Moral Reserve: Narrative Ethics and Aesthetic Principles in Camus’s La Peste

On the first reading of La Peste, the narrator is imagined as an anonymous figure who promises to reveal his identity “toujours à temps” (16). Through-out the narrative, however, the narrator betrays clues as to his identity and in the final chapter reveals that he is, as the reader may by then have come to suspect, Dr. Bernard Rieux. On a repeated reading it also becomes evident that Dr. Rieux’s narrative infringes on his own self-imposed principles of chronicle composition: objectivity, anonymity, and artlessness. This deviation from one’s own principle is thematized in the novel, and tellingly connects with deviations from individual principles and codes in several characters’ confrontation with the circumstances which befall them.

Edwin Moses, in “Functional Complexity: The Narrative Techniques of The Plague” (1974), argues, among other things, that Rieux’s flaws as a narrator enhance rather than reduce the overall effect of the novel (427). Laurence Porter’s “From Chronicle to Novel: Artistic Elaboration in Camus’s La Peste” (1983), continuing in Moses’s footsteps, focuses on the notion of “artistic elaboration” (591). Whereas Porter argued that “Camus avoids the mutual contagion of the esthetic and the moral” (593), John Krapp, in “Time and Ethics in The Plague” (2002), describes the relationship between these “contagions” as being one of the novel’s main dynamic qualities: “The work’s ethical and aesthetic dimensions [. . .] mask one another so that what appears to the reader is a series of tensions” (73). Yet Krapp’s aim to redeem the historical value of Camus’s novel often comes at the expense of other thematic elements in the novel’s repertoire.

The present analysis aims to examine more closely some of the techniques first identified by Moses—especially those that defy the narrative’s purported coherence and undermine its verisimilitude—in order to trace the gaps between the fictional chronicler’s purported narrative ethics and the aesthetic principles that Camus recorded in his journals. From this gap, I will argue, a dynamic of revising one’s own principles emerges as one of the novel’s recurrent theme, with characters undergoing extreme hardship modifying the principles that have guided their conduct.

A Narrative Ethics

Alongside telling us of an epidemic that supposedly strikes the French Algerian port city of Oran some time in the 1940s, Dr. Bernard Rieux, a fictional author of a chronicle, builds up his own narrative ethics. His narrative program takes the shape of explicit statements of aims, quasi-parenthetical asides, as well as preambles, clarifications, and reservations.

Rieux tells his reader when he feels “en mesure de dire” (84) one thing or another, when he is “persuadé” (85) of his narrative authority, and notifies them when he feels “mieux placé pour parler” (88) on behalf of others. He states which recorded views he does not share as well as what his view actually is, explains what is or is not “l’intention du narrateur” as well as when he is “plutôt tenté de croire” one thing or another (148–49). He acknowledges the moments when he is reporting what “le narrateur estime” (151) or “le narrateur croit” (213), when he is expressing “l’avis du narrateur” (156) rather than recording facts or the opinions or others, and when he “croit qu’il convient” to describe (185) one thing or another; he also notes when “on permettre au narrateur de justifier” (49) specific narrative details. When he finds “il faut bien parler” of things which he would perhaps have liked to skim over or skip, “le narrateur s’en excuse” (190)—continuing his account though “il sent bien le reproche,” though not without mentioning his only “justification” for doing so. He reports that “le narrateur sait parfaitement” (197–98) of the points on which his narrative does not conform to generic expectations.

Furthermore, since the chronicle is indeed largely limited to what he himself could directly witness or learn, references to briefly summarized events are accompanied by remarks that the narrator was “appelé ailleurs” (259) and that “le narrateur, par scrupule et par manque d’information directe, ne peut...