‘As others feel pain in their lungs’: Albert Camus’s The Plague

Abstract

This is an account of reading Albert Camus's The Plague in the wake of various real-world epidemics, and from a place, South Africa, that emerges as a kind of mirror image of the north Africa in which the novel is set. It suggests that what seems at first like a simple story is in fact a deeply complex, even contradictory work: one that that absorbs and reflects back as much history and difficulty as the reader is willing to bring to it. While giving postcolonial critiques of the work their due, I explore how and why The Plague still holds energy and meaning for a 21^st-century audience.

Keywords:

• Albert Camus
• Algeria
• illness and its metaphors

Notes

1 All quotations are from the 2001 Penguin Modern Classics translation by Robin Buss, unless otherwise stated.

2 At one point we hear that ‘there is no finer place in the team than a midfielder’: ‘the centre-half is the one who positions the game and that’s what football is about’ (113). Though Camus himself took on the greater moral anguish of being goalie.

3 See Todd 155.

4 This formulation is adapted from Carroll (Camus the Algerian 55‒6).

5 Memmi’s line from Anthologie des écrivains français du Maghreb (1969) is used by Carroll as an epigraph (‘Camus’s Algeria’ 517).

My thanks to Jan Steyn for his help with translation.