No abstract
A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images. 1 The rational creature…must struggle by conjecture about visible things toward an understanding of the invisible ones. 2 Camus' explication, in the first epigram, of how his art form works and so must be read, is on all fours with Augustine's view, in the second, of how God has worked, and can be seen to work, in the world. In both cases we must learn how to read the invisible through the visible. While Camus is considered by most critics to be atheist, and his argument between Fr. Paneloux and Doctor Rieux after the death of the child one of the classics of the anti-theistic argument from evil, 3 the burden of this paper is to show that such a reading is inadequate. It suffers from an incomplete evaluation of Paneloux's sermons, and is blind to the Augustinian substructure of the novel, which reveals that something more divine is present and active. 4 In reading this way it should be clear that Camus' own thoughts and beliefs are not my main interest; rather I am reading The Plague as a work of art, about which Camus also may have ideas. 5 To do this, we will center our remarks on the sermons of Fr. Paneloux-like Camus, an Augustine scholar-and a chapter in Part Two which suggests that the doctor's mother fulfills the Augustinian picture of love which the priest's sermons explicate.In order to see the argument between the priest and the doctor accurately, we should attune ourselves to several earlier descriptions and intimations concerning each character. We should begin, perhaps, by noting that the narrator (revealed to be Dr. Rieux) emphasizes that the town of Oran is 'without intimations' (P 4), 6 and that the first section of Part One ends with the narrator saying 'He also proposes….' (P 6), without finishing his sentence. For a man who is unwilling to speak to a reporter who 'couldn't state the facts without paltering with the truth' and has 'no use for statements in which something is kept back' (P 11), this ellipsis is the first of several intimations that the doctor is neither entirely straightforward nor an entirely trustworthy narrator. 7 At the end of the book, Dr. Rieux admits that he set himself not to report more than he had seen, nor attribute to his companions in the plague thoughts which they did not necessarily think (P 272). The narrator has a tendency to an almost positivist 'chronicle,' to quote what the first sentence of the novel describes as forthcoming; the author, on the other hand, does more: he shows us many things that the putative narrator misses and certainly gives no intimation of understanding.Fr. Paneloux, the doctor's opposite number, is 'a learned and militant Jesuit, …who was very highly thought of in our town, even in circles quite indifferent to religion' (P 16). We meet him helping Michel-the concierge of Rieux's building and first victim of the plague-back to his bed. By this we know he is not merely the intellectual powerhouse one might ...
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