[In the following excerpt, Nelson compares Albert Camus's depiction of Oran in The Plague with Andre Malraux's representation of Shanghai in The Human Condition.]

"The philosopher must decide between alternatives," writes Austin Warren, "or reduce his thesis and antithesis to some underlying or overlying synthesis. But the novelist of a speculative turn need not push his position to a stand. He can divide his conflicting insights between his characters. .. . "¹ Here is indeed a precious liberty for the modern author who finds himself in a world devoid of absolutes, where truth is temporal. But the novel of multiple truths, none of which may, on moral grounds, dominate the others, raises severe structural problems for the author who still cares about coherence and unity in his art. The presentation of multiplicity within unity, the adaptation of the traditional novel to an absurd world, is a task which Malraux and Camus attacked and accomplished in a remarkably similar way—the former in La Condition humaine (1933),² and the latter in La Peste (1947).³

Critics have shown interest in the impression of unity which each of these novels produces despite a superficially episodic structure,⁴ but they have usually been satisfied with demonstrating the existence of this unity and describing its nature. A deeper relationship of subject matter to form in these works remains relatively unexplored.

The two novels share a general subject: the confrontation of man's desire for absolute and eternal truth and the opposing multiplicity and contingency of the real world. This dichotomy is exemplified in numerous facets of man's existence. We find ourselves separate from others because we possess totally individual natures and because we must strive to Malte our uniqueness known to others through the use of a conventional language. We desire immortality for ourselves or for the causes we support, yet we know that we shall die, and so eventually will the values we uphold. We want reality to conform to a predictable pattern, and yet our hopes are constantly dashed by the surprise of the chance occurrence. These are all examples of a single central problem—the desire for parmenidean unity versus real multiplicity: the absurd. The man who accepts this world view will necessarily confront all phases of that fundamental conflict. But the struggle is vast, complex overpowering. To reduce it to human terms, we need to attack the absurd, element by element, in its own multiplicity. Might not a novelist be led in this way to create a whole city of differing characters, each seeking his peculiar solution to a single aspect of the great problem?

In this sense, the fictional Shanghai would be Malraux himself; and plague-stricken Oran, Camus. The various characters would be seen not as complete individuals but as fragments of the authors' mentalities, each one representing a part of the general struggle, a tentative solution to an element of a single central problem. To establish this notion, let us look first at the structural elements which tend to Malte these novels episodic, elements representative of the multiplicity of the chaotic world. Later we shall consider the forces of order, suggestive of the human aspiration for unity.

First, neither novel has a protagonist in the traditional sense. In La Condition humaine, Kyo is the leader of the communists, yet about half of the novel is taken up with matters not directly related to him. He is a man of action, strangely incomplete without his contemplative father. Although he is allowed to die for his cause in the end, it is Katow who appears, at least to Western eyes, more heroic in death, for he will sacrifice his cyanide to his young Chinese comrades and allow himself to be burned alive, while Kyo uses his cyanide tablets and dies quickly. Throughout the novel, our interest and our viewpoint are determined now by this character, now by that one: Clappique at the gaming tables, Tchen trying to assassinate Chiang Kai-shek, Ferrai making love or experiencing the dissolution of the Consortium well after Kyo's demise.

La Peste, as well, is devoid of a true protagonist. Rieux is the narrator, of course, but Camus conceals this fact from us until the end, perhaps out of a desire not to Malte of him, by the use of first person narration, a conventional hero. Here again our interest flits from character to character: we follow the efforts of Rambert to flee the stricken city and the progress of Joseph Grand's literary sentence; we go to the opera with Cottard and Tarrou, and we witness the agony and death of Judge Othon's little boy. Rieux's story, like his life, is anecdotal: a succession of daily rounds, a series of relatively unrelated conversations, reports of general statistics and reactions to the disease. If indeed, then, we are to speak of unified plot structure in either novel, it must be in terms of a totality larger than any single character. What happens—that which has the traditional beginning, middle, and end—happens to the City.

A second major element of disorder is the absence of any stated scale of values. The warring characters dwell in relative peace with the author, their creator. Both authors strictly avoid commentary and explicit moral judgment. König, for example, Chiang Kai-shek's chief of police in La Condition humaine, sends the communists to their death in a locomotive's fire box. While giving this brutal deed a chance to speak for itself, Malraux is careful to give its perpetrator the opportunity to present his explanation (M, pp. 317-318), the mental and physical torture the communists once inflicted upon him by driving nails into his shoulders. Having wept before his torturers, he felt himself to have lost all human dignity, and now, "Ma dignité, à moi," he adds, "c'est de les tuer." Thus his cruelty stems from a desire for personal dignity, a source akin to that of the selfless struggle of Kyoshi Gisors, whom he will condemn to death. Furthermore, it is to Kyo's father, the opium addict seeking first of all his own inner peace, that Malraux attributes the most lucid wisdom. Clappique's inner struggle, as he negligently allows the communists to be arrested and slaughtered, is portrayed by Malraux with sympathetic interest.

A similar impartiality is evident in La Peste.⁵ Rieux, as a doctor, early seeks the imposition of the severest quarantine and prophylactic measures to halt the advance of the epidemic. Yet he remains on friendly terms with those who combat the restrictions. While he will not sign a health certificate to help Rambert leave Oran, he will in no way seek to impede the reporter's efforts to flee illegally; indeed, it is at Rieux's apartment that Rambert encounters Cottard, whose underworld connections can arrange the escape (C, pp. 156-157). Rieux has harsh words for no one, throughout the book, except for Father Paneloux, and then only at a time of severe emotional strain and fatigue, and he hastens to apologize (C, p. 237). Since the narrator withholds judgment, characters remain unjudged. Rieux does not judge himself; we believe him to be good, since he heals the sick and fights the plague at personal risk, yet he is not presented as perfect: his marriage has been less than ideal, for he admits having neglected his wife (C, p. 21); sometimes, too, he seems indifferent to individual suffering, preferring to think in abstract, statistical terms (C, pp. 105-106). Here, as in La Condition humaine, the author eschews absolute, didactic judgment, each reaction being, for the author, at least a valid possibility.

Given a common danger and numerous reactions, all of them admissible, a series of episodes related to a general struggle becomes, then, the most likely sort of presentation. Furthermore, both authors have tended to fragment the general peril, to confront different characters with specific aspects of the City's problem. In this way, certain characters become, as it were, generals assigned to specific fronts in the universal combat. In La Condition humaine, for example, the problem of human isolation is recognized by Gisors, when Kyo speaks to him of the coded language records. It is Katow, however, who has a measure of success in dealing with this human limitation as his gift of the cyanide tablets produces a poignant instant of communion, of supra-linguistic understanding between himself and his young companions.

In La Peste, Joseph Grand fights the battle with language, as he struggles to Malte every element of his sentence perfect. It is significant that, thinking himself about to die of the plague, he scrawls across the bottom of his manuscript, "Ma bien chère Jeanne, c'est aujourd'hui Noël" (C, p. 284). The personal symbolism of Christmas, the moment when he and Jeanne had realized the existence of their love, touches the reader, and Rieux as well, before the pages are consumed by the flames. Thus Grand through the use of symbolism conquers for a moment his own isolation. But in a larger sense, if Oran is Camus himself, then the quarantine wall is the limit of his self, his skin, as it were, the point of contact and of separation in relation to the outside world. When letters can no longer be sent out of Oran because they are possible germ bearers, and when telephones are reserved for emergencies, the citizens are obliged to communicate with their loved ones outside in the conventional phrases of telegrams: "Vais bien. Pense à toi. Tendresse" (C, p. 83). Everyday language is hardly more adequate in conveying our own intimate feelings. Characters do pass through the wall once, on the occasion of the fraternal swim (C, pp. 277-278) when Tarrou and Rieux know a moment of physical, unspoken kinship reminiscent of Katow's brief victory.

Other characters wage war on other fronts. When Kyo decides that the Shanghai Communists should keep their arms and fight for their lives against Chiang, he is opposing death, struggling against all that is anti-eternal, as surely as is Rieux in combating the plague. Ferrai, in Malraux's novel, is striving to be God, to be capable of restoring order to a chaotic situation. Similarly, Judge Othon in La Peste is striving for order through law in Oran, and for self-discipline in his own life. Some characters seek to escape their human condition simply by denying it. Rambert, in La Peste, keeps claiming, "Je ne suis pas d'ici" (C, pp. 101, 121). But one can never really escape, and Rambert's efforts are so often frustrated that he decides to end them. Malraux seems to admit escape through imagination and dreams, and indeed Gisors succeeds in fleeing by means of opium. However, his escape is only partial: his attachment to his son ties him to reality, and he must suffer at Kyo's death. Clappique escapes through imaginative role-playing. He claims he does not exist, which is indeed true; he has many different existences, none of which is real. He flees Shanghai in still another disguise, but it is Clappique the deckhand who escapes; the Clappique who was a Shanghai art dealer has ceased to be.

If the lack of a conventional protagonist, the absence of an explicit scale of values and the fragmentation of the struggle among vastly different characters tend to Malte these novels episodic, there are nonetheless forces for order. The individual dangers which threaten Tchen, Kyo, and Clappique have a common name: Chiang Kai-shek. In Camus' work, the plague is the destiny of Catholic and atheist, criminal, judge, and idealist. Though the danger is fragmented in presentation, we are constantly aware of its common origin. Camus reinforces this notion particularly by the use of statistics and generalities about "nos concitoyens" in virtually every other chapter. It is the existence of this shared peril which unites the diversified characters in a single beleaguered City, and which Maltes of the City a true protagonist. If the danger is, in reality the simple fact of man's condition, as Malraux's title implies and as Camus' allegory suggests,⁶ then the applicability of Austin Warren's notion to these novels is clear. The "conflicting insights" are, in this sense, possible reactions to the human condition, reactions which coexist in the mind of each author at the time of writing, and each of which takes the form of a character.

Another unifying technique is that of distanciation. Part III of La Condition humaine takes place outside Shanghai. Kyo goes to Hankow in search of an absolute—the Communist party line. Dissatisfied with the orders, he has a chance to reflect on motivations, to consider the human condition, as it were, from outside. Seen from a distance, Shanghai and its problems seem like a single entity to the reader. Distanciating sentences, like this one from Part II, also add to the effect of unity: "Coeur vivant de la Chine, Shanghai palpitait du passage de tout ce qui la faisait vivre; jusque du fond des campagnes, .. . les vaisseaux sanguins confluaient comme les canaux vers la ville capitale où se jouait le destin chinois" (M, p. 136). A similar unifying view from outside exists in La Peste, when Rieux and Tarrou go swimming. Perhaps even more important in this regard are the conversations between these two characters, which achieve a degree of aesthetic distance and generality of view. They take place on the terrace of the asthmatic old Father Time, who counts his endless chick-peas, high above the city.

Furthermore, there are implied universal values based on the relative success of the characters in coping with particular segments of the battle. Those who live on, somehow, are at least temporary conquerors. It is as if the authors were themselves trying out various solutions to the problems posed by the absurd in order to see which are most satisfactory. Malraux's life, when he wrote La Condition humaine, held indeed the possibility of many futures. Would he continue in revolutionary actions, perhaps dying a martyr's death like Kyo, to live on in the memory of man? Would he seek peace in opium and philosophical meditation like Gisors? Would he find the meaning of life in art like Kama? Would he turn to a search for order like Ferrai and like him submit his own fate to the will of politicians?

Camus' novel is less speculative. He knows he wants to place himself on the side of the victims in the universal disaster. He knows, too, that he is a writer, and though he modestly Maltes Joseph Grand into something of a simpleton, he takes to heart the spirit of Grand's final advice:⁷ to eliminate all the adjectives, those interpretive, subjective words which cannot be understood beyond the barrier of self. Indeed, instead of speculating about the future, Camus seems to look backward here, upon what he has been, and the life of Oran throughout the plague might be seen as a view of the history of one man's life. No somber skies, no dull rains presage the onset of the plague; it begins in the spring, reaches its hideous peak during the ardent summer, starts to diminish with the fall rains, and disappears in January. The traditional symbolism of the seasons here becomes a unifying device and might well suggest that the plague is one man's life, from birth to death.

It is perhaps this sensation of multiple insights arising from a single mind that produces the particular emotional effect which, to a degree, both novels share. While much can be said about the structure of classic tragedy as the informing principle⁸ in these works, the central emotion in neither novel is tragic. While it is quite plausible to speak of cathartic release through heroic death in Malraux's novel, such emotion is present only, strictly speaking, in the death of Kyo. He lives on, in the minds of others, as a martyr at the end, but this represents only his particular victory. Tragedy is one way to organize one element of the absurd world. Malraux carefully attenuates the tragic effect of Kyo's decease by inserting, in Part VII, the long recital of Ferral's economic difficulties between the suicide and the final cathartic realization that Kyo lives on in memory. Camus, of course, consistently belittles heroic sacrifice: we all die, and the method seems, in comparison to that fact, unimportant. The old asthmatic expresses it best:

—Dites, docteur, c'est vrai qu'ils vont construire un monument aux morts de la peste?

—Le journal le dit. Une stèle ou une plaque.

—J'en étais sûr. Et il y aura des discours. Le vieux riait d'un rire étranglé.

—Je les entends d'ici. "Nos morts . . .", et ils iront casser la croûte (C, p. 330).

Indeed, the most persistent emotion in both works is that of poignant frustration arising from unresolved conflicts. Both Chiang Kai-shek and the plague bacillus remain alive at the end, as do the diversified populations of the cities. The world is not cleaner for having been swept by the breath of tragedy. Tension, a relatively modern emotion, is the basic aesthetic effect achieved through the device of the beleaguered City. There is tension between reality and symbolic meaning or abstraction, between the individual and the universal, between the citizen and the City, and between the City and the enemy. The author gives his characters the divergent tendencies of his own insights, but binds them together in the City with a compelling force like that which orders the atom.

If we have dwelt upon the similarities of these novels, it is not to suggest that Camus has imitated or attempted to improve upon his predecessor whom he admired so much.⁹ The differences between the novels are manifest. But if we can note here a basic structural resemblance, if we can see that similar—not identical—preoccupations tend to suggest similar forms, then we can posit that we are, perhaps, in the presence of a modern myth, of a sort of archetypal structure for the novel of the absurd: a City-protagonist which is truly one unified entity, and numerous highly individualized characters representing the temptations or potentialities of that collectivity.¹⁰

Malraux's novel seems less purely allegorical, truer to the historical reality on which it rests, while La Peste, though containing allusions to Camus' wartime experience, retains a more rigid, one-for-one relationship between symbol and signification. This greater degree of stylization may indicate a minor advantage awarded to the forces for unity over the tendency toward fragmentation, but both works depend, for their effect, upon the maintenance of a delicate equilibrium upon similar tightropes.

¹ Austin Warren, Rage for Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 89.

² André Malraux, La Condition humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1933). Page references in the text which are preceded by an "M" refer to this edition.

³ Albert Camus, La Peste (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). Page references in the text which are preceded by a "C" refer to this edition.

⁴ Bert M.-P. Leefmans, "Malraux and Tragedy: The Structure of La Condition humaine" The Romanic Review, XLIV, 3 (Oct. 1953), 208-214; Jean R. Carduner; La Création romanesque chez Malraux, University of Minnesota dissertation (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1959), pp. 35-36, 66-87; John Cruikshank, "The Art of Allegory in La Peste" Symposium XI, 1 (Spring, 1957), 61-74; Alfred Noyer-Weidner; "Das Formproblem der Pest von Albert Camus," Germanisch-Romanische Monatschrift, VIII, 3 (Juli 1958), 260-285.

⁵ Cruikshank notes, p. 67, the absence of obvious didacticism in La Peste.

⁶ For interpretations of Camus' allegory, see especially Roger Quilliot: La Mer et les prisons (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), pp. 161-188, and Philip Thody: Albert Camus (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957) pp. 29-46. On the allegorical implications of La Condition humaine, see W. M. Frohock: André Malraux and the Tragic Imagination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1952), pp. 58-89.

⁷ See Camus: Carnets, mai 1935-février 1942 (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), p. 127: "La véritable oeuvre d'art est celle qui dit moins . . ."

⁸ On Malraux, see Leefmans, op. cit., and Frohock, loc. cit.; the five parts of La Peste might be likened to the acts of a tragedy.

⁹ Malraux did, however, seem to see the plague as symbolic of the human condition (M, pp. 79, 186).

¹⁰Les Dieux ont soif by Anatole France might also be shown to fit the same structural mold.