Albert Camus' The Plague, presented by Dr. Randy Gordon

[Music] we'll go ahead and get started and it's great to see everybody here we'll probably pick up a few more in the next a couple of minutes um so tonight will have a presentation by our guest speaker and then a bit of back and forth between him and me and then we want to bring you into the discussion so please be formulating your questions your comments thinking about what you might want to say when we get to that part of the program because we do want to highlight our discussion a conversation among the people who are attending tonight so i'm going to give a brief introduction most of you saw it on the screen during our preparatory uh show but i'm going to read it again and and then turn it over to our speaker so we're very pleased to have with us this evening dr randy gordon he's a founding partner of barnes and thornburg llp's dallas office and executive professor of law and history at texas a m university he is a prolific writer he's writing all the time and and publishing all the time and he's a frequent lecturer around the country among his publications are a book rehumanizing law a theory of law and democracy and then he has numerous chapters in books and journal articles across the u.s and beyond he's also a fellow of the dallas institute and a co-founder with me of the institute's hyatt prize for the humanities so it's great for us to welcome tonight dr randy gordon so randy i'm going to give it to you and let you take it away all righty thank you larry welcome everyone uh glad to see a big turnout tonight uh for uh such a dismal dismal kind of subject you will notice that uh i did break out a black turtleneck sweater since we're going to be talking about uh existentialism and uh a little bit and uh kind of get in the 1950s mode i thought i'd start with a little bit of background uh i know that some people have read this novel more recently some of you may not have read it in decades you may have read it in college or something you may have taken a class in philosophy that covered existentialism you might not so i want to give you some background a little bit of context before we get into the novel itself uh if you want to know a lot about camus in a short period of time you can go to the nobels website which has a nice capsule biography and i pulled a few things from that to tell you something about camus himself as many of you know he won the nobel prize in 1957 shortly before he died in 1960 uh as a result of that i think it was an automobile accident some sort of traffic accident um camille was representative of non-metropolitan french literature in other words non-parisian literature his origin in algeria and his experiences there in the 30s were dominating influences in his thought and work he was of what the nobel calls semi-proletarian parents working-class family in other words and he was early attached to intellectual circles of strongly revolutionary tendencies with a deep interest in philosophy only chance happened stances actually kept him from just having a university career in the field he came to france at the age of 25 and there the man and his times met camus joined the resistance movement during the occupation and after the liberation uh was a columnist for the newspaper combat but his journalistic activities had been chiefly a response to the demands of his time in 1947 camus retired from political journalism and besides writing his fiction and essays was very active in the theater and as a producer and a playwright most relevant to the dallas institute he uh his work included an adaptation of william faulkner's requiem for a nun so larry larry can talk about that a little bit and when we start to visit he died in january of 1960. he's often associated with the existentialist movement in philosophy a label that he actually rejected but there are enough links to suggest that at least at a high level an understanding of the subject is worthwhile a particular note is that unlike most philosophy most of the movements key works are literary uh as opposed to philosophical tracks like you might find in someone like wittgenstein uh camille writes in in terms of his prose style and uh what has been called the steal americana uh in other words a great example is ernest hemingway of course short declarative sentences that sort of thing uh in a bit of uh doubly comic uh that's doubly comic those of you who have read the novel recently will remember the character of graham uh in the play who uh uh spends all his time rewriting the first sentence of some sort of parisian bellapop novel social novel um but one of the things that he does is at one point he decides to um quote unquote suppress all the adjectives which of course is what hemingway is famous for doing uh a hallmark of hemingway's pro style anyway the idea of existence is part of the modern conception of self which entails numerous oppositional pairings things like individual versus society um particularity versus universality as well as themes involving temporal emergence uh the struggle for authenticity and a troubled assertion of freedom in short it's a particular expression of what philosophers of the period called the quest for selfhood existentialist writing is threaded with a specialized vocabulary a lot of those of you just picked this novel up again i sure ran across many of these words being absurdity choice dread despair anxiety and commitment in specific camus embraces the concept of absurdity which entails the recognition that our ability to reason at humans is as flawed and that there are things that reason and logic cannot explain uh we are as flue as freud posited governed by in part at least uh the appetites of the id as d.h lawrence suggests the soul of a man is a dark vast forest with wildlife in it um so community's man arriving through an admission of absurdity and affirmation of his own worth by stripping himself of illusion and abandoning hope for ultimate leaning the existential hero is liberated and placed in the position to exercise his freedom and revolt against absurdity kamehameha uses sisyphus in his work called the myth of sisyphus who endlessly pushes the stone up the hill only to have it roll back down every time as the archetype persists is the owner of his days and finds his struggle worthwhile commute leaves off that uh that essay uh by saying one must imagine sisyphus happy of camus novels the stranger which was published a few years before the plague perhaps best illustrates the existential individual versus society theme we see a nod to that earlier work in the play when grand the rewriter of the first sentence of his novel recounts an animated conversation at the tobacconus involving a murder case that had created some stir in algiers a young commercial employee had killed an algerian on the beach and i'm quoting from uh was page 54 in my piece that of course is the act animating the stranger marseille kills uh an algerian arab on the beach this uh all this background brings us to the doors of our discussion of the play prior to our current covet difficulties the plague was mostly considered an allegory of the nazi occupation of france during world war ii camille himself had invited such a reading as evidenced by a well-known letter to the structuralist critic roland gard um but nowadays it's it's more literal surface meeting uh is the one that is attracting our attention if the stranger represents the individual struggle with absurdity the plague represents the importance of collective action of community and it exists within with a community of other plague works as camus acknowledges in an epigraph drawn from daniel davao who like camus had meticulously researched the history of plagues the philosopher cultural critic renee girard once remarked that the plague is found everywhere in literature it is older than literature much older really since it is present in myth and ritual in the entire world bibliographies dedicated to plague literature runs to dozens of pages so let me just mention a small sample here the convenient starting place is boccaccio's the de cameron the controlling conceit of which is that seven young women and three men have to camp for the countryside where each will tell 10 many of them body stories over 10 days to escape the pestilent atmosphere of 14th century florence the de cameron reveals a sharp divide between the humorous stories told in good fun and the horrors of the plague that serve as the occasion for them the plague brings with it economic disaster eroded social conventions and political entropy david steele is this right to argue i think that there is a sense in which the age of modern fiction was us ushered in by a virus bocaccio's rough contemporary jeffrey jeffrey chaucer began in the canterbury tales what became a standard literary practice of grimly reciting death statistics and quoting uh from the tales here an unseen thief called death came stalking by who hereabouts makes all people die he's slain a thousand with this pestilence by the time we get to daniel defoe's journal of the plague year 1720s fictional account of the 1665 london plague the backbone of the story as david steele observes is not provided by dramatic incident or descriptions but by the numbers defoe works into narrative the weekly bills of mortality kept by the parishes the plague also carries the burden of statistics the mounting death numbers signal not just the magnitude of the problem but the impotence of science alone represented as it is by numbers to turn the tide curiously it's the scientist in chief dr ryu who serves as both protagonists and we later learn as narrator who makes the case for a balanced humanism before delving into that though let's address the stage for those of you who may not have read the word recently uh or may not have read it at all i don't think it's it's critical that that you have it in front of you the town of iran uh which is a real place uh is and i'm gonna quote little bits from the the novel here an entirely modern town whose primary purpose is commercial a neutral place all things were love uh leisure pleasure taking going to movies all that all that sort of stuff is carried out with the same frenzied and abstracted air of routine and order in short life is not too exciting thus there are no inklings of what shakespeare would have punned as graver things to come these things will disrupt the unthinking tranquility which has blinkered the citizens to the fragile nature of social constructions and seduce them with an illusion of modern freedom ryu is the first to find a dead rat soon another is found in another then another then another it's not long before the town is overwhelmed by the deaths of thousands of these diseased rats who come out of their holes and there's a drop of blood on the end of their nose they have emerged from what he tells us are basements cubby holes cellars and drains to die bloody and rotting in homes offices schools and cafes people call for radical measures to remove what is a rather disgusting accident they accuse the authorities of inaction does that sound familiar to any of you and heave signs of relief when they are told that the numbers have been brought under control but ryu knows better uh he knows enough about plague he's a somewhat of a student of the plague from rats to humans is something that uh often happens and may very well in this case the newspapers are soon enough reporting that there are deaths and initially these media accounts create a consoling spirit of objectivity which is sometimes found in statistics we know right but at the same time there were the first stirrings of that slight nausea with regard to the future that is known as anxiety another one of those existential buzzwords that i mentioned a minute ago first the citizens deny reality because quote they were humanists they did not believe in pestilence plagues like wars always find people unprepared they say of war that it won't last it's too stupid but it does last and stupidity carries doggedly on but we must remark that ryu does not condemn the humanistic term he remains doggedly non-judge judgmental throughout with an exception made for the priest that we'll talk about a little bit later and indeed ryu appears to sponsor the notion that knowledge hope and memory are more important than idealizations and political beliefs the solace this brings may be transient but it's nonetheless more comforting than abstractions i'm going to take a minute and just read a few blurbs to you that i'm sure some of you noted in your reading but i think they're particularly important um on this on this point about memory and uh we'll come back and talk about that but the plague forced inactivity on them limiting their movements to the same dull round inside the town and throwing them day after day on the elusive solace of their memories for in their aimless walks they kept on coming back to the same streets and usually owing to the smallness of the town these were streets in which in happier days they'd walk with those who were now absent it was undoubtedly the feeling of exile that sensation of a void within which never left us that irrational longing to heart back to the past or else to speed up the march of time and those keen shafts of memory that stun strung sorry that stung like fire in short we returned to our prison house we had nothing left us but the past and even if some were tempted to live in the future they had speedily to abandon the idea anyhow as soon as could be once they felt the wounds that the imagination inflicts on those who yield themselves to it at such moments the collapse of their courage willpower and endurance was so abrupt that they felt they could never drag themselves out of the pit of despond into which they had fallen therefore they forced themselves never to think about the problematic day of escape to cease looking to the future and always to keep so to speak their eyes fixed on the ground at their feet thus in a middle course between these heights and depths they drifted through life rather than live the prey of aimless days and sterile memories like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress and finally even the past of which they thought incessantly had a savor only of regret for they would have wished to add to it all that they regretted having left undone while they might yet have done it with the man or woman whose return they now awaited just as in all activities even the relatively happy ones of their life as prisoners they kept vainly to include the absent ones so ultimately i think in in camus view humans mean more than history this way of thinking was inevitable to the hardcore essentialists like sarge and and perhaps as much as anything led to the rift with camus camus's success also irritated sarge i think but i think that's the these passages illustrate for us that memory has a power that can be turned um to the good it's not it's not pointless we don't have to relive the past we can't relive the past but it's a way of bringing us comfort in a way that political beliefs and uh uh commitments to ideals and that don't necessarily do ryu and taru the stranger from whose diaries is the plague the narrator reads and in part constructs his chronicle both of them at great personal cost care for people that are infected with this plague and those dying throughout the entire course of the epidemic but they and others who join them like grand and rember are not heroes in the popular sense of the term uh someone dashing into a fire to save a cat you know that that kind of thing they're like the teacher and this is a relationship that camus specifically draws our attention to they're like the teacher who must show that two and two make four rather than otherwise but just as remarkable as the teacher who risks herself in times when i'm quoting again the person who dares to say that two and two make four is punished by death in other words a explicit reference to nazism they're like the nurses doctors all those other kind of helpers ambulance drivers um what we call first responders and essential workers uh to labor under contin conditions um and take acts with no great merit or in other words you don't get a medal for doing them just the clear-sided practice of living in the presence of death uh you know is is part of what it means to be part of this universal human condition so heroism um in in this sense is maybe no more than what ryu calls you know doing what needs to be done um and would always have to be done again because these things recur there's this recruit essence that we all live have to live with and he puts it in terms of a terror actually at one point ryu is accused of abstraction um being a scientist in other words being captured by the enlightenment belief in rationality and that you know once we proceed rationally we're proceeding objectively um and you know this this comes to him when victims the family of victims um accuse him of being heartless um [Music] despite their uh what the narrator tells us their struggles tears and pleas this just forces him back into deep reflection though um he knows that there is a certain abstraction to the work he does it has a human component but it also has these scientific abstractions circling around it um and these he has to make impersonal decisions um but those lead to what he calls a closing a closing in around around his heart the heart closing in around itself but he knows that this too can just devolve into another abstraction right um and uh he he may come to resemble that uh after a period of time in order to fight the spread of infection in other words he needs he has to maintain some emotional distance but that's not really the end of it i don't think i think all that begins to change with the death of the child which shakes his professional distance and draws him into a confrontation with the priest belief system and we can come back and talk a little bit about um how existentialism deals with christianity um there's a long spectrum between hardcore atheists like sarg somewhat softer views of someone like camus to you know full-on christians uh a catholic even like um paul tillich anyway there are times when the only feeling i have is one of mad mad revolt i understand that sort of thing is revolting but perhaps we could love what we cannot understand no father i have a very different idea of love and until my dying day i shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture ah doctor i've just realized what is meant by grace it's something i haven't got that i know but i'd rather not discuss it with you we're working side by side for something that unites us beyond blasphemy and prayers and that's the only thing that matters yes yes you too are working for man's salvation salvation is much too big a word for me i don't aim so high i'm concerned with men's health and for me his health comes first as the disease starts to weaken and the number of cases decline we're told that spontaneous signs of optimism appear relief joy even begins to take hold but this this liberation um this escape from exile comes with what the narrator tells us is laughter and tears but joy is transient and the citizens will still live in a quote senseless world in which the murder of a man was happening as benal as the death of a fly can they avoid the memories of a well-defined savagery the calculated delirium and the imprisonment that brought with it a terrible freedom from everything that was not the immediate present the stench of death that stunned all those whom it did not kill i added the question mark to that uh in the novel itself it ends with a period the plague is in us all and we are all in it says to root no one is immune and to not become its victim uh requires um you know a variety of things from education um [Music] in the in the sense of we need to be led um out from the state of ignorance um about death and life so that we don't and i'm quoting again find ourselves breathing in another person's face and infecting him did you all of you notice that they even talk about masks at some point in the novel um so the trick must be to refuse to be on the side of the pestilence like the people of iran all we can know at the moment is that um the coveted disruption will end but we have to sense that ending with a deeper sense and that is kemi warns us that other plagues and viruses will return because plague never dies or dashes entirely it can remain dormant for dozens of years in furniture or old clothing it waits patiently in bedrooms cellars trunks handkerchiefs and old papers and perhaps the day will come when for the instruction or misfortune of mankind the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city this is to say as steel puts it that the plague's ultimate pertinence as a literary symbol is not that men die from the plague but that man is plagued by death thank you randy you're welcome thank you for that um you of course you raised several questions um let me jump into a couple or three of them and then you all get your questions ready get your comments ready so um i'll depend on you for the correct pronunciation of words uh let's go back and talk about the uh the priest pandalu is that the way you pronounce his name i think that's fine a little bit more you brought him up right you talk about him and and there's the confrontation or the conversation with ryu um he has two sermons right you know and then something happens to him after the after the second sermon shortly after that so what what's the emphasis of his of his sermon the first we must say talk about the emphasis of this well the first one's just kind of the classic hellfire and brimstone right and it's your own damn fault yeah you know the uh kind of the old testament view um as that this is uh punishment for your sins you know sodom and gomorrah and et cetera et cetera et cetera yeah you're to blame yes yes it's all your fault it's all your fault that's how i i tell my students that's how we operate in kansas by the way if something bad happens to you it's your own damn fault don't be filing a lawsuit uh why were you in that alley why were you out past midnight all those kinds of things so and what about the second sermon uh well i mean it certainly shows a softening right uh it gets off the gets off the the the rigid uh what i've referred to as the old testament uh way of looking at it i i don't think that i don't think that ryu finds it satisfying although i think he thinks it's better than the first shot at it yeah yeah and then shortly thereafter he dies yes right uh and so what are we to make of his death do you think anything particular i mean he's just as mortal as everybody else or you know what does ryu draw from his death well yeah i mean it you know it gets into the this interesting this interesting argument um well you know if you if you're that much of a believer you know why would you ever go to the doctor right you know why would a priest ever you know he said god's going to look after you so uh why do you need me yeah uh why do you need a physician um and uh yeah i mean even i mean i think i think uh ryu is probably the the least judgmental person you know that we've we've ever run across right and even though he violently disagrees with the priests creed if you will i i think he has a soft spot for him and you know appreciates the priest's humanity okay and so that raises another question in my mind then because this is a strange thing um for camus or any writer you know camus the author of the plague uh places within that a narrator who teases us at the beginning that he's going to reveal who the narrator is right you know and then it's all the way to the end of the novel almost that he does indeed do that within five pages of the end of the novel you know it's time for me to reveal who the narrator is right and it turns out to be ryu who is a character in the narration up to that point right yeah and it is one of the things contained in those last two or three pages is the death of his own wife you know spoken almost in passing you know just as a a little note on page 14 of the newspaper something like that yeah but what what do you think what are we to get from the narrative strategy here that camus uses in this novel do you make anything of it or or how do you think of it uh a couple of things uh i mentioned in in my remarks that he thinks of this as a chronicle um there are um you know if we kind of rewind to medieval times there were a couple of kinds of history that were kept annals and chronicles and it chronicles you know just a list of you know great floods in you know 1105 uh 11 12 uh pestilence you know it just stuff stuff like that maybe a little bit more meat on the bones but essentially a chronological list of what happened and that's not really how we view history today right we think of historical works as a selective appropriation of facts uh no real pretense to objectivity anymore or at least at least we think that the author's exercising pretense but that's that's why we you know in the in the course of a few decades you know kind of completely rewritten the history of the civil war right and so i think that he chooses this narrator with this clinical voice in the form of the chronicle to make us believe that he's being objective that these these are the facts this is really what happened this is not fake news and so within that context then there is that place where um i think it is it you mentioned this but uh is it taru who uh accuses him of being abstract yeah i think so yeah and so um he lodges that against himself in the narrative right in what way am i abstract as you as you were talking about it and so that objectivity is we think is there and yet then we have such things as his description of the death of the magistrate's son you know which is almost too much to bear right yeah it just is so painful because it not only contains the the death struggle of this young this boy but the way it incites as it were a chorus of sufferers along the hall right where he is in that in in that unit and so it's it's almost unbearable um it seems to be more than objective right you know and that's very rare you know in this novel there aren't very many maybe that's the only scene that's that's stark in that graphic yeah i think that's right and you know only literature can do that right yeah philosophical track can't can't capture that um and so i think that's that's the importance uh of that and um it's the sort of thing that brings a new dimension to this allegedly objective account because it's you know it's threaded with emotion um with empathy um and deep sorrow um you're gonna know i was i'm about to work this this in the only other thing i can think of that's like this is the death of the grandmother and proofs remembers the things right yes absolutely yeah so so but once you have that in the narrative it's almost impossible to imagine the narrative without it right you know that yes that is almost a necessity regardless of the degree to which is it is objective or not you know so um but but more typically in the plague um what would you call it it's not exactly philosophical right but the the issues are there and they're treated in the mind of the narrator for example you know ryu's contention that uh god is not in the world but love is right you know and he wants to he wants to make the distinction between those two two things doesn't he yeah and that that's why i think it's ultimately a humanist account um and it's the the substitution of this humanistic belief system uh that substitutes for religion um and i think that you know camus is a non-believer and so to that extent i think he swims with sarge even though they disagreed ultimately uh over communism uh but i think that their they're probably swimming together on that and and you know sark's point was you know when you his his example was you um i don't have one in front of me you have a conception of a need for what he calls a paper knife a letter opener right oh yeah and so you know what that that is and then you you know make a drawing and go take it to a blacksmith and it makes you a letter opener that concept existed that but before the object was created yeah but if you don't believe in god then actually its existence precedes essence instead of essence preceding existence and i think that's the the the underlying theory um that we're seeing worked out here philosophically and you can now this is full of contradictions that you don't find in an ordinary philosophical text right you know you get this idea this i mean almost an aphorism or you know a logical statement you have to do what you have to do but then later you'll say hell i don't know what i'm doing uh right and so it it injects that in uncertainty into the equation yeah so an awful lot is it is uh made of and this is very very familiar to us in koben you know an awful lot is made in this in this novel of separation what what the narrator calls separation right you know at a certain point then the they're actually apparently actual gates around the city you know that they have to be closed and guarded nobody can get out nobody can get in and so there is this separation that we read so much and some of us experience today right uh aged parents and grandparents and uh homes that we can't go you know funerals that we can't attend and things like that um so that seems to be a point that ryu or the narrator dwells on right the almost a philosophy of separation you know how how does how does separation work on us yeah in a separation and uses the word exile which of course you see in other uh other works of of camus and you know it's that that lack of the ability to communicate to have a community that wears the hardest on these people until we see you know people trying to breach the gates and so forth to get out um but it's a it's a difficulty that um that camus was not the first one to to dwell on i mean that was part of the point in defoe's year of the plague um you know he thought that uh those shut in orders is what they were they were called then um may have been helpful but fell the most harshly on the most vulnerable people in the community the rich people still you know got out and and same thing happens in iran right rich people are you know they got good food they got good restaurants um and it was the other other quarters um that um didn't fare so well [Music] so let's talk let's go back and talk a little bit more and uh i please you all out there uh ask questions and get involved in this conversation but let's go back and talk about heroism a little bit more you brought it up you talked about it a little bit and at one point it becomes an explicit thing in the novel right the okay so the narrator says it seems that i'm i'm kind of called upon to name a hero okay so and and he keeps it kind of veiled but i think he names grant as the hero right yeah the little little person so what's going on with that and then can we talk a little bit more about grant's uh phrase you know his opening and we take it this is the first sentence of a tome right a massive work that he's going to to write yeah yeah yeah through the whole thing it's almost like it is is not a throwaway it's something that's very central to what's going on in the plot how do you regard grant and you know is he really the hero well grant is uh uh you know he's kind of a comic really the only comedy in the novel is associated with him um you know he's this hapless bureaucrat that's that's never been promoted um you know his wife left him he's uh he is essentially alone and when the novel begins what we find him is he's at work on his novel you know he goes off to this horrible job and then comes home and works on the novel the work on the novel is redoing the first sentence of the novel over and over again and like i say it's a uh you know clearly a parody of a 19th century french society novel um and uh at one point when he is sick and in danger of dying he turns over his manuscript to ryu who looks at it and he's got 50 pages done but all 50 pages are just different versions of the first sentence and he then asked asked for it to be burned and uh really not much was lost since uh after he recovered he just goes back to reworking the first sentence thinks he has it he uh expunges all the adjectives and adverbs at one point and the last we hear about it he thinks it's perfect except he says well i'm not sure the word fine is quite right it's and it's too similar at one point right you know and so then as you said earlier he takes out the adjectives and remember when he gets it just right what the response will be uh you know the people at the publishers are they're all going to stand up and hats off and so that's exactly right that that um uh the hats off thing um the uh the homeward angel yeah uh his uh editor always wears hat yes so he could just take that off but um why i think he is heroic it's a it's a quiet kind of uh heroic activity is he volunteers to help and you know participate in and take a leadership role in these brigades yeah i think that's the heroic part it's a quiet heroic yeah so if we have to name a hero he is he's the person right and it's kind of proof that as the narrator says toward the in the second half of the novel that that human beings are more good than bad right then than there is so we've got several um we got several good comments and questions randy you can read them on your chat column too but i'll read them out loud to everyone and this is from angelica anderson to say that man is plagued by death does death have to be literal if the plague in the novel was a metaphor for the nazi occupation man was plagued by hate as much as literal death to further the argument hate can linger on pages and in sellers as much as germs so to restate what all can death be and more importantly what's the objective of acknowledging our death if it is destined to follow us indefinitely whether we acknowledge it or not oh my gosh that's a camus kind of uh series of questions there randy it is uh how about i say i don't know yeah i mean i i think that i think that's right it's it it's not the it it's not the death itself it's this virus it's this basilis um that can lie dormant um and the point is is that it can infect the body politic which is what happened uh with fascism and with the collaborators in in france um so i i do think that that's right um that um you know hate is this kind of virus that can spread and you know as as they saw in france at the time it spreads to to well-meaning people um and and there's not a serum uh to use the language of the the novel there's not a serum that can inoculate even well-meaning people okay and if anybody has anything you want to add as we go as we can as we converse you raise your hand or do chat to break into a particular point this is from gail saxon yes she writes hate lingers and the plagues of the future will be man against man and reason during times of crisis so would you have a comment on that randy i thought it was man versus machine don't we read the matrix watch the matrix [Laughter] no i mean i you know that's that's sort of where we are right now right not just in the united states but globally um there seemed to be uh more divisions than than ever before even though we're not at world war and so you know uh at least that hasn't hasn't happened um so so i'll i'm gonna risk uh jumping in here with a with a question to you um you know so often we hear today it's it's never been this bad you know we're heading toward apocalypse how do you hold historical efforts in your mind right how do you regard where we are now versus where the human race has been in the past well you know i'm uh i try and be cheerful about it i mean the i mean if you look at the positive side you know there's uh you know fewer bad things really bad things happen in the world than they've ever been happened you know 100 years ago there's more food there are fewer diseases despite this covet and so the world is in some ways in pretty good shape you know i think probably the the biggest problem we have now is there so much news whether you call it news or fake news or whatever we're just bombarded with this negative stuff all the time because you know it's clickbait um but all in all you know the world's in pretty good shape if we're thinking about historical things like plagues of locusts and famine and uh and so forth so and that's yeah and so that's a that's a reason for hope there's something to build on and something to go forward from yeah absolutely and in the novel by the way you know hope hope is an important piece of this humanistic endeavor as opposed to the stranger where what marissa had to do was rid himself of hope yeah yeah yes and it's very interesting the the the way ryu talks about small consolations for example he learned learns that he can give up pity because it's useless in this you know it doesn't it doesn't do any good so he can seize a small consolation not having a struggle with that you know that kind of thing so yeah so so let me go to carol um as isolated as we are is community a possible redemptive player we should not forget and like in the fall the fall by camus are we given chance after chance to try choice to try choice wise again the narrator hasn't a clue in lieu of ryu it is a paw i i didn't follow that larry the okay so are we given are we given chance after chance to try choice wise again you know is is there no no exit for example i think that's what carol's getting at carol you might want to jump in here yeah no i i think i think camus says we've you know we've got more opportunities it's we're not condemned in the way that sarc believed yes so let me go to josh um so josh asked i wonder if the constant fixing of the first sentence is a bit of symbolism of an incapability to let go or move on for fear of making the wrong choice either personally or as a community yeah i think that i think that's a good way of thinking about it i mean i mean he's trying to he's trying to achieve perfection in something that's utterly banal so okay seems to find personal meaning in meaninglessness which is volatility right yes tell it um so here here's another one from gail i suggest that the rewriting and rewriting is actually the reality of a writer and is timeless kamu is serious and laughing at the writer's plight yeah that i think that i think that's right i mean it's a isn't it a form of writer's block you know he manages to fill the white space but he fills the white space with the same thing with these minor variations well and certain writers uh you know are known for not letting things go for even after things are published you know to going back and tinkering with them and making them better you know right like like grant wants his first sentence to be great and then others like faulkner who both uh camus and sartre admired so much you know once they get through with the novel they forget about it you know they you know faulkner was famous in his university classes for not being able to answer the questions the students had about his novels because he couldn't remember she was always on to the next thing you know well the other and at the other extreme there's henry james uh you know the new york edition of his works he monkey with them extensively and uh hardly improved something monkeyed with them nonetheless yeah and then you something i won't go on with this but dostoyevsky and those massive novels he writes was a was you know a rabid reviser you know he couldn't leave it alone either so let me go to uh sam sam says sam asks what lessons for our current plague can we learn from this novel well i and first of all i think the chemist point is that it's not a prescription you know yes it's it's not a it's not a guide nonetheless can we take things away from it um which is yeah that um in these situations um we have to maintain our sense of community um and you know as we found worldwide you just can't lock everybody up forever um you know it just it just doesn't work particularly in uh more pluralist sorts of societies where there are lots of subcultures and and so forth uh you know we'd like to think that uh it's kind of a caricature but you know we think that germans and are really good at following directions and so maybe they are you know maybe they are conditioned better where here um you know we like our freedom and you know don't want to wear masks governor said i don't have to wear a mask how are things in kansas uh they have ebbed and flowed we've got so much open space so i think we'll probably be all right um you know we've got more cows than people so so what you're saying randy is that this is in no way a how-to book right right exactly it it is more um i mean it certainly has a philosophical philosophical dimension to it as you've said but it is uh almost a call in the midst of a plague to reflect on things that you wouldn't ordinarily think about that's right that's right and in particular you know what he's what he's thinking about is how do we keep this fascist virus from reinfecting the the population i mean at the allegorical level yes you know that's what that's what this is about yeah right okay good uh thank you thanks for the question sam and then from george cooper in the french i wonder what the conversation between the priest and ryu is kamu ryu is kamu having linguistic fun sante healing holiness and didn't camus struggle with tuberculosis uh i don't i don't know whether camus had tb i mean obviously ryu's wife had tb that's why she was in the sanitarium as for the french version um i of course read that uh as an undergraduate you might notice from here and so forth that i've slept since then no idea you mean that was a couple of years ago that was at least two years ago right yeah george you want to follow up with your question or not unmute yourself and speak now you're you're you're still not okay there you go okay yeah i'm this american who likes my freedom to be able to click on clickbait if you understand uh i'm just wondering there's so much of the connection here it seems to me it also says that there is this residual underlying consequence of christianity that the enlightenment begins to raise questions about and that organizing things abstractly uh puts constraints on really our humanity and camus is trying to navigate a lot of that it seems to me in this uh in this novel and i would also think that that a lot of it is this is a writer this man is a writer and as a result of that i he may have philosophical themes that he's thinking about but he's not a philosopher and he's not a theologian but he sees i think uh and and i think this is what that conversation between uh ryu and the priest is about that there are parallels going on here and the priest has got more really to say that's profound in saying that healing is really a form of sanctification of uh that holiness is involved in the work that i do and you do only i'm sorry you think we're enemies we're not i i don't i haven't seen in any of uh any other of camus stuff that he's necessarily anticlerical so i don't know exactly all of this but it just strikes me that there's a really a rich set of strata going on in this narrative that is present in the french but may not make it through translation into english and that's the reason i was asking and i'm sorry that i brought up uh questions of gray hair and that sort of thing and raising it it's been a while since i read it in the french too so i'm still trying to and my french is much worse than yours but i'm still trying to gather what's going on throughout all of this and this set of circumstances that he's going through and you know admiring faulkner faulkner deals with context that he's familiar with and right now in colonial uh then in colonial algeria you still have the nazi you still have the nazi presence you don't have it the way it is in in the occupied france but you've still got it i mean all we have to do is watch the movie casablanca to get a sentence and so camus he's french but he's also algerian yeah and and all of that seems to me to say something to us and that is we're in the metroplex dallas texas and we're facing a plague now and i can't speak to what camus experienced with the 1918-1912 plague even though he's looking at what's what happened with cholera i don't know i don't know randy how much does that factor into this do you know well i know he heavily researched just like defoe he heavily researched um the history of plagues um and so you know he was well versed in the plague literature if you will but that that's all i know so so let's go on thank you george for that thank you very much and um so we have a question from caitlin can you elaborate on this as an allegory for nazi occupation you've mentioned it you've alluded to it when i was taught it in undergrad which i know caitlin and it was a few years less than what you and i are talking about randy right since i'm right when i was taught at an undergrad we read it as exist existentialism only or so i remember so i would like to dig more into the allegory aspect i i think the uh what camus would have said is that this grew out of his experience with the resistance he was actually very very active in the resistance and i think the point that he is making is how how thin the veneer of civilization really is and how easy it is for infections totalitarian inspections to get under that veneer and lead to the sort of corruption that took place in french society and so i think he is saying that fascism um of the the sort that overran france is operated very much like a virus it jumps from person to person it's difficult to cure and the cure is uncertain and there's always the possibility of resurgence and where he broke with with sarc and and simone was they were all communists at one point but camus just didn't agree with stalinism and where sark was willing to overlook some of stalin's excesses camus was not and so that's why we have this character who uh is opposed to the death penalty believes that the death of the individual is in fact important um whereas serge was willing to overlook that uh with respect to saul and oh well you know you got to break a few eggs if you're going to make an omelette and you know i think that's i think that's the point and it the character who pardons everybody wants to not blame anybody is that tarou yes okay okay so on the other side here this is from jim phelps roland bark said of the novel that it was a misreading of camus work to say that it was an allegory of the nazi occupation camus responded that to the contrary it was a valid reading of la passed so there's the there's the other side yeah yeah and that's the that's the letter i was referring to earlier okay yes good okay all right um and caitlyn no sam wants to know if there's a particular translation that you recommend i the only one i'm really aware of is the stewart gilbert one okay and this is what jim phelps says the stuart gilbert translation seems to be the universally available one there's a new one coming out in early 2021 by laura maris m-a-r-r-i-s which is much anticipated a translation by robin bust b-u-s-s is largely out of print but is supposed to be better from what i've read so jim you obviously you're into camus and so thank you for that information randy do you have any uh comment on that no i mean i i use the old crinkled yellowing things from my youth okay and caitlyn is helping out jeff thomas who's having chat issues and so somehow caitlyn got his question which is this there is now an ongoing terrible plague of locusts and with climate change more hunger and such may well be coming than in the past this comment this comment regards your optimism of noun versus the past so going back to what you had said uh randy earlier that you find a lot of reasons for optimism in the world you know yeah you know um i i hate to reign on a fellow kansan but many of you who have hair like mine uh will remember paul eric's population bomb uh in the in the 1960s and you know i mean as all we're going to die of famine and there was this malthusian belief that uh well technology was able to keep keep up with that and in fact there's more food than there ever was um now what i'm more worried about is is actually are people like draft horses you know i i don't know how many of you grew up on the farm but when i was a kid old farmers still had draft horses belgians percherons clydesdales and clydesdales 12 of them i guess were able to find a job working for budweiser but the rest of them their purpose for existing is is gone um uh technology has completely replaced their usefulness and so that's what i worry about more is technology just simply going to take away all the work that people do so i'm less worried about locus than uh than displacement yeah but of course jeff is literally right right he's not using that as a metaphor in some parts yeah no that's right that's right there are those locusts okay so uh another question from claudia williams do you feel the regret of missing out on life in the past contributed to forming the idea of camus philosophy that life is absurd throughout the plague if so do you believe his feelings imparted his philosophy i would also like to ask your opinion on his idea of the absurdness of life and does it come from the pursuits of life so there's several bundled up there in that well let me take the last one first and then you can remind me what the first ones the last one first i mean i think that the idea of the absurd is in a lot of ways it's a it's an attack on uh enlightenment belief that rationality will solve all of our our problems that we can reason our way to solutions for everything um and i think camus conception of of the absurd along with other existentialists is that um there is not this sort of objectivity that some people believe in there's this belief that if you once you proceed rationally you've achieved an objective result and you know camus says there are all sorts of other things in the stew other than logic and rationality because we're emotional creatures and we have anxieties and all those sorts of things that can't be explained rationally you want me to remind you of the others please okay do you feel the regret of missing out on life in the past contributed to forming the idea of camus philosophy that life is absurd that you see throughout the play i i'm i'm not sure i understand the question yeah it seems to be a biographical question but i'm not sure i i i don't know all that much about his biography not his early biography if you're talking about the fact that he was unable to go to the fancy schools that search was yeah i think that probably does does figure into it so claudia would you like to be the algerian boy i'm sorry he's the poor algerian boy who comes to paris and yeah do you want to you want to claudia do you want to jump in here and add something or not um i believe you answered most of what i was asking thank you okay all right so so that takes us to the end of the queue and we're running short on time anything else i have one question i want to ask here at the end so but let me give a minute for anyone else who who might have something um so let's let's go to the last page of the novel randy yeah no and it's such a you know ryu has said before in that wonderful conversation between him and taru that uh and this is the kind of thing that to me camus is best at saying that you know we must continue to struggle against creation right do you remember that where where he says because there's something wrong with creation right because we're born to die and we need to keep struggling against death you know so there's this this this continual struggle and at the end of the novel and i'm reading here from the end of the novel um sort of the about five or six lines up from the final the final two paragraphs dr ryu resolved to compile this chronicle right still keeping his uh identity as an error so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague stricken people and i think again he's talking about the literal physical plague and the allegorical plague at the same time [Music] so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence that there are more things to admire in men than to despise okay i mean that's would you agree that that's a almost an uncharacteristically positive statement by cambuur about the capacities of humankind yeah well that goes back to my uh you know you could you could read this novel in starkly bleak terms yeah and um you know as i as i mentioned at the near the beginning it is it is in a lot of ways evaluation of humanism and that on balance it works pretty well and we can work through problems as long as we cling to our humanistic values now within the within the scope of the novel i think he mean ryu means what he says the narrator means what he says that this chronicle will stand as a memorial to the fallen you know a reminder no they can't give everyone a medal like they were talking about it at one point but this is a this is a testament and that bearing witness is something that can happen again and again right i mean this is something that is uh repeatable in human experience yes and then he he almost takes it back in the next paragraph when he says nonetheless you know we can never claim a final victory and this could only be the record of what had to be done right there's nothing about it this is what what had to be done and then in the in the final well let me read it could only be the record had to be done what had to be done and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaught despite their personal afflictions by all who while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences strive their utmost to be healers that that's a what would we call it that's a bracing message to take away right yeah at the end of this novel yeah no i think i think so and you know the the problem is is you know if we're again if we focus on on nazism you know what happens after a couple of generations when there's nobody around that was actually bore actual witness and do institutional memories fade and so forth and that's why the rats come out again right yeah right exactly well that could lead us into another hour-long discussion on the power of art right in this in this kind of struggle this human struggle but we won't do that because we're at the end of the hour so uh do you have any final words dr gordon that was a it was great to hear you talk about the novel and entering this was fun um it's always nice to talk about something other than law thanks i think some of my students showed up and they were probably happy to hear me talk about something other than torts right well wonderful and i'm always uh really more hopeful at the end of this novel than i expect to be and so that's one of the reasons i like it so much and it's a toss-up for me between the stranger and the plague as to what is the what is best in his canon but thank you all for being with us um please join us again when we have another one of these uh meetings i hope you all all are well and we will see you again in the future i'm hoping so good evening everyone you

Channel: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture

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Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: dallas institute, humanities, culture, dallas

Id: hqCEE2jPA4k

Length: 85min 27sec (5127 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2020