Sign in with Facebook
Fergus, Quondam Happy Face's Reviews > The Plague
The Plague
by
by
The plague is a literal epidemic of the modern Bubonic Plague that sweeps through a town in Algeria.
And it is also figurative and symbolic - the African town, the colonial remnant of Oran, is “sealed off” as a result (as political powers seal us off nowadays, from obtrusive and disturbing Truth?) in a collective slumber of despair.
Sound familiar?
But guess what... within its sealed demesne, good men are doing active and physically-engaged Good Things within the vibrant frame of a new kind of postmodernist Faith - as Paul Tillich said, echoing Karl Barth - in a God beyond the worn-out bourgeois god.
They also have Faith in their own Elbow Grease, to tirelessly though humanly combat the insidious Evil of the Bubonic Threat.
Yes, the postwar years saw the Genesis of a plague-like, veiled, formless despair that still chills our thin twenty-first century blood, and Here it has been manfully faced and contained by A Few Good Men such as these!
They are not many, but they have boldly made the decision to Live and Work - Bodily and Humanly Incarnated in a Brutally Absurd World.
And we can do that for ourselves.
Now.
And avoid being bodiless, bloodless internet junkies of no apparent tangible good.
The forces of law, as in Camus’ symbolic postwar Algeria, try to stifle the truth with subtle thoughts of ingrained fearful and useless conditioning.
But brave men REFUSE not to act, even under the Paralysis of our modern day Plague... “ours is ONLY (and always) the Trying.”
A stark, gainless grappling with an Angel - for even Jacob was disabled for life by such combat...
But kept on fighting.
Excelsior.
Unlike so many of us others today, who have just Given Up.
But we, even when innocent children are senselessly dying in the plague’s pointless grip, though we reject the modern ersatz gods, we don’t give up, as Oran’s tireless doctor says.
For we are informed in our souls, nerve endings and stretched sinews by a vision that refuses to die:
Why listen to The Lies?
We can speak out for The Discarded Truth! And just watch for...
The vision of that infinite God beyond god that Refuses to Quit -
And refuses to just stand by, watching and helpless...
As His Angel disjoints us.
And it is also figurative and symbolic - the African town, the colonial remnant of Oran, is “sealed off” as a result (as political powers seal us off nowadays, from obtrusive and disturbing Truth?) in a collective slumber of despair.
Sound familiar?
But guess what... within its sealed demesne, good men are doing active and physically-engaged Good Things within the vibrant frame of a new kind of postmodernist Faith - as Paul Tillich said, echoing Karl Barth - in a God beyond the worn-out bourgeois god.
They also have Faith in their own Elbow Grease, to tirelessly though humanly combat the insidious Evil of the Bubonic Threat.
Yes, the postwar years saw the Genesis of a plague-like, veiled, formless despair that still chills our thin twenty-first century blood, and Here it has been manfully faced and contained by A Few Good Men such as these!
They are not many, but they have boldly made the decision to Live and Work - Bodily and Humanly Incarnated in a Brutally Absurd World.
And we can do that for ourselves.
Now.
And avoid being bodiless, bloodless internet junkies of no apparent tangible good.
The forces of law, as in Camus’ symbolic postwar Algeria, try to stifle the truth with subtle thoughts of ingrained fearful and useless conditioning.
But brave men REFUSE not to act, even under the Paralysis of our modern day Plague... “ours is ONLY (and always) the Trying.”
A stark, gainless grappling with an Angel - for even Jacob was disabled for life by such combat...
But kept on fighting.
Excelsior.
Unlike so many of us others today, who have just Given Up.
But we, even when innocent children are senselessly dying in the plague’s pointless grip, though we reject the modern ersatz gods, we don’t give up, as Oran’s tireless doctor says.
For we are informed in our souls, nerve endings and stretched sinews by a vision that refuses to die:
Why listen to The Lies?
We can speak out for The Discarded Truth! And just watch for...
The vision of that infinite God beyond god that Refuses to Quit -
And refuses to just stand by, watching and helpless...
As His Angel disjoints us.
Sign into Goodreads to see if any of your friends have read
The Plague.
Sign In »
Reading Progress
Finished Reading
January 4, 2020
– Shelved
Comments Showing 1-19 of 19 (19 new)
date
newest »
newest »
message 1:
by
Zoeb
(new)
Mar 09, 2020 04:41AM
It all seems so relevant and horribly prescient today...at a time when the coronavirus menace has enveloped the world and nations and governments are scrabbling the bottom of the barrel to restore order. Superb review, sir.
reply
|
flag
We have an editorial cartoonist in Ontario named Graeme MacKay (top-notch humorist) who took our politicians to task recently for not knowing where to go on this ugly issue! Doubtless we shall be told soon enough...
How do you bring God into all of your reviews! I'm sure Camus didn't want that 🤔😊
Quite right, Suha! He wanted us to Face the Void. But for Christian mystics like Eckhart, to Face the Void is to see the pure Face of God: “I am Who Am.” Pure Being - which Spinoza calls God, or Nature!
Good for you Fergus. I really enjoyed reading your review. It is so good, so positive about life, God and Christianity.
Thanks so much, Josephine. Camus, too, is positive - but his world is godless. You see, back in ‘71 when I read it I misconstrued his underlying pessimism as similar to my inner via negativa - which made sense to me when, 11 years later I read St John of the Cross. The Way Up had to also be the Way Down: no pain, no gain (as Camus also thinks here)!
Taught this in a course on medicine and humanities, Coping with Life and Death. Also 5 Stages of grief, some Dickinson poems, etc.
Alan, I take it the students were from the Faculty of Medicine - is that right? If so, it makes a lot of sense. A grim book, but for Camus’ front line heroes!
Thanks, no, I studied with a Med School prof, but my students were nurses. A grim book ...you’re right. Dropped it the next time I taught the course.
Well, my French prof from summer session in 1970 adored Camus and Sartre - and what she called their epiphanies - in French “les prises de conscience....” And it stuck with me as a good name for the rude awakenings I was having as I entered sophomore year. Her zest for teaching around such leitmotifs - all the rage in the sixties with its ‘archetypal’ obsession - must have appealed to you, as well, as a prof or student back then! She made this book a treat for us.
Fergus wrote: "Well, my French prof from summer session in 1970 adored Camus and Sartre - and what she called their epiphanies - in French “les prises de conscience....” And it stuck with me as a good name for th..."Coming from English lit, spoiled by the wit of Donne and Shakespeare, Austen and George Eliot, I'm not happy to read depressing modern novels--a continental specialty, with all the great modern women novelists in Italy (where my older daughter lives) are depressing. Of course, sexism in Italy is legendary, so probably they should be depressing, BUT witty overcoming of so-called failure--as Austen overcame the fact she was not married-- is my desire for prose. And of course, plenty of continental wit and comedy, Moliere and Pirandello, for a start.
I love how you’ve made wit your personal Deus ex Machina, old friend! It’s obviously what made you so successful as a college professor.
Thanks so much, Jayson! Appreciate it.
Thanks so very much, Sharon. My own reading of the book was muddled in misunderstanding, in spite of my frequent trips to the dictionary - you got it, I was reading it in French! My most vivid memory is of the villager who is writing a novel, but because of writer’s block, gets stuck on the first sentence, a pleasant enough lead-in about walking through les Bois du Boulogne… he’s me to a “T”.
This book has always been such an interesting puzzle to me. (It's also a personal favorite.)On the one hand, "There is no God coming to help us - just us humans - what are we going to do about it?" is threaded into the core of this book in a manner that I think you just can't sever. So why, on the other hand, is there something about the ethos - the idealism, or maybe just the psychology - of Christianity, that feels comfortably at home and at harmony with the book?
I'm glad to see you rated this book highly and have spared a few words on this puzzle.
The chief characters of this book are heroes of conviction and action. You made a great summary of their role by crediting them for resolving to toil and work - and therefore to be bodily incarnate - in a "brutally absurd world". (an apt, concise wrapping.)
The plague itself, you also say, is, by these heroes, faced and contained. Faced, yes, definitely. Contained - it'd seem not. They are powerless to control the plague itself, it comes in and out like the tide. But the abyssal flavor of horror it brings with it is combatted by their actions. They offer (or do they create?) a sort of alternative. So while they cannot control the plague biologically, maybe they can contain it symbolically.
Camus seems to stand alone among the thinkers and writers of his wave, in offering an existentialism that actually comports with something about the driving essence (albeit, not the metaphysics) of religion. That's just my take at a glance; I have a lot of reading and discovering yet to do...
Wow, Matt, your comments knock my socks off - and I'm glad of it - for they reveal " the abyssal horror" at which we all tremmble. And it is the reason for my Hail Mary pitch: my own Deus Ex Machina!
