallimard, 1950.
Camus, Albert. Selected Essays and Notebooks. Trans. Philip Thody. London: Penguin, 1970.
Camus, Albert. Algerian Chronicles [1958]. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.
Carroll, David. ‘Camus’s Algeria: Birthrights, Colonial Injustice, and the Fiction of a French-Algerian People.’ MLN, vol. 112(4), 1997: 517-549.
Carroll, David. Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Coetzee, J. M. Introduction to Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Craddock, Susan. City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty and Deviance in San Francisco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Daoud, Kamel. The Meursault Investigation [2014]. Trans. John Cullen, London: Oneworld Press, 2015.
De Beauvoir, Simone. La Force des choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.
Dunn, Susan. The Death of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination. Princeton University Press, 1994.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth [1961]. Pref. Jean-Paul Sartre. Trans. Constance Farrington. London: Penguin, 2001.
Horne, Alistair. A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 [1977]. New York Review of Books Press: 2006.
James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution [1938]. London: Penguin, 2002.
Jameson, Fredric. ‘On Magic Realism in Film’, Critical Inquiry, 12(2), 1986: 301-325.
Judt, Tony. Introduction to The Plague, trans. Robin Buss. London: Penguin, 2002: vii-xvii.
Melandri, Francesca. ‘A Letter to the UK from Italy: This is What We Know About Your Future. The Guardian, 27 March 2020. www.theguardian.com Accessed 1 May 2020.
O’Brien, Conor Cruise. Camus. London: Fontana, 1970.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. ‘Paris Under the Occupation.’ Sartre Studies International, 4(2), 1998: 1-15.
Scialabba, George. ‘Resistance, Rebellion and Writing.’ Bookforum (April/May 2013). www.bookforum.com. Accessed 1 May 2020.
Scott, A. O. ‘Film Review: Blindness’. New York Times, 2 October 2008. www.nytimes.com. Accessed 1 May 2020.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago. London: Collins/Fontana, 1974.
Susan Sontag, ‘Illness as Metaphor’, New York Review of Books (26 January 1978). www.nybooks.com. Accessed 1 May 2020.
Susan Sontag, ‘AIDS and its Metaphors’, New York Review of Books, (27 October 1988). www.nybooks.com. Accessed 1 May 2020.
Susan Sontag. Illness as Metaphor; and, AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), pp.147-8.
Todd, Olivier. Albert Camus: A Life. London: Chatto & Windus, 1997.
Williams, Thomas Chatterton. ‘A Malevolent Holiday’, Harper’s (June 2020). www.harpers.org. Accessed 1 May 2020.
Young, Robert. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.
Zaretsky, Robert.A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.