 Hi, my name is Monty Johnson. I teach philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. And this is the first of my lectures on Albert Camus, The Plague, La Peste, 1947. I'm using the translation of Stuart Gilbert, published in 1948. Now, to begin with, the overall structure of the work, it consists of five parts, which are of various lengths, and these parts are divided into chapters. Part one, which is an average-sized part, eight chapters, 63 pages in translation, explains that the book is a narrated chronicle of events that take place from mid-April to mid-February, sometime in the 1940s, of a plague that affected a French colony called Oran in North Africa. Initially, the citizens deny that this is happening, but that gives way to steadily growing unease and eventually panic. Plague, although its effects have already spread far and wide, is not officially declared and accepted by everyone until the very last line of this first part. The second part, by far the longest part, consisting of chapters 9 to 17, 97 pages, gives us the introductions to the characters and in-depth character descriptions of Ryo, the doctor who's leading the medical response, his friend Taro, who's a traveler who keeps a journal that the narrator uses in recounting the events, Rambar, a kind of hack journalist who just happens to be trapped in Oran because he was visiting there and who spends almost the entire novel trying to escape from it. Grand, an unassuming bureaucrat who proves himself constantly useful during the emergency, and Father Pantelou, a Jesuit priest and intellectual who at first treats the plague very abstractly and sermonizes about it as a punishment for religious indifference on the part of Oran's citizens. So, chapter 2 introduces all of those characters in their complexity by describing their initial reactions to the plague and the rapidly changing circumstances in the town. Then in part 3, which is a kind of pedestal of the whole work, center of the work, but the simplest and briefest part, the entire part just consists of one chapter that's 18 pages long, contains a graphic description of the treatment of mass death as a result of the plague in Oran. Part 4, quite substantial, 76 pages, chapters 19-25, is a collection of self revelations and descriptions of changes or transformations that the main characters undergo. Their perceptions of themselves, of their friends, of strangers, and of the world itself, including nature, are revealed and reflected and changed in various ways as a result of the plague. And part 5, the last 39 pages in translation, chapters 26-29, we get an end of the plague and resolution of the novel, a review of the main characters. Some of them have died, others have been profoundly changed but have lived, and others still remain essentially unchanged. So to begin with part 1, and the opening. The time is spring, April 16th to be specific, of some unspecified year in the 1940s. The narrator tells of unusual or extraordinary events in what he describes as a very usual or ordinary. He complains of how plain it is, a town called Oran, which is in Algeria, North Africa, on the southern coast of the Mediterranean. He describes the ordinariness of the town in great detail, but basically with respect to three kinds of themes. Number one, work. He describes them as a completely mercantilist and commercial and business-oriented people who are mostly focused on making money and absorbed with making money to the exclusion of almost everything else. He describes their attitudes about love, which he describes as basically thoughtless, either kind of young lust or bored, domesticated relationships, and then their approach to death, which seems to be even more thoughtless because it's just not in their view at all. They're too caught up with business. They have a perfunctory observation, even of its existence. Now, at this point, the calm and tranquility of the town corresponds to a lack of real feeling and kind of emotional detachment of the citizens due to their largely commercial preoccupations with money and businesses. And so we are to get a sense of a normal but uninspiring and unpassionate place. The narrator says that to some people, these events will seem quite natural to others all but incredible. And so that depends, apparently, on the reader and their situation. As for the narrator himself, the work is said to be a chronicle and a narrative, both, although it's not a strict chronicle. Some of the later chapters describe events that occur earlier than other chapters. And it is essentially a narrative, but a composite and often unlinear narrative that's been constructed afterwards out of the notes of several different people. In fact, it's not immediately clear who the narrator is. He doesn't reveal himself at the beginning, but says his identity will be made known in due course. Now, Oran in Algeria happens to have actually been the birthplace of Albert Campbell, and he lived there. But he is not a character in the work, and it would be facile to read any one of the characters as corresponding to his own views. The narrator claims that they are merely playing the part of an historian, and thus relying on hard data, of which he describes three kinds. His own view of things or autopsies, as it were, since the narrator turns out to be a surgeon. Second, other eyewitness accounts that are known to him through talking with some of the central people involved in the town and the plague. And third, documents that subsequently came into his hands, by which he seems to mean primarily the notes of his friend Taro, who was keeping a journal and describes many things in details, that it turns out the narrator comes into possession of because he dies of the plague towards the end. Now, the characters, over the next several slides I will introduce the characters. The first, perhaps most important, is the Doctor Rio, Doctor Bernard Rio, a practicing surgeon who's at the center of all the action. The narration begins when he sees a dead rat, and in the end is revealed that he is the narrator, and he introduces and concludes the entire work. His wife is set off on a train in the very beginning of the whole novel, going out of town to a mountain sanitarium for treatment for an unnamed serious illness. And Rio is remiss at her departure, but they pledge to each other to make a fresh start when she returns. In her place, Rio's mother has showed up to live with him while his wife is away. And we also learn of his friend Jean Taro in his young, idealistic friend, who's also a writer, keeping a kind of plague diary or journal of his travels or wanderings. That is, we learn consulted by Rio in constructing the overall narration of the novel. Now, the journalist Rambert, a major character, he's a former football player, turned journalist, kind of hack journalist from Paris, who's on assignment in Iran to report on conditions with local Arab population. And he is going to interview Rio about this. Rio explains to him that the conditions aren't good, but he hesitates to cooperate with Rambert because of doubts he has about Rambert's commitment to telling the uncompromised truth when it becomes clear that Rambert would not or could not do so and is not, in fact, an idealistic or courageous journalist. Rambert responds by comparing Rio to Saint-Just, a very problematic Jacobin leader of the reign of terror during the French Revolution. Rio ignores this comparison but describes himself in an important passage as sick and tired of the world that he lived in, though he has much liking for his fellow men, and he is the kind of person who had resolved to have no truck with injustice and compromises with the truth. So, his relationship with Rambert begins with tension and there's kind of tension throughout, but in part that's because one is very committed to the truth and to intellectual virtues, while the other is mostly motivated by his desires and emotions and is slow to use his reason to examine what he should do in the situation. Several other central characters include the priest, the bureaucrat and the criminal, the priest Father Pantelou, a learned and militant Jesuit who was highly thought of in the town, even in circles who were quite indifferent to religion. He's a serious man who gives two key sermons in the novel in the first one about how the plague is a punishment for sins, but then as he sees the innocent suffer due to it as well, his religious convictions are challenged. Joseph Grand, very interesting character, a clerk and a patient of Dr. Rios. He's also an aspiring writer who asks Rio to come to his building where he's just saved his neighbor who tried to hang himself. Grand is an enigmatic figure who has resigned himself to the life of a petty cleric and his austerity or asceticism protects him from anxiety so that he's able to maintain his tranquility even though he's eventually put in charge of keeping track of the mortality figures due to the plague which steadily rise. Now the person who he's just saved from hanging himself is his neighbor, Cotard, but Cotard doesn't even want the doctor to be brought in because he fears having to notify the police. Cotard begs Grand not to notify anyone. Rio agrees to ask the police to put off an inquiry into him and we later learn that the cause of Cotard's reluctance is the fact that he's a criminal fugitive who's hiding in Oran and was on the brink of suicide in order to escape his fear of punishment. Now most of part one is just a description of the growing uneasiness due to the plague as people initially deny and then slowly are forced to accept the reality of what's happening. It begins on April 16th when a porter becomes afflicted and has a terrible illness and a very brief remission from this illness. It's described in some detail before he has a crisis and then dies raving in the end about the rats whose existence in the very beginning of the novel he denies exist. So the affliction of this person known directly to Rio begins the entire set of tragic events, denial of the reality or existence of the very cause of the plague. Rio rings up the sanitary services, Mercier the man who's in charge of that department promises to get an order to deal with the problem, but evidently doesn't bother to actually follow through. So the bureaucracy kind of fails in its response. On April 18th, the evening papers are questioning whether the municipality has acted on the rat problem turns out that it had not. And so a meeting is later scheduled and a meeting in order to ends up issuing an order to get the sanitary services to finally act, but it describes a kind of plotting and bumbling response. Things thus worsen over the next several days with respect to the dead and dying rats to the point where people are literally stepping around and on them. So what they had initially considered stupid or obnoxious and didn't even want to talk about they begin to see as vaguely menacing. By April 28th panic sets in authorities are accused of slackness. Some people flee the town to their coastal summer homes, even though it's early in the season. And then it's announced that only a few rats were found so everybody breathes freely and thinks the problem is over. And to this point that we hear about Rio's ruminations over what's going on. In chapter five, we get a description of his personal thoughts about the possibility that the rats actually and the fleas indicate that there's a problem with plague once he starts to see these this unexplained illness. He sympathizes with townspeople who are going about their business and taking no notice of the plague and thinking it's too stupid, it can't last long, but points out that many stupid things do last very long. And so they went on doing their business, arranged for journeys, formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like the plague, which rules out any future cancels journeys, silences, the exchange of views, they fancy themselves free, and no one would ever be free so long as there are pestilences. So the first thing, one of the first reactions is this is affecting my freedom I reject that imposition on my freedom so I won't cooperate with not only the laws put in place to deal with it, but even the claim and the reality acknowledging the reality that it's happening. And Rio reflects on history and the horrible death toll due to plagues, such as those at Athens, which is described by Lucretius, who is explicitly mentioned on page 40. Plagues in China and Constantinople, Venice, London and so forth. But he says it's impossible to fathom how many deaths happen. And nobody takes these accounts seriously, even the historians that are interested in researching them have no direct acquaintance with the reality of plague. So at this point, there still seems to be hope that the plague can be stopped. And Rio just cannot imagine how it could affect such an unremarkable town. And so late in this part, he's still thinking that the plague might might not actually make much headway among the citizens, as he says. Now, this leads to a strange phenomenon, which is the kind of irrational denial of the plain facts of the situation. So beginning with Michel, the concierge of the building in which Rio lived, initially he denied there were dead rats, then he tried to blame them on kids or pranks. Then he develops symptoms of the plague but denies that they're anything serious. And as a result, he's the first one to die of the plague. Now, Rio also has an asthmatic Spanish patient who reveals that there's a lot of chatter in his poor neighborhood about dead rats. He's more realistic about the problem, but he never acts. He's just a patient, not an agent. He observes the events that are happening, but does nothing and can do nothing to change them. Othon, a police magistrate in a chance encounter with Rio, says, oh, the rats, that's nothing. And in a restaurant, he forbids his children to even mention the word rats. Later, his wife is quarantined due to the plague, but he refuses to stop taking his children out to public restaurants and so forth. And in the end, he is forced to, in a very vivid way to acknowledge finally the existence of the plague. Now, after consulting with colleagues and learning of about 20 deaths, Rio encourages the local medical board to put fresh cases into isolation wards. But the board says that only the prefect can do that, and so it fails to act. The prefect, in turn, tells another doctor to take prompt action if you like, but don't attract much attention. He personally convinced it's a false alarm, and so there is still dithering over the response to the plague among most of the officials. Another doctor, a colleague of Rio named Castel, tells Rio that he is convinced that the fever is plague. He'd actually witnessed it firsthand a long time ago in China, and even just 20 years ago he says in Paris. And he points out that people will insist that the plague has disappeared and refuse to accept the possibility that it can afflict them. This seems to be one of the symptoms of the plague is that people deny its reality. Everyone knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world, yet somehow we find it hard to believe in the ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise, Kamu writes. So it's the fact that we should have been able to predict. We knew it was coming. Officials warned us about it. Historians teach us about it. They describe it in vivid detail. Everybody knows it's real, knows it can happen. But whenever it does, somehow the human reaction is to deny its reality and to let it become a crisis such that characters are tested and lives that manage to survive it are changed forever. So by the end of part one, we finally have an acceptance of the reality of the situation. Even when the doctors meet there at first reluctant to accept the facts and even the willingness to call it the plague because it's clear that that would imply the need for very drastic action. And initially they embrace a kind of wait and see attitude. They entertain the idea that the epidemic could just stop spontaneously. But Rio insists that whether it's called plague or not, they must immediately enact severe prophylactic measures. The media doesn't however take the story up very quickly because it's a kind of invisible thing unlike the rats which were in your face. The invisible bullets of the plague aren't initially as newsworthy. Official notices posted around town don't have much effect. One had the feeling that many concessions had been made to a desire not to alarm the public, i.e. for the sake of political expediency. Even the doctor is mentally affected by the plague. On two occasions he enters crowded cafes like Cardard. He felt a need for friendly contacts, human warmth and so forth, which Kamu calls a stupid instinct. That is a stupid instinct to break the social distancing needed to slow the transmission of the plague. It quickly becomes clear that the measures that the officials have taken prove totally inadequate and the only hope is for a spontaneous disappearance or natural death of the disease itself. And so isolation wards quickly fill up. New measures have to be taken even with regard to burials. Doctors await the arrival of a new serum to combat the disease from a lab outside the city, but it will take a long time to synthesize to create any kind of medicine like a vaccine or serum that could avoid or inoculate or even cure the plague is just a distant hope. Eventually, the prefect is forced to act and to enact real quarantine measures. So part one ends with instructions coming from colonial administrators quote, proclaim a state of plague and close the town. By the time we read those words, this actually seems to be a kind of relief, almost like good news. As if reason is triumphing over the ignorance and incompetence so frustratingly depicted throughout this first section as we see the bungled responses to this crisis.