Ep. 244: Camus on Strategies for Facing Plague (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: So maybe we should move to Grand. What's his first name?

0:03 Wes: I don't know. Do we ever get his first name?

0:06 Mark: Monsieur Grand? Yeah, Grand. He's an older gentleman. Somebody else want to give more of his story?

0:13 Wes: Where do we first meet him?

0:14 Mark: Well, it's when he's just saved Cottard from committing suicide.

0:18 Dylan: They live in the same building together.

0:19 Unknown speaker: Right.

0:19 Wes: So Grand is a municipal office clerk. So he'll end up doing a lot of stuff with the death counts and the statistics too. Stuff that actually, you know, we've, with the coronavirus, become pretty familiar with. In fact, there are lots of things in this novel that are very resonant, but we'll get to that later. So Grand, it turns out, is calling not because of his typical health problem, which is a constriction of the aorta that Rieux sees him for regularly, but because Cottard, his neighbor, has tried to kill himself. So that's the first time we see Grand.

And then as the novel goes on, this is kind of the way things go in general. Because of the plague, Rieux gets close to people that he actually had more of an acquaintanceship with or more of a doctor patient relationship with. So it's over the course of the novel that he'll learn Grand's story, which is that he was in love, he had a wife, he was left by that wife. You guys can fill in more details and I'm forgetting it at some point.

1:14 Mark: Well, I think it was because of his crappy job that he couldn't. He took this lower level clerk position with the promise of rise. But then like the person who made that promise left and he just never. He Talks about how he just can't find his words, he can't stick up for himself. And so this grind, you know, for this low wage steadily drove the love out of his marriage that he just wasn't giving. He was not making her feel loved enough. And so she left. But he seems usually okay about that. This is many years later, or at least, you know, his concern about that seems to be that she doesn't feel guilty for leaving him at this point, you know, that she probably looks back on the whole thing with regret.

But the most of what we get of their interaction with grand is the thing that Seth was complaining about, which is that he whiles away his time after he goes home very intently. Working on this novel, though, we find that it's really like the same few

2:08 Dylan: paragraphs, the same first line, isn't it? It's like one line. He can't get past the first line.

2:14 Mark: That's all he talks to them about. But when they actually get the document in their hands at the end and burn it when he thinks he's gonna die, it ends up being 50 pages. It's not all just the first line. It's not all work and no play make Jack a dull boy. It's not that kind of.

2:27 Wes: It is all just the first line.

2:28 Dylan: Yeah, I thought it was just crossed out over and over again, rewritten over and over again, the same first line. That's what I thought.

2:34 Wes: Let's go to that point, because I think we should figure out, since Seth posed this challenge early on, we'll figure out what this means.

2:40 Mark: But let me just read the quote, though, from page two through 37. When they actually get the manuscript in hand, he's talked to them about it, and he's read them this first line and how he's working on it. Glancing through them, Rieux saw that the bulk of the writing consisted of the same sentence written again and again with small variants, simplifications, or elaborations. I was interpreting the bulk as not quite as psychotic as you guys were.

3:02 Wes: It's around the middle of the novel that we first, or a little before the middle of the novel, that we learn what this line is. Because he talks to them about it. He's confided about his wife, and then he says, well, luckily, I've been working on this project. You know, I have that now. And the line is, one fine morning in the month of May, an elegant young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne. He's very worried about getting all the words right. So he's changing a word here and there. And apparently he spent, I don't know if it's years, God knows how much time he spent on this first sentence and just tweaking words here and there. What does this say about him? And what's the point of this being in the novel? I guess that's our task here.

3:49 Mark: Now is this Sisyphusian rock. He likes it. It's not like pushing the rock. He likes doing it.

3:56 Seth: Camus makes a point of the narrator, sorry, makes a point of saying how he struggles with language. He struggles with words. He always struggles to find the right thing to say. And it's unclear to me, I don't recall if it's indicative of an educational or a lack of intelligence or something like that, but he's always pausing to try to find the right way to say something or to find the right way to articulate or even struggles to find the words. And the novel is. Is just a magnified representation of that. By the way, I'm going to say very early on, in the first time that he reveals the sentence, I made the call that he should drop the adjectives. So I was able to. I picked that part out of the plot anyway, just like I also predicted.

4:43 Mark: Spoiler alert.

4:44 Seth: Spoiler alert.

4:45 Mark: Gets rid of the adjectives.

4:46 Seth: The plague ebbs. His obsession with language is one thing that I'm sure Wes has paid a lot more attention to than I did. But his relationship to the novel is really, if we're going to read it through the existentialist lenses, he's fixated on playing some kind of a game with language in the sense that he's trying to find this perfect. He's struggling over what, as opposed to just the doing of the writing. Write the book, try to get it published and take action. And instead it's almost a self indulgent obsession. You know, initially he. He won't share it with anybody.

And then when he does, he's talking about, well, Rieux has to actually correct him, right? That the description he uses of the horse is actually a color. And that, you know, after he says, should I say that the horse is black as well? He didn't even understand the words he was using. It represents a certain kind of. It's a distraction from trying to create meaning in life. And in fact, Grand's great movement. And the reason why he's partially, at least in some of the extra commentaries I read, the hero of the book is that he Breaks free of this self isolation and obsession to actually act in the world with other human beings and to struggle against the virus, the bacillus.

6:04 Mark: It's not a virus. It's alive.

6:06 Seth: Sorry, I'm preoccupied with what's going on around us.

6:12 Wes: It seems like this started after he lost his wife, after she left him. Right. So this is his way of responding to that loss instead of grieving it properly. He's developed this obsession. And then there's this fantasy that once it's published, someone's going to tip their hat, say, hats off, gentlemen, or something like that. He wants an outlet for his love, he wants an outlet for his creativity. But he's stuck. And that's not something that's uncommon. It's not as dramatic, but it's not uncommon for people to be stuck in this particular way and especially in this particular type of repetition.

And Seth, your use of the word viral is kind of spot on because it's this type of deathlike, mindless repetition that enters into life. And it's one of the factors that creates the kind of shallow, ordinary living that the narrator describes at the beginning of the novel, in which one moment just sort of infects the next. What's shallow about life is just sort of the mindless repetition of it and the ways in which that prevents people from truly loving or from truly being engaged, let's say, with other people, taking other people for granted and so on.

So I think even though this dramatizes that predicament, this is actually a predicament that's common to humanity and is part of the metaphorical plague that afflicts us even before this and afflicts the townspeople of Oran even before the literal plague arrives. And it involves the same thing. It involves replication and infection. It's just the type of replication infection that bleeds life of its vitality.

8:00 Seth: That's a good point, Wes. And actually, in saying that, you made me think, you know, one of the major themes of the novel is the shift from Camus's at some point or the narrator that was put into an immediate state of exile because of their solitary confinement. They were essentially exiled from the community and from the ones they loved and what have you, and the evolution of their response from this kind of selfish woe is me or trying to exploit it. And this notion of exile is the move towards a community response where they recognize that they're all in it together and everybody is level before death and that classes don't matter and so forth.

And what you just said makes me Think that the opening move for grand is in essence a selfless one. That he's not calling the doctor with his aortic thing or, you know, calling him to have a conversation about this secret pastime that he does in the evenings. But it's actually concern for another. There's essentially already that spark or that hint in him that he has the capability for other directedness and selflessness that he'll ultimately demonstrate. But it's funny, it wasn't until you just spoke that I actually thought about that as a virtue in the initial phases of the novel.

9:15 Mark: I didn't know before reading this that, well, he's described as having all the attributes of insignificance. But that's right after they say Grand has no upper teeth. So I did not know that having

9:26 Seth: no upper front teeth means you are of no significance.

9:29 Mark: That doesn't sound insignificant. It sounds scary to me.

9:33 Wes: Well, as in being lower class, probably.

9:35 Dylan: Yeah. A sign of being poor, though. He himself has a job and he's not indigent or anything like that.

9:41 Mark: Well, yeah, we should then. So the guy he was helping Cottard is very interesting. Everybody else seems like you could describe him as a hero. Right. But Cottard is too messed up for that.

9:52 Dylan: He's the only one that seems to be thriving and in fact prefer the plague and is upset about the plague going away.

10:04 Wes: Say why that is.

10:05 Dylan: It wasn't completely clear to me exactly why it was, except for the part where he's basically profiting off of it.

10:11 Seth: That's exactly the reason.

10:13 Wes: Well, no, he's done something wrong, right? Yeah, he's committed a crime, or at least he thinks he has and he thinks he's wanted for that crime.

10:22 Dylan: So that part of it was that suspicion was clear enough with him, where he was at the end. He's constantly worried about the way in which things are going to get back to normal. And when the machinery of administration, government start coming back around, he's really worried about that. Did I just miss it or was it just. Is it left unstated what his crime was, what he did wrong?

10:46 Wes: It's left unstated. I mean, the closest we get to an indication of that is when he runs out of the tobacconist shop, this tobacconist woman who's a nightmare, apparently. And a gossip says something about an Algerian, someone who's been murdered on the beach. And Cottard's like, oh, I'm out of here. And it's unclear whether he's just uncomfortable with the whole idea of people talking about crime and culpability. Or if he's responsible for that murder. Because later on he's gonna say, it's not a murder, it's something, but it's not a murder. I'd done something wrong. People are after me. You get the impression that it could just be entirely in his imagination, especially since he goes nuts at the end of the novel. It could just be purely his paranoia.

11:25 Seth: That put me in mind of Harry Lime from the Third Man.

11:29 Wes: If you guys know, I don't explain that for. It's been so long.

11:33 Seth: Oh, it's that Orson Welles movie. Basically, in Post World War II Vienna, when it's all cordoned off. This American is looking for this guy he knows named Harry Lime. And Harry Lime is an elusive character. He's in the black market and he buys and sells medications that by doing so he's depriving people who need that medicine. He's selling it at a profit when it's supposed to be delivered, you know, to. And so kids are getting, you know, typhoid and stuff like that. And I thought of Cottard as that kind of a character where maybe he didn't directly murder somebody, but he's.

We know he's a smuggler. That comes out. And later on in the book. And my reading of it was the implication is that somehow his smuggling related activities, particularly right. Since the wars just ended. And I think in one of the commentaries I read, there's a suggestion that he was almost a collaborator doing business with the Nazis and that. So it's possible that that's the implication.

12:31 Dylan: My read of it was that because it's also never stated exactly why he tries to commit suicide, but that whatever it was that he was involved with, it was central to why he tried to commit suicide earlier. He's trying to avoid something.

12:48 Wes: Yeah. And he says that actually that's in a conversation.

12:51 Mark: Eventually. Yeah. He doesn't for a long time does not admit that. And he does, you know, he's friends with all the characters and he hangs around with them and he invites them out. He gets much. Apparently he's very antisocial at the beginning of the story, but as this play comes and his whole personality changes and for some reason someone Tarrou is very interested in. Does that mean he's a saint? I don't think so. But Tarrou says the only thing that he holds Cottard guilty of is collaborating with the plague, essentially that he wants the plague to continue. That he's the only one that since his life in normal circumstances did not seem worth living, at least and then that catches up with him at the very end that he basically. He's taken away.

13:34 Wes: Right.

13:34 Mark: But he tries to kind of kill himself by cop. That's how I was interpreting it. He got pissed off by something. People talking on the street. And he holds himself up and he shoots a dog right in front of us. So there's no way we can like that character anymore.

13:48 Seth: Yeah.

13:48 Wes: Well, we get the sense because there's an earlier scene in which detectives are looking for him.

13:52 Mark: Right.

13:52 Wes: And he flees.

13:53 Mark: Did they identify them as detectives? That's what I wasn't sure.

13:56 Seth: Government. Their government.

13:58 Wes: I think all this is purposefully ambiguous so that we can wonder whether it's all on his head or not.

14:04 Mark: His overdue library books.

14:05 Wes: Yeah. Or more of his suicide inquiry or something like that. But yeah, he's created this situation in the end where he's. Whether it's because people have come looking for him to arrest him or whether it's just because that was in his imagination and he started all of this. Yeah. We get a final shootout at the end and then he's dragged off.

14:24 Mark: Do we think that's a coincidence that that's after Tarrou is dead, that maybe Tarrou, who is shown as at least taking a lot of interest in him, you know, and writing a lot about him in Cottard in his journal, that once Tarrou is dead at the beginning of the final book, then that's the mooring that maybe that was part of. Everybody else says that he's kind of turned a cold shoulder to them.

14:46 Dylan: I didn't take it as being somehow that Cottard went off the end because of Tarrou's death as a character, but that it Tarrou dies is sort of the last great casualty of the plague. And the timing is basically the plague has ended and that's why Cottard goes crazy. And so it's just a kind of coincidence of timing that's happening.

15:11 Mark: Yeah. I wasn't sure in terms of like, could he have prevented that if Tarrou was still around? If Tarrou is representing some kind of saintly figure that with his charisma was holding everybody together. He's the one that got the sanitary squads together. It was. Even though it's under Rieux's direction. Rieux is kind of a busy, straight laced doctor and could not rally the troops in that way.

15:31 Dylan: I mean, I know that all five of them know each other. I got the sense that Tarrou and Rieux were the ones who were most interacting with one another. And then they have that rooftop scene where Tarrou says Can we talk together as friends? And has his big speech and that grand and Cottard are neighbors and that they are sort of the two that hang out together and Rambert is sort of around and they know each other. But I didn't get the sense that I didn't see Rieux be like close with Cottard at all.

16:04 Wes: They went to the opera together.

16:06 Dylan: Oh, maybe I'm just wrong about that.

16:09 Wes: I mean, we get a lot of. The account we get of Cottard is actually by Tarrou. It's in his narrative.

16:15 Mark: But I think you're right that Grand is sort of his immediate connection.

16:19 Wes: Yeah. And I think you're right, I wouldn't describe them as close. You know, I think you're right in that sense. I don't think Cottard is really close to anyone. He's not capable of that.

16:28 Mark: So other than the obvious irony of his being cheerful, Cottard's being cheerful during the plague. Like what philosophically are we supposed to get out of this character? Like, he doesn't seem to represent one of the logical ways of dealing with things. It's just more. Yeah, some people actually would thrive in this because they're regular, you know, it seems like there's nothing more to read into it than that. But what did you guys think?

16:51 Wes: Well, he might be the subman, right? He might be to Beauvoirs, something like the subman. But I think he's the only one who doesn't take part in the sanitary squads, I think, or in some other effort related to combating the plague. And he's preoccupied with himself and with what could be paranoid, delusional fantasies. And then in selfish, what's it called, smuggling, he's utterly self interested. And I think that is depicted as being a consequence of his fear of his persecutory anxiety, the idea that other people are out to get him and that he needs to just take care of himself.

17:35 Dylan: One way to ask the question is to what extent are the characters representative of large swaths of people? Is Cottard that sort of self absorbed character supposed to be by implication the way lots of people are? Or Tarrou, the guy who comes along and takes charge of the sanitary squads under Rieux's guidance? Is that the way most people are or is that not the right way to think about the division of the personalities?

18:08 Wes: I think the characters are actually well developed and subtle and so they're not merely just representatives of parts of psyche or as representatives of general types or anything like that. On the other hand, I do think that Cottard, I see as someone who's paranoid, essentially. And I think it's a very recognizable trait in other people. I mean, I don't know. Have you guys not met Cottards in your life? Oh, sure, yeah. Just as a matter of character, as a matter of what's going on with him psychically, I think you could say. Yeah, this is very common.

Although the novel itself is quite optimistic about human beings. And there's all that talk, right, against heroism and in favor of the idea that it's the whole two plus two equals four idea. It's not the only time I was reminded of 1984 in this. Actually, there's nothing enormously, and this is Rieux's reflection on grand, but the idea that you could have a hero who's just sort of an ordinary person with problems, and that heroism isn't even really the point, that there's nothing especially praiseworthy about doing what's right. It's more about a matter of knowing what's right.

And it's in the same way that you would know that two plus two equals four.

19:24 Mark: That quote is on 120. On mine, Rieux is saying this. We do not congratulate a schoolmaster on teaching that two and two make four, though we may perhaps congratulate him on having chosen his laudable vocation. Let us say then, it was praiseworthy that Tarrou and so many others should have elected to prove that 2 and 2 make 4 rather than the contrary. But let us add that this goodwill of theirs is one that is shared by the schoolmaster and by all who have the same feelings as the schoolmaster. And be it said to the credit of mankind, they are more numerous than one would think such anyhow, is the narrator's conviction needless to say. He can see quite clearly a point that could be made against him, which is that these men were risking their lives. But again and again, there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that 2 and 2 make 4 is punished with death.

20:05 Wes: I brought that up just because, I think, despite the fact that there are plenty of Cottards in the world, I don't think the novel is, you know, as that passage reveals, the novel is more optimistic about human beings and their ethical capacities.

20:18 Mark: So a minor character that we brought up is this Othon, the magistrate. Just that the obvious kind of narrative thing near the beginning is that the town denies that this is really plague or is slow to accept that things have to actually change. There's such a habitual nature that towns have, that human nature has that There's Rieux and there's two other doctors that are involved. They have to kind of go through a lot of red tape to get this magistrate to actually do anything. Or the magistrate claims he doesn't have power. So he starts off as kind of a, I don't know, irresponsible, just generic functionary.

And then by the end, after his son has died and he's been quarantined himself in this isolation camp, running the camp while he's in there. And then when his kind of time's quarantined has come up, then he voluntarily goes back into it. So, you know, like Rambert and these other characters are that are taking on the plague most directly. This guy goes back into the worst place. Like worse than the characters that we deal with spend much time in at all. I think it's just Tarrou goes on a tour of one of them at some point so we get a little glimpse of how horrible it is.

You know, it sounds like a concentration camp, the way they talk about it.

21:29 Dylan: I think that the way in which the magistrate as a sort of public functionary is one of the recurring but sort of minor themes in the whole book is this kind of grind against official organization. And so the times where government or journalism, you know, newspapers would fall on the same thing. They're all part of a kind of mess of half truths about the world. And in some ways it's part of the things that you can't change, like the plague. And you have to figure out how to live with it. And are constantly struggling against it and sometimes suffering from it.

And as magistrate and the way in which the outside world is dealing with the plague and falls into that category and then the times when that's overcome are on cases of individuals who. Or small groups of people who take it upon themselves to do the work that the organization itself can't. And I mean, to me, I just read it as a kind of constant grind on Camus part against large organization that it's just will always fail or be sort of slow and part of the problem.

22:47 Mark: I was thinking a lot about the efficiency of fascism through some of this as it gets going. At some point he talks about the inertia of these government agencies continue to do what they've been designed to do, even though it doesn't make any sense for them to do that. Like, as you say, you know, it's a very deadening red tape kind of thing. But by the time we get really into the book and they're talking about the way that the mass graves and sort of one of the picturesque parts, you know, when Rieux is considering plague, at the beginning, he has these images from, like, Herodotus or, you know, these.

23:18 Wes: Lucretius or.

23:19 Mark: Lucretius, yeah. These accounts from the ancient world of all these horrible things. But by 162 here, no, the Rio plague had nothing in common with the grandiose imaginings that had haunted Rieux's mind at its outbreak. It was about all. A shrewd, unflagging adversary, a skilled organizer, doing his work thoroughly and well. And just the way he's describing how they have to bury the people and put quicklime, a layer of quicklime over them and then pour more people in, and then the pits are all full, so they have to rig up the trolley cars to be running with no drivers to the crematorium outside of town. And I was really getting strong vibes of the efficient killing machine of the Nazis here.

24:01 Seth: No comment.

24:01 Dylan: Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah.

24:04 Mark: I guess the one other character thing that I thought maybe was worth mentioning was in terms of another way of reacting to life, is the Spanish asthma patient. It's like the first patient that Rieux sees, the whole thing. And I don't think they gave his name. They might have at some point. I didn't and I didn't seem to catch it. But he decided at the age of 50 that he'd done enough work for a lifetime. He took to his bed and never

24:26 Wes: left it again and counts peas in order to, instead of using a clock, counts peas to keep track of time. It takes peas and puts them into pots and fills them up. And so when a certain number of pots are full, he knows that it's time to eat lunch or something. It's truly ridiculous.

24:45 Mark: Yeah, I was kind of admiring the character up until that detail. His excuse, it was the first half of a man's life is an upgrade. The second goes downhill. On the descending days, he has no claim. They may be snatched from him at any moment. Thus he can do nothing with them. And the best thing precisely is to do nothing with them. His goal is to die at a very advanced age. So he's not a nihilist. He wants what Benjamin called bare life. He has an allowance that he can live on and he just wants to be in bed. And that sound kind of liberating. But then if what he's doing with his time is counting peas the whole time, like, no, we got the Sisyphusian sort of self distraction back.

25:26 Wes: Well, like Cottard, he's kind of delighted by the whole plague. So very early on. So he kind of has like a soothsayer type role in the novel, it seems to me, kind of like a prophetic madman. And early on, when the rats are dying, I think it's the first scene, actually, that we see him in, sitting on his bed with his peas. It says it's hunger, exclamation point, and talking about what's bringing the rats out or what's killing the rats. And so, you know, thematically what hunger has to do with plague in the general figurative sense. And then later on he'll say, you know, they're coming out, they're coming out.

And he says that smiling with glee and similar things, you know, talking about the weather. It cooks you. You know, just like the fever cooks you. So every stage of the novel, or, you know, he's beaming with delight, saying that the plague is cholera. It's a really interesting relationship to what's happening. I don't know exactly what to make of it, but just throughout the whole. Through the novel, he makes these regular visits to the apartment of the asthmatic.

26:31 Mark: So I guess we're circling back around then, to what is reused the actual narrator's philosophy here. It's a little harder for me to tell, even though he. Just because he's present in more discussions, I think we should. Also, there's probably more Tarrou still to talk about, since he's an equally complicated character and a sub narrator, since Rieux is giving the contents or summarizing Tarrou's journals through some of this.

26:54 Wes: We've gotten at some of this just by talking about the contrast between his position and that of Paneloux and Tarrou already. But I think there's a lot more to say, or to wrap up at

27:05 Seth: least it might be worth spending a moment just talking about what Rieux does or how he. He represents during all of this. So he. He's a doctor, right? He's making house calls, and he's one of numerous physicians in the town. It's not as though he's the medical examiner. He's not affiliated with the government. He's not a, you know, a pandemic expert or virologist. Right. He's just a guy who happens to be a doctor who's doing his job. And as this thing develops, he simply acts with a kind of, I want to say, moral force. But what I want to do is say something else about the kind of practicality and with determination and with practicality, for the purposes of alleviating suffering and reducing Deaths, which gives him a kind of moral weight with others.

And he has a standing, not by virtue of his title, but by virtue of his actions in the community where the magistrates don't have the courage to say the term plague. Right. Because we know what. Well, we've just lived through it in almost every country in the planet.

28:11 Unknown speaker: Right.

28:11 Seth: That the governmental officials are afraid to say what needs to be said from a health perspective, because they're afraid of the, as we've already established, economic consequences for this particular place. But also, you know, they don't want to restrict individual liberties. They don't want to deal with the populace, the backlash, or having to find the ways to implement the measures that are actually necessary. And yet both the governmental entities and individuals, but also the other doctors, recognize that he's to be respected, and his point of view is to be respected.

He's not shouted down, he's not marginalized, and he's not even strident in the way. There's the other doctor who says, hey, it's plague. Why aren't we calling it plague? Right. The older doctor. Right. Who has nothing to lose. He doesn't go that far. But what he says is, who cares what it is? We need to act to prevent the loss of life. And so that stance and the actions he takes to try to actually prevent the loss of life give him a kind of standing and credibility in the novel, but also amongst the other characters, obviously, he's intended to be, in some sense, a measure of what an appropriate response is to the epidemic, to war, to death.

Right. Is to just. He says it's. What does he say? It's common decency, which in my case means doing my job.

29:28 Mark: Yeah, that's the two plus two equals four things. Yeah.

29:31 Wes: Yeah. It's worth revisiting here. We talked a little bit about it, but a discussion that he has with Tarrou. So this is page 106 in mine and probably add 20 for yours. They're discussing Paneloux's sermon, and this is where we get some of the philosophical discussion about what all of this stuff means. And one of these. It kind of sounds like it's going to be in the beginning of the novel. You sort of get the sense that there's a moralistic element to this in which the plague is going to wake people up. Right. They're normally oblivious, but it's something that Rieux seems to object.

So Tarrou says, however you think, like Paneloux, that the plague has its good side. It opens men's eyes and forces them to take Thought So Rieux responds, so does every ill that flesh is heir to. What's true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves. At the same time, when you see the misery it brings, you'd need to be a madman or a coward or stone blind to give in tamely to the plague. So one of the things we see throughout the novel is, again, I mentioned this before, but this rejection of the moralization of suffering, of saying that suffering, whether it's religious explanation or whether it's something else, even one as sort of innocuous as to ruse the idea that it opens our eyes and forces us to take thought.

I think he's onto something much more fundamental than that. There's a more basic principle, which is that we must work to address suffering. So instead of. And the way he puts it again in this conversation is, you know, he works against creation as he finds it. He's willing to fight nature and not simply submit to it. The other way he puts it is to try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its excellence. In other words, it's not about ethical aspirations. Relieving people of pain is more important than making them good or excellent or virtuous.

31:33 Dylan: He says in the middle of this conversation, Tarrou is basically asking him what is giving you the reasons that you're doing anything. Earlier, Anja asked him if he believes in God, and he says, no, I don't even know really what that means.

31:49 Seth: Means.

31:50 Dylan: And Tarrou starts talking to him about his profession as a doctor and fighting creation against creation as he found it. This is what Wes just read. And Dr. Agrees, more or less. He says, yes, you're thinking it calls for pride to feel that way. But I assure you, I have no more than the pride that's needed to keep me going. I have no idea what's awaiting me or what will happen when it all ends. For the moment, I know this, there are sick people and they need curing. Later on, perhaps they'll think things over, and so shall I. But what's wanted now is to make them well.

I defend them as best I can, that's all. And Tarrou asks him against whom, and he says, I haven't a notion. Tarrou. I assure you, I haven't a notion. When I entered this profession, I did it abstractedly, so to speak, because I had a desire for it, because it meant a career like another one that young men often aspire to. Perhaps, too, because it was particularly difficult for a workman's. Son like myself. Then I had to see people die. Do you know that there are some who refuse to die? Have you ever heard a woman scream? Never. With her last gasp.

32:53 Mark: Well, I have.

32:55 Dylan: And then I saw that I could never get hardened to it. I was young then, and I was outraged by the whole scheme of things. Or so I thought. Subsequently, I grew more modest. Only I've never managed to get used to seeing people die. That's all I know. Yet. After all. After all, Tarrou prompted after all is something that a man of your sort can understand. Most likely. But since the order. Order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in him and struggle with all our might against death without raising our eyes toward heaven, where he sits in silence?

And Tarrou says, but our victories need will never be lasting. That's all. Yes, I know that. But there's no reason for giving up the struggle. No reason. I agree. Only now I can picture that this plague went mean for you. Yes, a never ending defeat. And Tarrou asked him, who taught you this, doctor? Rieux replies, suffering.

33:43 Mark: Yeah. So that seems to be Rieux's growth throughout. This is. He reaches this pretty early, actually. I think it's reflected in this talk of abstraction as he gets to. Just like Paneloux, we were saying, as Rieux gets to know suffering, then. Well, see what you make of this abstraction. This comes up initially in his conversation with Rambert, right? Rambert. When he initially wants to get out, he's like, come on, Rieux, give me a certificate that says, I don't belong here, I don't have the plague right now. Let me go. He's like, I don't know if you have the plague.

Even if you don't have the plague right now. If I give you a certificate, then they. You might get it on the way to leaving, you know. And besides which, they don't care about certificates. They're not going to let you out. And so Rambert says, you're using the language of reason, not the heart. You live in a world of abstractions. And this makes Rieux think quite a bit. This is around page 80. The journalist was right in refusing to be balked of happiness. But was he right in reproaching him, Rieux, with living in a world of abstractions? Could that term abstraction really apply to the days he spent in the hospital where the plague was threatening the town, raising its death toll to 500 victims a week?

Yes, an element of abstraction, of a divorce from reality entered into such calamities still, when abstraction sets to killing you, you've got to get busy with it.

34:55 Wes: That goes on the movie poster. Dr. Rieux with a machine gun in each hand.

35:03 Dylan: It's those scenes that make me feel like if there's a mouthpiece for Camus and the whole thing, it's gotta be Rieux and the combination of pragmatic activity that's outside of abstraction, but directed, a kind of rooted directedness.

35:20 Mark: I was reading his take on Tarrou as being Sartre. Not because I'm seeing, you know, Sartrean existentialism necessarily in there, but just like the thing that he's writing kind of sounds like Sartre's novel Nausea. You know, he's delighted that he's found a city, Oran, that's so ugly. And I don't know if you guys have any read Nausea. I did a not school thing on it with some people. And it's just a lot of phenomenological description of just the weird, ugly way the world is. But maybe he's not an ugly enough character for to be. To be Sartre. Just more on this abstraction.

So even just a page after the part I was reading, Rieux's talking about his job has become more and more just to kind of stand around and give information just to diagnose. Like, he can't actually cure this. Like, the sanitation squads, those are the guys, insofar as Rieux is participating in that, they're being proactive. They're going around and, like, are you making sure your house is clean? Because this is not a matter of, you know, maintain social distancing. This is a matter of keeping flea. That they know that you get it from fleas. So, like, how can you make sure that you're cleaning all your clothes and you're wearing the masks in areas anyway?

There's a bunch of things that they're not really clear on, what they're. How they're fighting it, what it comes down to. His day and day is like watching people that are sick and then like, deciding when they're sick enough that he has to just call the hospital for

36:40 Dylan: them in terms of treatment, eventually they get a serum that they're giving to patients to try to reduce the intensity. And they also are inoculating people as well, and with admittedly mixed success. They're doing it and they feel like it's making a difference, but they clearly also see exceptions. He's also draining people's swellings or deciding if it's going to make a difference and that kind of thing.

37:12 Wes: So, yeah, after he gets accused of abstractness by Rambert, it comes up in a few different places in the text where he's thinking about this whole abstraction thing. So at one point he says, then indeed began abstraction and a tussle with the family who knew they would not see the sick man again. And then later on, in another scene, it's, you know, yes, plague, like abstraction, was monotonous. And perhaps only one factor changed, and that was Rieux himself. Standing at the foot of the statue of the Republic that evening, he felt it. All he was conscious of was a bleak indifference steadily gaining on him as he gazed at the door of the hotel Rambert had just entered.

He kind of associates this concept of abstraction with pitilessness. And that's what Rambert is essentially accusing him of. You know, you're favoring reason, you're not pitying me, you're not having a heart. And this idea that he, you know, since the plague is abstract and pitiless in that sense, that's the appropriate response to it. And I think this says something about his approach as well to the ethical. Because you might think that helping out the suffering is just a matter of pity. It's motivated by pity for the suffering, and that you develop an ethics based on pity.

Right. Which is something that Nietzsche, for instance, would have rejected and I think that existentialists in general would reject. Pity is not a sound basis. It's not a sound ethical basis. So what's motivating him exactly, to alleviate the suffering of others, even if it means a kind of heartlessness, even if it means not escaping himself to see his wife or helping Rambert to escape to see his wife, Even if it means dragging loved ones away from each other so they could be isolated, taken to the hospital where they're going to die, all that stuff.

It's something deeper. You might even say it's akin to deontology, or akin to simply a matter of obligation, of fundamental obligation to humanity and its collective fate as something that transcends the moralism of Paneloux and any other moralism that's pity based.

39:17 Dylan: The only part about that I wonder is about whether Rieux thinks about it in those grand terms or if he implicitly is. I guess because he. In the part that I read earlier, he sort of stumbles into his profession and finds that the sort of. The mechanic of it, of going through and witnessing suffering, but then going about the business of alleviating it as a kind of practical thing, he doesn't seem to have the voice of someone who is Engaging in it. Because this is the human condition, or think about it as in those kinds of big terms.

39:57 Mark: Well, maybe it's the abstraction has to do with, again, the abstracting from individual circumstances. So if it's just. That's just what people do. In other words, that's just what's required of me. That's what's my function. So, like, that does bring, like, you're right, it's not saying the human condition, but like it's actually built into that. It's kind of human teleology, unquestioned, you know, habitual. Using reason to figure out, oh, this is the thing that one does in this situation. On the one hand, it's associated with reason, but the struggle between each man's happiness and the abstractions of the plague which constituted the whole life of our town over a long period of time, that's near that same section before where he was talking about abstraction.

Just that the plague dehumanizes it, makes it more abstract, and you end up just going through the motions. Which is why you said he stumbled in his profession. He actually used the word. He abstractedly got into his profession. That's just like a thing that people aspire to. So I did it. So is abstraction the enemy, or is abstraction. It seems like it is in general the enemy, but it can be a useful tool, right? If you were always feeling a fever pitch, you would not get anything done. You need to have habits. It's just like habit in general is the enemy of humanity, being an existential individual.

But goddamn, we need habits.

41:13 Wes: There's a point where Tarrou is explaining his position to him about murder and all of us being afflicted with the plague and essentially giving him his philosophy of pacifism. And Rieux says. Yes. So here's Rieux's response. Yes, he replied, the path of sympathy, which he doesn't embrace. And I think there's meant to be some daylight between the positions of Tarrou and Rieux. And I think it's along the lines that I've just spelled out, which is that when you're confronted with the pitilessness and abstractness or abstraction of a plague, which, again, just as a stand in, is a dramatic stand in for what life throws at us in general and necessity and the essence side of the existentialist existence, essence dichotomy, say for someone like de Beauvoir, right, The response to that is a matter of respect for other human beings as freedoms ascendants in themselves.

It sounds. It'll sound very much like something in the tradition of German idealism and Kant, but it gets us away from the sort of sentimentalism of Tarrou. So that's what I took to be the point of Rieux embracing abstraction at that point and Pitilessness, because I think he sees it as the only way that someone is going to do what he does, which is to help people, regardless of what feelings it creates in him. And Paneloux and Tarrou represent different solutions where there's still some sort of moralization required in order to act. And I think Rieux does transcend that.

What I'm calling moralization.

42:55 Mark: It seems. Actually Rieux, as well as Tarrou, plays with this idea of looking for saints that I just found in that discussion of the Spanish asthma patient of his weird thing with the peasant. Rieux asks, is he a saint? Yes. If saintliness is an aggregation of habits. And Tarrou is asked about the man that he sees out the window recurrently spitting on cats, like, is he a saint? Why would you think any of these people are saints? Like, unless you're equating a saint with just someone who sort of has a pureness of purpose. In other words, like grand in being so obsessed with his one sentence is acting saintly. Like, saints are insane that they're fixated on some pure ideal to the extent exclusion of all else. So you could be a saint of love, you could be a saint of almost anything.

43:42 Wes: Yeah, it's hard to decipher that. Right. We're familiar with the virtue ethics tradition,

43:48 Seth: and saints are often martyrs, I guess.

43:51 Mark: I mean, Rieux says, tarou, you got to stay alive. Saints, if you're going to become saint, you got to live.

43:56 Wes: So I'm not sure Tarrou is thinking about the possibility of secular sainthood without martyrdom. But what does this mean? Saintliness is an aggregate of habits. So we're familiar with virtue ethics, in which virtues are just habits, but they're particular forms of habits. They're not just any habit. Although with Nietzsche we get a refinement of that in which virtue isn't about human nature as such, but about one's particular character and becoming what one is becoming, that character living through, which would mean engaging in those habits associated with one's character. But again, it seems like it can't just be any character and it can't just be any set of habits. So I don't know what this means.

44:37 Mark: Here's the quote around the earlier Tarrou has been watching this man spit on cats, and then the cats disappear with the plague. And the man is so stymied because he so enjoyed spitting on the cats. And then when finally the cats are back at the end of the Plague, Tarrou is disappointed that the man never comes out again. So he's trying to figure out like, is he dead? If dead. The question was, as in the case of the old asthmatic, had he been a saint? Tarrou hardly thought so. But he found in the old man's case a pointer. Perhaps he wrote, we can only reach approximations of sainthood, in which case we must makeshift with a mild benevolent diabolism.

Which I'm interpreting is the same as like being the innocent murderer. But I still don't really understand Tarrou's obsession with sainthood here. I really, in light of reading Zarathustra book. Was it book three of Zarathustra somewhere? You know, the latter part of it where Zarathustra is encountering all these characters that are like, this guy's a giant eye because some people just see and they don't ever hear or smell. Some of these characters, these saints are somebody who's exaggerated in some way. Like these are potentially ways in a pluralistic sort of ethics of the sort that Nietzsche was in favor of at least, and probably Camus, you know, ways to try to deal with the world.

They're maybe not optimal. It would be nice to be a well rounded human being. But extremes are not terrible. They're a way to be at least. You're not just being abstract, right? You're being your individual weird ass self.

46:06 Dylan: Doesn't depend upon what kind of extreme you are.

46:10 Wes: Extreme doesn't depend a lot on what

46:13 Dylan: kind of extreme you are.

46:14 Unknown speaker: Right.

46:15 Mark: Well, I think if they're even wondering, was Cottard a saint? Well, he did live his own way. I don't know, am I misremembering that

46:25 Dylan: I'm sympathetic with his definition of sainthood as being someone who is solely focused on something? Except for the fact that I've never heard it before. I guess I didn't realize that I thought of sainthood as being anything other than somebody who is single mindedly devout to a particular understanding of God and particularly a Christian understanding.

46:49 Mark: But 90% of those words you said, you just take the God and Christian understanding part.

46:54 Dylan: I'm not disagreeing with you, Mark, but to me it moves the word saint into like any kind of obsessive behavior. Which is maybe it is.

47:03 Mark: Maybe that's just the problem, you know, with existentialism that we keep coming back, you know, back to our no country for Old Men episode of trying to like, okay, you know, the murderer is an individual. He seems self actualized. Like, please don't make us call that person a saint just because they're extreme in some way.

47:20 Wes: Well, whatever Tarrou means by this, you know, we know that Rieux rejects it and will say, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me. I imagine what interests me is being a man. And I think that squares with some of the contrasts that I was trying to draw before between their ethical positions.

47:41 Mark: But yet they can be friends, which is maybe a different way of approaching that same solidarity, of course, doesn't require friendship. You're just working together. Paneloux works with them on the squads, even though he has a totally different reason for doing so. But I think maybe more so just to kind of circle back to, you know, we were talking about romantic love. Well, maybe what's good about romantic love is as a species of, you know, particularly vigorous friendship, but that the thing that Camus is advocating here, love that is friendship, you know, whether it's between Rieux and his mother or actually Tarrou and Rieux's mother.

Like as he's dying, he, you know, seems to consider his mother a saint just because, you know, reminds him of his own mother and how unassertive she was. Like, it's not a very complimentary description of his own mother, but just, you know, that there's somebody that can be steadfast in their gentleness. And we have this whole scene before he dies of Rieux and Tarrou going swimming together. They can. We take time out for friendship. You know, they've been working so hard. Tarrou says that and they go swimming together because swimming is okay for saints.

And just that they're swimming in sync with each other, yet they can never really express that it's something that you can't fit into language. That's the thing that really hit me coming out of this is that scene in particular and. And how it's something that the plague, by making us abstract, rips off our capacity for real friendship. That you need the friendship requires both that you recognize the solidarity. In other words, the abstraction that we are all in the same boat, but that you engage with each other enough as individuals that you can see each other.

And through writing this, Rieux really is trying to see and channel Tarrou and everybody else. And that was like Tarrou's whole thing is he's making this journal because he's really trying to. I don't know how well he's getting in the head of the Cat man or anybody else that he's writing about. But, you know, it's as close as human beings can to, given that we're so opaque to each other, to connection, is that we each make a good, honest attempt at seeing each other in our fullness and that we then develop some kind of inexpressible simpatico.

49:52 Wes: Do you want to say anything about how this resonates with what we're going through with coronavirus?

49:59 Seth: Well, I will say that what struck me was just how initially the narrative could very well have been contemporary people preoccupied with commerce. The obvious is happening, but they're like, meh, shrugging it off. The magistrates and government officials who are afraid to take action, the health officials urging more serious the supply constraints for the vaccine, the belated measures, the disbelief and hostility and anger of the crowds. And I got to the point where I wondered whether there would be a kind of resignation and that step to communal awareness.

And it seems, at least I can tell you, in the state of Texas, the answer is going to be no. They're not armed protesters with swastika flags entering the Capitol building, but they're gonna cave to commerce. And, you know, that's the lesson, right? I started off my introduction saying that I haven't learned anything and not learning anything from history. And that's one of the things that comes through in the book, is that the only thing we learn from history is that we never learned from history. The plague, for Camus, is not a unique event. It's a recurring event.

War and plague, pestilence, these sorts of things, they come and they visit themselves upon humankind frequently and repeatedly over generations. And we have an opportunity, when confronted with these things, to understand and to become fully human in the existentialist sense. And for a short period of time, we do, and then we forget and we move on. And the fact that this novel is set just several years, it's unclear exactly what year it's supposed to be, but it's 1940, something. So either the Second World War is happening or it's shortly thereafter, and the people already are acting as if that had never happened.

And I think the plague is a call to awareness, a call to understanding, a call to compassion, and all many of the things that we have talked about over the last 11 years, and we've been doing podcasts on ethics or social theory or political theory or what have you. This. This need to have an awareness that everybody suffers, everybody is experiencing life, everybody has their own story, their own narrative, but everybody experiences life, and everybody will die. And the idea that we somehow are, as egos, as individuals, block out that recognition and realization so that we can create these edifices that involve social strata and honor and all these other sorts of things.

Camus making a very stark call to recognize that, to be prepared for the next time you're confronted with the immediate possibility of your ceasing to exist, to use it in a more Heideggerian way.

52:54 Wes: Yeah, that's very well put. We can read the novel, of course, in a number of different ways, including seeing the plague as a metaphor for war, Nazi occupation or whatever. But there's this broader sense of the plague that's always with humanity that Tarrou tries to point us to, which involves, you know, murder, as he puts it, and violence and war and all the ways in which we wrong each other. Seth, you've tied it into the sort of question of the plague is denial of mortality. I think that's the way to the plague that's always with us is the denial of mortality.

And then you reminded me of Epicurus in talking about the things that result from that denial of mortality, including a preoccupation with status and hierarchy and power and all the sorts of things that flow out of that. So you could treat this novel as a being about those sorts of things. And ironically, it's that pre existing plague which makes the town of Oran so susceptible to the actual plague when it arrives. Right. Because they're oblivious. And that's one of the things that most resonated with me about the current moment is the kind of disbelief that people have that this could actually be happening in the beginning, which makes them slow to respond.

And we watched that unfold with this whole coronavirus thing. And I personally felt it, just that feeling of disbelief looking at what was going on in China, people being welded into their homes and thinking, well, if that's happening there and it. I mean, obviously it's going to spread here and if it's that bad, then we're going to be seeing really bad stuff happen here. But then the thought, but can that really happen? That's just crazy. That can happen and no one else is acting like it's going to happen. So just sort of trudging along, thinking, not accepting the fact that there are going to be lockdowns or certain things are obviously going to have to happen.

That to me, was the most resonant thing. The way that Camus captures that level of disbelief that this sort of thing can be happening. And it's something that reflects. Seth, as you pointed out our denial of mortality, which plays such a fundamental role in psychologically and socially and politically.

55:06 Mark: I know there's been a lot of people trying to connect this book to what's happening right now, but just the fact that our situation is global, and I think this being a local event is very key to defining how people react, the solidarity that they do develop. Am I going to flee the city? Am I going to try to break out of the city? The people who are. I mean, there's other kinds of violence, of people looting and things like that, but most of it is people trying to break out. Like, that's the way that they're defying the orders. They're not militantly saying, I'm not gonna get rid of the fleas from my house.

There's nothing like the exact correspondences to the protesters now, but just the fact that, you know, it's local and that it's much worse in this story that, like you were saying, Wes, I see the most parallels to the early parts of this book, but it's just. It matters so much then whether the early part is a harbinger of things that are going to be much worse or not. That's the magistrate and others failing in the book, is that they weren't paying enough attention. And you can say that there's something comparable to the way, you know, we were reacting in January and things about that, but there's wide divergences, despite the parallels right now between what the squads do here and the squads do there.

For instance, you can go volunteer right now, and this is something we didn't discuss in our pandemic episode. But do we have a moral duty to join one of these groups that are, you know, doing wellness checks on people and getting out into the community to, you know, at the time when we are being told to be locked up, but to deal with those disparities that we were talking about last time. If people are unable to get food at all, like, maybe that's what you should be doing is volunteering to cart stuff for an older person. That kind of. You can draw parallels to ethical requirements that are adhered to.

Ethical requirements. But we have. But it's just such a different scale. If somebody who's, like, actually working in a hospital in New York where they're piling up bodies in a trailer because they don't have room for them, maybe they would see more parallels, more exactly to what we're seeing here than we're certainly not feeling it the way that these citizens are feeling it in this

57:13 Wes: Book, I would say overall it's more spread out. I mean, if you were to compare death tolls and, you know, it's a global thing that's actually. Its impact is larger. But Mark, as you're pointing out, everything is concentrated in this book. And so this particular community, everyone feels the brunt of it. Whereas really in the United States, it depends on where you are in the world or even within your particular country or city, how hard you're getting hit by this. I think a lot of us will know someone who's lost someone or we'll have a friend of a friend who's lost someone.

It'll be that it's because the amount of people who are dying. But yeah, the whole. The dramatic scenes of, you know, even though mass burial, you know, there's been scenes of mass burial and things like that. But the kind of stuff that goes on in the book, that sort of dramatic spectacle. Yeah, for the most part, that's not part of what we're experiencing. And it's not the same immediate call to action. Exactly. Unless you're a doctor in New York or in a place that's hard hitting.

58:18 Mark: Dylan, any last thoughts?

58:20 Dylan: I don't have anything new to add.

58:22 Mark: All right, next time. We are doing an episode on fashion that's really relevant to go from grave

58:34 Wes: concerns to the trivial.

58:36 Seth: Not trivial.

58:38 Mark: I guess we'll see. So our guest is Shahidha Bari. So we had talked after our Simone de Beauvoir episodes. She had had a chapter on fashion that we didn't really have time to talk about. And it seemed really interesting. And then Shahidha Bari had written this book called Dressed. So we're gonna read a little bit of that. And then she helped us pick out an essay by Susan Sontag. Some Foucault, some Derrida. So this is gonna, you know, be some pretty heavy reading, intense reading for potentially a light subject. But I guess we'll see. I'm looking forward to it.

Something that is different than what we just have done for the last couple times. Also to potentially lighten things up. Our closing song, relevantly to the discussion we just had is You Will Kill the One You Love by Jack Hues, whom you probably know from his days with Wang Chung. But most of his music doesn't sound anything like that. I interviewed him for Nakedly Examined Music, episode 122. Check that out@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com Good night, everybody.

59:34 Seth: Good night.

59:35 Unknown speaker: Night.

59:35 Wes: Good night,

59:42 Unknown speaker: Sam. I smell the sulfur hanging in the air the sacred veil that I must have to shatter all my illusions My crippling confusions Return the day to night oh, you will kill the one you love with all the pain that you were given oh, you must learn to serve the stars in heaven of love or you will kill

1:00:50 Mark: the one you love.

1:00:59 Unknown speaker: I saw the sadness in your left eye your morning sunshine will start to fade and by the evening we would be screaming about some long forgotten meaningless charade oh, you will kill the one you love with all the pain need to carry since you were a child Forgive them all Most of all forgive yourself for the one else so it's still a way to kill. The one you love. Come on now. Trying to piece together mental anthracite Exafading from my mind but all I knew got left behind oh, you will kill the one you love with all the pain you carry since you were a child well, it's the same for each other, each and every one of us. You will take the trust and all good will and you will thrust your knife and you will kill.

1:02:56 Mark: The one you love.