Bring Out Your Dead! Camus' The Plague

I recently read Albert Camus' novel The Plague. To give a brief synopsis, the bubonic plague breaks out in a modern city in north Africa (presumably Camus' native Algeria), and the quarantined residents grapple with their fear of infection and death, separation from their loved ones, exile from the outside world, and questions of faith and science (or, faith in science).



Although a novel about a devastating epidemic is fitting for this season of swine flu, what struck me most was the theme of how love changes with different circumstances. For many of the residents trapped behind the barricades, their primary concern is reuniting with absent loved ones. They are so monomaniacal about this goal that the desire to find a way around the barricades soon outweighs their desire for the loved person. This happened to the character Rambert, a reporter from Paris who happened to be in the city at the time of the outbreak, depserate to get back to his wife in France. For weeks, he was consumed by his plans for escape and realized that, the entire time he was plotting out the details with two guards, he had not thought about his wife at all. This distressed him somewhat and caused him to reflect. And then he decided that there was something more important than love within the walls of the city; he had a responsibility to fight the plague, to give his all to combat the disease and help its victims. The happiness of reuniting with his wife would be forever tarnished by the shame of abandoning the people he could have saved.



While reading this book, I was struck by how many obstacles threaten to render love impossible, or to change it irrevocably. Another character, the one I found the most tragic of all, was an old man, Grand. He reveals to the protagonist, Dr. Rieux, that he had married when he was just a teenager, but because he was poor and couldn't manage to advance in rank in his profession, he neglected his wife. Although he loved her very much, and even loves her now all these years later, he was too preoccupied with the dire state of his finances to show her that he loved her. To even tell her that. It soon became something that he couldn't find the words to say because it had gone unsaid for too long. She left him; he tells Rieux that no passion can withstand the strain of poverty.



Dr. Rieux cannot say "I love you" to his elderly mother, nor can she say it to him; Dr. Rieux explains that his sentiments cannot live up to the lofty phrase. They can only express their affection and care for each other in actions, or indirect phrases like, "how are you feeling?"



Illness, finances, the stresses and obligations of daily life all pose a threat to the delicate existence and expression of love. Even when Rambert is finally reunited with his wife in the end, he feels distant from her, as though she can never regain that central position in his life now that he has chosen the plague over her. In this novel, love is such a fragile and fleeting state, and it's essentially not the driving force behind our relationships. Rather, a fear of death, a need for human warmth and companionship in the face of the plague, defines relationships and incites people to seek out the company of others.



I don't think that I agree with Camus on that, but I do think it's worth contemplating the fragility of love, and how words fit into the experience of love. Would Grand's marriage have lasted if he could have found his words, or was it doomed from the start? Is Rieux right in saying that the sentiment of love can never live up to the word assigned to describe it?