7/4/2023 0 Comments The plague camusThe Plague is full of people who struggle to clarify their language and strain to make it more precise: Grand, Rambert, Paneloux, and even Rieux all try-and often fail-to express their deepest feelings through words. “I’ve heard so much reasoning that almost turned my head,” he says, “and which had turned enough other heads to make them consent to killing, and I understood that all human sorrow came from not keeping language clear.”Īll human sorrow! The boldness of this claim hints at how much Camus believed in words. Like with most problems in art, the solution was to address it directly: in one of the most revelatory sections of the novel, the character Tarrou blurs the line between fancy rhetoric and violence. Aside from these difficulties, there was the pressure of authentically speaking up about the violence of World War II without falling into the nationalist heroics he deplored. Camus was ill when he began it, then trapped by the borders keeping him in Nazi-occupied France. The Plague was not an easy book to write. Photograph by Marianne Casamance, via Wikimedia Commons.
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