Why the Classics: Laura Marris on Camus's The Plague
Why the Classics: Laura Marris on Camus's The Plague
"If we have these ways of remembering, then maybe in the future we’ll be inoculated against particular types of hate."
If one mark of a classic is that it can be read on many levels and remain as resonant now as when it was written, then Albert Camus’s The Plague has to qualify. When COVID-19 arrived, it shot to the top of bestseller lists for the obvious reasons—but the book is relevant today for more subtle ones as well. Written during the Second World War, it works as both an allegory of political turmoil—of evil unleashed on a fractured society—and as a compelling account of the emotional and physical devastation caused by a rampaging disease. In November 2021, at the height of our own pandemic, the writer Laura Marris published the first major translation of the work in years. We spoke to her about her thoughts on the book, its place in Camus’s life and oeuvre, and why it’s still worth reading today.
Octavian Report: Can you talk a bit about The Plague and the themes that dominate it?
Laura Marris: Camus wrote The Plague during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II. It takes place in the Algerian city of Oran. A mysterious disease pops up that starts killing off the rats and then slowly spreads to humans. The city is quarantined, and the people who live there have to figure out how to come together as a community to fight this disease and how they, personally and as a group, navigate their resistance.
For a long time, it was taught as an allegory of the resistance to Nazism during World War II. But of course, when it came out in 1946, that’s what was on everyone’s mind. I think when we read it in the context of the coronavirus crisis, the disease in the book becomes a little bit less allegorical. It’s definitely not a book that I expected to be translating during a time like this.
OR: What drove Camus to write The Plague, and how does it fit in with the rest of his literary work?
Marris: The Stranger came out in 1942, and many of us probably read it in high school or in college, but that book has a much more negative image of society. The main character of The Stranger has a very flat affect, and The Plague is the opposite of that. The Plague was all about Camus’s ideas of community, and resistance, and the immunity of the herd to an actual disease—and also the way that we could develop a kind of cultural immunity to darker forces, like the rise of fascism.
When The Stranger first came out in English, people were a little bit confused, because by then Camus was famous for being this writer who’d been in the Resistance. So they were expecting a Resistance novel, but they had to wait a little bit longer to get it. When Blanche Knopf, one of the founders of the Knopf publishing firm, acquired The Stranger, she said “Oh, I have to buy [it] in order to get The Plague.” Little did she know that The Stranger would sell millions of copies.
That success explains why The Stranger was retranslated first. There haven’t been as many versions of The Plague, and the Stewart Gilbert version that most people read is very, very focused on the World War II context (which is definitely an important part of the book). But Camus was also sick when he was writing the book. He had tuberculosis and was so ill that he was sent to a sanitarium in France. He was separated from his wife. There are some things in the novel that are pretty personal to him.
OR: How political do you think Camus intended The Plague to be?
Marris: It was certainly intended to be political. Just after The Plague came out in France, Camus came to the United States and gave a speech called “The Human Crisis” at Columbia. In it, he talks about how it would be easy to say that because Hitler is dead, the snake is dead, the venom is gone. But, he says, the venom is not gone. Traces of the war and of hatred remain in all these people and we have to work on that. We have to combat that. That idea ties into the ending of The Plague, where Camus talks about how the virus lives on in paperwork, and it lives on in dressers, and it lives on in all these everyday pieces of life. That’s Camus’s definition of what it means to be politically engaged and to be resisting. It’s not a heroic thing. It’s more like: if we come back to this again and again, and if we have these ways of remembering, then maybe in the future we’ll be inoculated against particular types of hate as they raise their heads.
OR: Why did he set it in Algeria?
Marris: There’s a funny reason and a more serious one. The funny one is that Oran is where his in-laws lived. Camus didn’t like them very much; they weren’t very nice to him. So he visited the plague on their city.
The serious reason is the same reason that he writes the date in the beginning of the book as 194-blank. I think he wanted a place where he could write about things that were happening in his own life and in France while keeping a bit of a distance from them. I don’t think Camus wanted this to be the kind of book where people are saying, “Okay, but actually that general entered the city of Paris at this time, not that time.” He wanted a pretext to be able to tell some of these stories.
I think also he was thinking about Oran because that’s where his wife was when he was writing The Plague. In the novel, the doctor’s wife is sent out of the city to a sanitarium to get well; in Camus’s own life, his wife was in Oran and he was the one sent away to recuperate. If you read his notebooks, which are great, you can see he almost called the novel The Separated. So that was a very big part of it for him.
OR: What is it like to translate Camus? What are the unique difficulties of rendering his prose into English?
Marris: Some of the hardest passages actually tie back to the separated lovers. Camus will really stretch these sentences. He’ll expand them. You can almost feel the breathlessness of the lovers; in those moments, they’re just waiting for news of the people that they care about. Camus makes the sentence structure reflect their waiting. You don’t think that those sentences could possibly go on any longer, but they do. That’s a challenge; French sentences can take more phrases and clauses than English ones can. I don’t want to shorten them, obviously. I’m working on ways to make them feel elegant and to capture the stylistic effect of feeling the waiting, without it becoming overbearing or cartoonish.
There are moments, like the scene when Bernard Rieux and Jean Tarrou go for a swim, that have such a lyrical beauty, where Camus is walking the edge between something being so powerful and crystal clear and simple. But if you’re not careful, that can fall flat. I’m trying to find an English that keeps that feeling powerful and monumental, but still grounded in the world, in a way that the simplicity of the imagery remains, without tipping over into oversimplification.
OR: What did The Plague mean for both the French and English reading publics in the years after its publication? How has that meaning changed over time? What was it like to translate this book about the spread of a terrible disease as another terrible disease was spreading around you?
Marris: The context in France was quite a bit different from the American one because of the slight delay before the English translation came out. The translation of The Stranger came out in the United States as World War II was ending. That was what made it particularly weird. The French version of The Plague came out in France right as World War II was ending. So that made a lot more sense in terms of it being a book of the moment. I would really recommend Looking for The Stranger, the critic and historian Alice Kaplan’s book on this question. She goes into all the details of how that book got published and how it led to Camus working on The Plague, and what different books they were.
But to your question: I have an editor friend who said that The Plague is a book that’s crashed into our lives at this moment. I think that feels very true, especially because there’s a strange two-way street of metaphor here. You read in the news about politicians talking about the invisible enemy, using the language of war. Whereas during an actual war, Camus used the language of disease.
That said, I think the human aspects of the novel got a little bit overlooked in the immediate postwar context and in the way The Plague has been taught since then. I think allegory can be tricky and all-consuming. I often get questions about how certain details fit into the allegory. I think the answer is that they don’t, because Camus didn’t want to write an airtight allegory. He also was trying to describe how it felt in the human moment.
And he was also really trying to write about illness. He’d had tuberculosis since he was 17. His whole philosophy of the absurd—the fact that we die and there’s nothing we can do about it—comes out of his own experience with illness. We now have a chance to look at the book through that lens and draw comfort from it in a way that we couldn’t before.
One of my favorite weird moments in the book is the old man who leans out of his balcony and spits on cats. That’s his favorite part of his day. We know that things are getting bad when all the cats disappear and the little old man is devastated. Our little routines—the strange ones that we wouldn’t necessarily tell anyone about—have been disrupted. I think Camus has a real wisdom about that, about what that kind of uncertainty and those kinds of absences in our life feel like.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Did you turn to art about plagues (or the zombie apocalypse) during the pandemic? If so, what film, book, play, or other work spoke to you the loudest? Answer in the comments section below. We want to hear from you!