Time and Ethics in Albert Camus's The Plague

JOHN KRAPP Time and Ethics in Albert Camus's The Plague Ethical readings of Albert Camus's The Plague have traditionally reflected the criticism, introduced by Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes, that Camus's text fails to invite serious moral consideration because, representing its subject allegorically, it fails to represent real material history, in which ethical thought serves to inform choice in time. While Sartre's and Barthes's evaluations are strong voices of ethical criticism in the corpus of textual interpretation of The Plague, they are expressions of a specific historical moment in that corpus; hence, they Calmot be taken as the last word on the novel's moral significance. Contemporary trends in literary criticism, which specifically include the recent proliferation of theoretical speculation on ethics and literary study, have persuasively argued that an event is not necessarily atemporalized even if it is expressed allegorically; rather, allegorical representation and temporality may be coextensive. A demonstration of The Plague's representation of historical time thus challenges Sartrean and Barthesian prejudices and provides the foundation for an ethical reading that discloses a vital moral dialogue among competing ethical positions at the centre of Camus's text. The Plague was published by Librairie Gallimard in 1947- Thereafter, for a period of about twenty-five years, critical attention frequently fell into one of two camps. On the one hand were the critics who either praised or condemned what they perceived as the novel's subordination of aesthetic concerns for the sake of the narrative's message. Stephen Spender represented the former position in his review article for the New York Times Book Review: 'The Plague is parable and sermon, and should be considered as such. To criticize it by standards that apply to most fiction would be to risk condemning it for moralizing, which is exactly where it is strongest. The Plague stands or falls by its message' (1). Orville Prescott's evaluation in the Yale Review condemned the novel for the same moralizing signature: 'instead of writing about particular people [Camus] has written about people who are abstract symbols of various political and moral attitudes' (189). An entirely different type of criticism brought against The Plague found its most persuasivespokespersons,in Sartre and Barthes. Defending Francis Jeanson, a colleague who had writte:t:l a review of Camus's philosophical treatise The Rebel, to which Camus himselfrespondedharshly, Sartre wrote: UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 2, SPRING 1999 656 JOHN KRAPP in 1940, political choice confronted our fellow Frenchmen ... UeansonJ did not claim that the Resistance could have been easy, and, although he had not yet had the benefit of your lectures, he had just happened to have heard about the tortures, firing squads and deportations, about the reprisals which followed attacks, and the excruciating decisions they involved for the individual conscience ... But these problems arose from the action itself, and to understand them, one had to be already engaged in it. (75) Sartre was making a distinction between Camus's theoretical dedication to the principal of revolt against whatever might threaten the value of human lifeJ which Camus believed to be inviolableJ and the material consequences of defending that principle. To enforce this distinctionJ Sartre made direct reference to The Plague: You were fortunate in that the common fight against the Germans symbolizedJ in your eyes and ours, the union of all men against inhuman fatalities. By choosing injustice, the German, of his own accord, allied himself with the blind forces of nature, and in La Peste you were able to have his role played by microbes, without anyone getting the joke ... Thus, a concurrence of circumstances ... allowed you to conceal from yourself the fact that man's struggle against Nature is, at the same time the cause and effect of another struggle, equally old and pitiless, man's struggle againstman. You revolted against death, but in the iron belts which surround cities, other men revolted again [sic] social conditions which raised the toll of mortality. (97-98) Sartre's commentary introduced an evaluative vocabulary on which Barthes would draw several years later in his 1955 review'La Peste:Annales d'une epidemie ou roman de la solitude?' With...