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Albert Camus's novel The Plague, published in 1947, centers on the French-Algerian city of Oran, where thousands of rats are found dead in the streets. At first, only a few inhabitants take notice of this strange event—but soon, as the plague rushes through the city and begins to kill people, too, the nature and meaning of the disease can no longer be ignored. The Plague is probably my favorite novel by Camus; it ranks with other great existentialist/philosophical works of fiction, like Kafka's Trial, Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, Sartre's Nausea, Dazai's No Longer Human, Malraux's Man's Fate, and so on. Unlike Sartre, Camus refused to accept the label of 'existentialism' and preferred that of 'absurdism' (more on this later). Nevertheless, I think that we can still meaningfully apply the term to Camus, albeit with a footnote. Back to the novel: as the plague spreads, the city is sealed off from the rest of the world. People are cut off from each other and struggle to live. Eventually, the plague begins to retreat, and the gates of the city are reopened.
“Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.”
I won't say much more about the novel itself (there are plenty of analyses and interpretations out there). Instead, I want to pick out and focus on one character in particular. He is not the man that catches the eye while reading The Plague—it would be stretching the boundaries of the term to call him a protagonist. Yet he is not a minor character, and, importantly, through him Camus speaks about much larger things: on the one hand, about the practice of writing generally, and on the other hand, as I will show, about creation in light of the absurd.
I cannot introduce Joseph Grand better than Camus does. He is "a man of about fifty years of age, tall and drooping, with narrow shoulders, thin limbs, and a yellowish mustache" (Stuart Gilbert translation here and in what follows). This humble civil servant lives on scraps, being poorly rewarded for his services. He is sometimes employed in the Municipal Office, where he compiles figures of births, marriages, and deaths. He was offered the prospects of a promotion in his early years, but he never made anything of it. During the height of the plague, it is he who keeps track of the death rate. Camus is at times rather brutal in his description of Grand, who "had the walk of a shy young priest, sidling along walls and slipping mouselike into doorways, and he exuded a faint odor of smoke and basement rooms; in short, he had all the attributes of insignificance," and "even before you knew what his employment was, you had a feeling that he'd been brought into the world for the sole purpose of performing the discreet but needful duties of a temporary assistant municipal clerk on a salary of sixty-two francs, thirty centimes a day." On a more appreciative note, however, Camus adds that Grand's life might in a sense be said to be an exemplary one, as he is "one of those rare people, rare in our town as elsewhere, who have the courage of their good feelings. What little he told of his personal life vouched for acts of kindness and a capacity for affection that no one in our times dares own to."
Kind, irredeemably clerky Grand spends his free time bookishly, brushing up on his Latin. He always seems to have troubling selecting his words, which finds tragic expression in two ways. First, in his anxiety-provoking inability to find the right words to write his wife Jeanne, who, tired of the monotony of living with the man, has left him. Second, in his inability to move beyond the opening line of the book that he is writing. The line, which Grand hastens to point out is only a rough draft, is as follows:
“One fine morning in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.”
Having long struggled with the words, he feels confident enough at one point in the novel to share the line with another person. However, as soon as Grand says the words out loud, he realizes that they do not sound quite right. He picks at the words, discards some for others, questions their relevance and meaning—until it becomes clear that Grand will never get anywhere with his sentence or his book. In fact, it is somewhat of a running joke (even if not ill-intended) among the other characters to ask Grand how his young lady on horseback is progressing. "Once I've succeeded in rendering perfectly the picture in my mind's eye, once my words have the exact tempo of this ride—the horse is trotting, one-two-three, one-two-three, see what I mean?—the rest will come more easily," Grand hopefully (and futilely) explains.
There is, of course, no such thing as the perfect sentence. This is because there is no objective, unchanging standard against which one can compare it. In fact, one's aesthetic judgment of a given sentence will change over time. Perhaps, looking back on a piece you wrote years ago, you will find it amateurish. Sometimes, a reevaluation of the quality of a written sentence can happen almost instantly—a slightly different reading, a change in how you sound the words out in your head, an altered mood. Voicing the words can be murderous. Or it can be revelatory—it depends on what happens next. If what happens next is that you are satisfied and move on, or make the necessary changes and move on, then all is well. The moving on must happen, though. And this is precisely what Grand cannot do.
The cage in which Grand finds (locks) himself—his first sentence—has been interpreted in a number of ways. It can be seen as writer's block, as not being able to get past a certain point in one's writing. That it is the very first sentence does not matter. (Is having a first sentence better than having nothing, if one is not happy with it? Would it not be better, at some point after many frustrations, to let go of it and to begin afresh?) I don't find the writer's block view particularly interesting. The commonest explanation is by far that Grand is a perfectionist, and that his struggle with perfectionism—in extremis—is what holds him back from even coming close to achieving what he wants: an actual, complete book. This, rather than a perfect sentence, must, after all, be the goal. To focus on the small detail at the expense of the larger overall project is what holds many people back in their endeavors, including Grand. "'Evenings, whole weeks, spent on one word, just think! Sometimes on a mere conjunction!'" And precisely because there is no objective standard (there is no collectible and compilable statistic here), the task of writing the perfect sentence is doomed from the beginning.
I think that there is truth to the perfectionism explanation. It matches the character of Grand, and it tells us something important. Grand's toil over his young lady on horseback is the best fictional representation of the straightjacketing effect of perfectionism that I know. But there is more to it than that. It seems to me that a key lies in a chapter from The Myth of Sisyphus, on Absurd Creation. Now, for Camus, life is absurd. It has no inherent meaning; there is no God or eternal truth or absolute, transcendent value. Nothing is given to us. As Sartre puts it, existence precedes essence: we exist, and then it is up to us to give meaning to that (our) existence. Not the other way around.
Camus famously opens The Myth of Sisyphus with the pronouncement, "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." (Translation Justin O'Brien here and in what follows.) In the face of the meaninglessness of existence, we must decide whether we even want to live. Camus's answer is positive: the absurdity of life requires not suicide, but revolt. As he writes in the Myth, there is "a metaphysical honor in enduring the world's absurdity." This is why he chose the myth of Sisyphus as a metaphor, and urges that one must image Sisyphus happy—happy, even in his thankless task of pushing the boulder up the mountain in endless repetition. One of the means that we have of revolting against the absurd is through art. However, Camus warns that this is not any better, really, than any other form of creation. "In this universe the work of art is then the sole chance of keeping [one's] consciousness and of fixing its adventures." But, at the same time, "it has no more significance than the continual and imperceptible creation in which the actor, the conqueror, and all absurd men indulge every day of their lives. All try their hands at miming, at repeating, at re-creating the reality that is theirs. […] Creation is the great mime."
“All those folks are saying, ‘It was plague. We’ve had the plague here.’ You’d almost think they expected to be given medals for it. But what does that mean – ‘plague’? Just life, no more than that.”
If Joseph Grand's struggle to get past the opening line of his book seems like a mime, that's because it is. But it is not just Grand who is miming—so is everyone else who writes, whether they get past the first sentence or not.
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If you want to read The Plague, I recommend this Vintage edition. If you can spend a little more, however, I would suggest getting this beautiful Everyman’s Library edition, which also includes The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and selected essays. It’s one of my absolute favorite books—one I would take with me to an island.
If you just want to read The Myth of Sisyphus, you can find an inexpensive edition here.
(Note: if you buy any book(s) using the above link, or any book from The Book Depository via this link, I will receive a small commission. It won’t cost you anything extra, and you’ll help me maintain this blog.)