In Albert Camus's novels, we see the recurrent figure of the exile, of a man struggling to partake in society. Meursault and Rieux, in The Stranger and The Plague, respectively, display these struggles. Meursault deals with the death of his mother and struggles to find any meaning in his life, and therefore cannot use reason to defend it in court. Rieux must face a world of chaos and exile, attempting to maintain order through constant work and dealing with the unrewarding reality of life.
Albert Camus’ The Plague: a story for our, and all, times
The fascist ‘plague’ that inspired the novel may have gone, but 55 years after his death, many other varieties of pestilence keep this book urgently relevant
Ed Vulliamy
Mon 5 Jan 2015
Last modified on Wed 21 Aug 2019
Few writers kept their work as close to the subject of death as did Albert Camus, one of the greatest novelists and essayists of the 20th century, who met his own end in a road accident 55 years ago this week, on the Lyon-Paris Route Nationale 6.
Of all Camus’ novels, none described man’s confrontation – and cohabitation – with death so vividly and on such an epic scale as La Peste, translated as The Plague. Most of us read The Plague as teenagers, and we should all read it again. And again: for not only are all humankind’s responses to death represented in it, but now – with the advent of Ebola – the book works on the literal as well as metaphorical level.
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I
n our time of social distancing, the desire for physical contact has never been so intense. And yet we are untouchable. This experience has had its more conspicuous consequences, such as the government scientist Neil Ferguson breaking his own rules to meet his lover during lockdown. This notion of forbidden touch, unique and even shocking as it may be to us, has a multitude of echoes in literature. Cultural constraints and taboos on touch are reflected, overturned or used for dramatic purposes by writers throughout history, and our own bookshelves are newly rich with the comfort of identification. Who would have ever guessed that the plague-ridden, the apocalyptic or the edicts of Victorian England would have quite such resonance?
BY ALBERT CAMUS
AUGUST 9, 2013
Translated by Ryan Bloom
PART ONE
A.
A small painter’s studio. Three walls, one of which is, perhaps, made of glass. These panels must be mobile. The studio is shabby but contains some attractive objects: an antique, a beautiful pitcher, some drawings, an old copper vase, two or three pieces of old furniture with dirty, but handsomely made, wood. Above all, the light.
The end of coronavirus: what plague literature tells us about our future
From Thucydides to Camus, there are plenty of hopeful reminders that there’s nothing unprecedented about the coronavirus lockdown - and that pandemics do end
Marcel Theroux
Friday 1 May 2020
Shortly before the London lockdown, at an eerily quiet branch of Waterstones, I managed to get my hands on The Decameron, by Boccaccio,and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. But Camus’s The Plague had gone the way of dried pasta and toilet roll; there was just a desolate gap on the shelves where the copies had once been.
The primary lesson of plague literature, from Thucydides onwards, is how predictably humans respond to such crises. Over millennia, there has been a consistent pattern to behaviour during epidemics: the hoarding, the panicking, the fear, the blaming, the superstition, the selfishness, the surprising heroism, the fixation with the numbers of the reported dead, the boredom during quarantine.
Defoe would have recognised the impulses behind the strange tableaux of life interrupted in central London: piles of ice melting outside abruptly closed bars; a truck unloading gym equipment at an oligarch’s house in Mayfair; jittery shoppers with overloaded trolleys. “Many families,” he writes, “foreseeing the approach of the distemper laid up stores of provisions sufficient for their whole families, and shut themselves up, and that so entirely, that they were neither seen or heard of till the infection was quite ceased.”
The sudden, powerful need to know what’s coming is predictable, too. We turn to historical witnesses who can explain what it’s like. Defoe’s motive for writing A Journal of the Plague Year was an outbreak of bubonic plague in Marseille in 1720. Anticipating its spread, readers wanted to know what it had been like in 1665. Defoe, responding to demand, provided them with an instant book, fashioned out of statistics, reminiscences, gossip, anecdote and blood-curdling dramatic detail. “Passing through Token-House Yard in Lothbury, of a sudden a casement violently opened just over my head, and a woman gave three frightful screeches, and then cried, “O death, death, death!”
Bring out your dead ... a depiction of the Great Plague in London, 1665.
Defoe almost certainly didn’t witness this – he would have been about five. Novelistic moments such as these would make the book compelling at any time, but right now it has a painful relevance. Defoe is particularly strong on the unpreparedness and prevarication that made the impact of the plague more severe. Or, as he puts it: “I often reflected upon the unprovided condition that the whole body of the people were in at the first coming of this calamity upon them; and how it was for want of timely entering into measures and managements, as well public as private, that all the confusions that followed were brought upon us, and that such a prodigious number of people sunk in that disaster which, if proper steps had been taken, might, Providence concurring, have been avoided.”
Bracingly vivid ... Daniel Defoe’s religious fanatic Solomon Eagle from A Journal of the Plague Year. Photograph: Colin Waters/Alamy
Defoe is sometimes dismissed as a hack, but his lack of vanity about his prose is one of the things that gives the book its power. There’s something amazingly bracing about his vividness and curiosity – the bills of mortality, quoted in full; minor characters such as the religious fanatic Solomon Eagle who walks around naked with a pan of burning charcoal on his head; and the imprudent John Cock, a barber who is so relieved by the apparent retreat of the epidemic that he returns to normal life too soon and pays the penalty. Moral: don’t be a John Cock.
So much of the behaviour of our 17th-century forebears is uncomfortably familiar. The citizens of east London watch complacently as the plague tears through the West End, and assume they will be fine. They’re proved terrifyingly wrong. Defoe adds in a chilling parenthesis: “For indeed it came upon them like an armed man when it did come.”
Even before germ theory, Defoe’s common sense and perceptiveness lead him to conclusions of which our chief medical officer would approve. He gives a prescient warning about the danger of asymptomatic carriers: “The plague is not to be avoided by those that converse promiscuously in a town infected, and people have it when they know it not, and that they likewise give it to others when they know not that they have it themselves.”
If human behaviour remains dismayingly constant, one thing that has changed for the better is science and our understanding of it. Seven hundred years on, there’s something deeply poignant about Boccaccio’s pre-scientific description of the spread of the Black Death in his native Florence. “What was particularly virulent about this plague was that it would leap from the sick to the healthy whenever they were together, much as fire catches hold of dry or oily material that’s brought close to it. And that was not all. Not only did speaking with the sick and spending time with them infect the healthy or kill them off, but touching the clothes of the sick or handling anything they had touched seemed to pass on the infection.” You feel like the audience in a pantomime, wanting to shout across the centuries and tell him who the villain is and how he operates.
‘There was particularly high mortality among doctors,’ Thucydides tells of the plague in fifth-century Athens. Photograph: Science History
Not everyone responds to plague by immersing themselves in data about epidemics. The escapist response to disaster is another predictable move and The Decameron epitomises it. After his short but terrifying description of the Florentine plague, Boccaccio sends his troupe of young characters into quarantine, where they spend the remainder of the book, swapping funny, ribald stories: the plague doesn’t feature again. It’s a welcome relief to lose yourself in a world of cuckolds and randy nuns. And once more, plus ça change. The gilded Florentine youths are doing the 14th-century equivalent of binge-watching Sex Education on Netflix.
Thomas Mann and Camus are less interested in plague itself than in using it to make existential points. The plague in Death in Venice is an avatar of death in general, the terrible mystery, the pale horse; it is something that strips away vanity and reveals unpalatable truths. In Mann’s novella, it is the catalyst for Von Aschenbach’s humiliating descent into clownish self-destruction. At the same time, the pages dealing with the cholera epidemic are vigorous and apposite. The hotels in Venice empty swiftly, despite official protestations that there is nothing to worry about. It’s a young English travel agent who finally cuts through the official flannel. The doubts he raises about administrative competence and probity are ones that in due course we’ll all be obliged to consider. “‘That is,’ he continued in an undertone and with some feeling, ‘the official explanation, which the authorities here have seen fit to stick to.’”
FacebookTwitterPinterestExistential epidemic ... a scene from Neil Bartlett’s adaptation of Camus’ The Plague at the Arcola theatre, London, in 2017. Photograph: Jane Hobson/Rex/Shutterstock
Camus is the real odd one out. The Plague is often read as an allegory of the French experience under occupation, but right now there seems nothing allegorical about it: the hero, Dr Rieux, seems like a naturalistic depiction of a frontline care-worker forced into impossible decisions over who gets a ventilator. At other historical moments, the constant reflection on the meaning of the plague could seem heavy-handed – Gallic, not in a good way – but in 2020 it’s like reading The Cruciblewhile your elderly parent is on trial for witchcraft. For long stretches, you forget any notion of allegory and simply wonder how Camus could have got it so right: from the panic buying of peppermints that people think will be a prophylactic, to the high mortality rate in the municipal jail, to the exhausted healthcare workers, and the terrible monotony of quarantine, something with which we are only just beginning to get acquainted.
And then, of course, the plague ends. That’s the actual good news that these books bring. The epidemic always passes. The majority of people survive. Thucydides himself had it and recovered. “I shall simply tell it as it happened,” he promises of the plague that ravaged fifth-century Athens, “and describe the features of the disease which will give anyone who studies them some prior knowledge to enable recognition should it ever strike again.”
Should it ever strike again is the phrase that awakens our sense of hubris. For all the talk of an unprecedented crisis, we are living through something with many precedents. “There was particularly high mortality among doctors because of their particular exposure,” Thucydides wrote 2,500 years ago in a sentence that could appear in tomorrow’s paper. We have assumed that deadly epidemics belonged to a phase of history that was behind us, as quaint and irrelevant as candlelight and milking your own cows.
When the number of fatalities finally peaks and dwindles, Defoe’s citizens pull up their windows and shout to each other to share the news. Camus’s Oran is liberated; its citizens struggle to make sense of what has happened to them. Back in fifth-century Athens, the Peloponnesian war continues. Whether society changes for the better or worse, or simply stays the same, is what we will find out.
Why does Camus’s famous work have two different titles? Alice Kaplan explores a transatlantic mystery
Alice Kaplan
Fri 14 Oct 2016
The Outsider or The Stranger: the right title for the English language translation of Albert Camus’s 1942 classic, L’Étranger, isn’t obvious. Choosing a title is among the most important decisions a literary translator must make. It is hard to sum up a writer’s work in a new language, and once a title is on the cover, readers start to know the book by that name. An étrangercan mean a foreign national, an alienated outsider or an unfamiliar traveller. So why has the novel always been called The Stranger in American editions, and The Outsider in British ones? The two titles tempt us to fill in the blank with cultural or political theories. We could imagine, for example, that in the melting pot of New York, the immigrant publishing firm Knopf had a sense of foreignness that directed them towards The Stranger, whereas the English publisher Hamish Hamilton, in class conscious Britain, was more aware of social exclusion – hence The Outsider. Both theories, however, are wrong.
By 1946, the war in Europe had been over for a year, enough time for English language publishers to begin thinking about what literature published in Nazi-occupied Europe was worth translating. Blanche Knopf, who founded Knopf with her husband Alfred in 1915, considered translations of contemporary European literature central to her list. She had been cut off from France during the war, but by February 1945 she was back in touch with Jenny Bradley, her agent in Paris. Jean-Paul Sartre had lauded a new Camus novel called The Plague in a lecture he gave at Harvard in 1945, and word of its young author reached her. Blanche Knopf cabled Paris, asking to see the book, which was still in manuscript. La Peste, with its link to the suffering and heroism of France during the German occupation, was bound to make a splash, and she understood that Knopf might also have to buy L’Étranger in order to get La Peste, which she considered a more exciting and relevant book. Alfred Knopf cabled Bradley in February, but Camus hadn’t yet finished The Plague. Knopf hesitated. In March 1945, he made an offer of $350 for translation rights on The Stranger, with an option to buy rights for The Plague when it was finished.
Albert Camjus
The British were more enthusiastic than the Americans. Cyril Connolly, the magazine editor and influential literary critic, as feisty and eccentric in his own way as the irrepressible Knopf, had stated in his 1930s book, The Unquiet Grave, that the European novel was a wasteland, consumed by its own formalism. He saw a whole new start for fiction in Camus’s stark, violent, Algerian tale, which seemed to speak directly to a Britain about to begin the process of decolonisation. Connolly brought The Strangerimmediately to the attention of publisher Jamie Hamilton, who purchased British rights from Gallimard in February 1945, with an advance of £75. Hamilton asked Connolly to write an introduction. Hamilton also chose the translator, Stuart Gilbert, a friend of James Joyce who had a good track record translating novels like Man’s Fate by André Malraux. Knopf and Hamilton agreed to share translation costs.
Albert Camus
Gilbert worked fast. By September 1945, he’d sent his complete manuscript to Knopf and Hamilton with instructions and a title, The Stranger. On 10 January 1946, Hamilton sent bound, typeset pages of the translation to Blanche Knopf in New York.
But there was a bombshell in his letter, the announcement of a fait accompli: “I send you herewith a set of corrected galleys of Camus’s L’Étranger, which we have decided to call The Outsider, both because we consider this a more striking and appropriate title than The Stranger, and because Hutchinson’s recently called one of their Russian novels The Stranger.”
In 1945, Hutchinson’s, a rival British publisher, released the translation of what was actually a Polish novel, Maria Kuncewiczowa’s Cudzoziemka, which they had unfortunately entitled The Stranger. At the New York end it was too late to change the title of Camus’s book – Knopf had already typeset it for themselves so that it could be available for the author’s visit to New York in April. The Stranger was printed on the title page, the headers and the spine. They couldn’t redo it.
Blanche Knopf responded tersely to Hamilton’s announcement: “I had assumed when I received the manuscript, because it had instructions on it from Stuart Gilbert, it was setting copy, we read it very carefully and made any necessary corrections. Certainly if I had known there was a chance of corrected galleys, I would not have set, and wish you might have cabled me the new title, which I can well understand your using.”
Hamilton hadn’t cabled; nor had he telephoned. The two publishers may have shared the English language but they were separated by a vast ocean and very different expectations. In London, it hadn’t occurred to Hamilton that Knopf would go to the trouble of producing the book separately. Was Hamilton being patronising? Was Knopf being presumptuous? The combination of an assumption for control on the British side, and an assumption of independence on the American side, make for a fine allegory of British-American relations going back to the revolution that separated us.
Readers were never informed that the two titles were an accident, and for years, no one has been able to explain why Camus’s L’Étranger is sometimes The Stranger, sometimes The Outsider. And while political questions were not part of the original decision, the titles do resonate differently and lend themselves to conflicting political interpretations. An Algerian critic argued recently, in a review of Sandra Smith’s 2013 translation of L’Étranger, that the title The Outsider is politically scandalous, for it effaces the ambiguity in the French word “étranger” and substitutes a more banal idea of someone being “excluded”. He thought Smith’s 2013 title was new – not realising that the British have used it since 1946.
In the end, I prefer The Stranger to The Outsider. Yet Meursault, the narrator of the novel, is not a foreigner; he is a Frenchman in colonial Algiers, a “petit colon”, and his strangeness is more like the strangeness of an outsider than the strangeness of an alien. So I question my own preference. I wonder if I like The Stranger simply because it’s the title I’m used to. How many readers flinched when Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past became, in a new Viking translation, In Search of Lost Time, even though this is a more direct translation? Then there’s Dostoevsky – The Possessed, The Devils, The Demons – what difference does it make?
Whether the titles of translated works sound familiar or foreign, whether they are literal renderings or poetic departures, their fate is unpredictable. L’Étranger has sold millions of copies in Britain and the US. Kuncewiczowa’s The Stranger, the hidden cause of L’Étranger’s two titles, is still considered a masterpiece in Poland. But the English translation is no longer in print.
• Alice Kaplan’s Looking for The Outsider: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic is published by University of Chicago.
IT WAS THE dead of winter and yet a radiant sun was rising over the already active city. At the end of the jetty, sea and sky fused in a single dazzling light. But Yvars did not see them. He was cycling slowly along the boulevards above the harbor. On the fixed pedal of his cycle his crippled leg rested stiffly while the other labored to cope with the slippery pavement still wet with the night’s moisture. Without raising his head, a slight figure astride the saddle, he avoided the rails of the former car-line, suddenly turned the handlebars to let autos pass him, and occasionally elbowed back into place the musette bag in which Fernande had put his lunch. At such moments he would think bitterly of the bag’s contents. Between the two slices of coarse bread, instead of the Spanish omelet he liked or the beefsteak fried in oil, there was nothing but cheese.