Camus, Perfectionism, and Absurd Creation—On Joseph Grand in The Plague

Albert Camus's 1947 novel The Plague is set in the French-Algerian city of Oran, where thousands of rats are suddenly found dead in the streets. At first, only a few of the inhabitants take notice of this troubling event—but the plague soon spreads through the city and begins to claim the lives of people, too, so that the significance of the disease can no longer be ignored. The Plague is probably my favorite novel by Camus. It ranks highly among other great existentialist novels, like Franz Kafka's The Trial, Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, Simone de Beauvoir's All Men Are Mortal, André Malraux's Man's Fate, and so on. Unlike Sartre, Camus rejected the label of 'existentialism' for his work. Instead, he preferred 'absurdism' (more on this later). Nevertheless, I think that the term—which, according to David Cooper, was coined by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel near the end of World War II to refer to the ideas of Sartre and Beauvoir—can still be meaningfully applied to Camus. Walter Kaufmann, for instance, has argued that the defining feature of existentialism in a broader sense is a revolt against traditional philosophy and a refusal to belong to any particular school of thought, along with a timeless philosophical sensibility that is to be lived or enacted through art in the here-and-now. That is, according to Kaufmann, how we can meaningfully group together not just self-conscious existentialists like Heidegger, Jaspers, and Sartre, but also many others (e.g., Ortega, Dostoevsky, Rilke, etc.). I would personally define existentialism in art as a philosophical preoccupation with the nature and meaning of human existence.

But let us not quibble over definitions. Back to Camus's novel. As the plague spreads throughout the city, Oran is effectively sealed off from the rest of the world. People are severed from each other, too, and struggle to live their lives. Having gone through a pandemic and lockdowns, this should sound unnervingly familiar to us. Eventually, the plague begins to retreat, and the gates of the city are reopened.

"Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky."

I will not say much else about the novel here. Instead, I want single out and focus on one of its characters: Joseph Grand. He is not a man that immediately catches the eye while reading The Plague. It would be stretching the limits of the term to call him a protagonist. And yet, he is not a minor character. Importantly, through him Camus is able to address much larger issues about the practice of writing in general; and, as I will show, specifically about artistic creation in the face of the absurd.

I cannot introduce Joseph Grand better than Camus does. He is "a man of about fifty years of age, tall and drooping, with narrow shoulders, thin limbs, and a yellowish mustache."[1] This humble civil servant lives on scraps, since he is poorly rewarded for his services. He is sometimes employed in the Municipal Office, where he compiles data on the city's births, marriages, and deaths. He was offered the prospects of a promotion in his early years, but he never made anything of it. During the height of the plague, it is he who keeps track of the death rate. Camus is at times rather brutal in his description of Grand, who "had the walk of a shy young priest, sidling along walls and slipping mouselike into doorways, and he exuded a faint odor of smoke and basement rooms; in short, he had all the attributes of insignificance," and "even before you knew what his employment was, you had a feeling that he'd been brought into the world for the sole purpose of performing the discreet but needful duties of a temporary assistant municipal clerk on a salary of sixty-two francs, thirty centimes a day." In many ways, Grand is the epitomical bureaucrat. On a more positive and appreciative note, however, Camus adds that his life might be said to be an exemplary one, as he is "one of those rare people, rare in our town as elsewhere, who have the courage of their good feelings. What little he told of his personal life vouched for acts of kindness and a capacity for affection that no one in our times dares own to."

Kind, irredeemably clerky Joseph Grand spends his free time bookishly, brushing up on his Latin. This is not a smooth process. He always seems to have trouble selecting his words, which finds tragic expression in two ways. First, in his anxiety-inducing inability to find the right words to write to his wife Jeanne, who—tired of the monotony of living with Grand—has left him. Second, in his inability to move beyond the opening line of the book that he has been trying to write for a long time. The line, which Grand hastens to point out is only a rough draft, is as follows:

"One fine morning in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne."

Having long struggled with these (and similar) words, Grand feels confident enough at one point in the novel to share the sentence with another person. However, as soon as Grand says the words out loud, he realizes that they do not sound quite right. He proceeds to pick at the words, to discard some of them for others, to question their relevance and meaning—until it becomes clear that Grand will never get anywhere with the first sentence, let alone the book. In fact, it is somewhat of a running joke among the other characters (not necessarily ill-spirited) to ask Grand how his young lady on horseback is progressing. As Grand hopefully—and, to the reader's increasing awareness, futilely—explains: "Once I've succeeded in rendering perfectly the picture in my mind's eye, once my words have the exact tempo of this ride—the horse is trotting, one-two-three, one-two-three, see what I mean?—the rest will come more easily."

There is, of course, no such thing as the perfect first sentence. There is no objective, absolute, unchanging standard by which to compare it. In fact, even aside from interpersonal judgments, one's own aesthetic judgment of a given sentence is likely to be subject to alteration. Change over time as a result of personal development, change against the backdrop of what has just been read elsewhere, and so on. Looking back on a sentence written many years ago, the sinking feeling of discovering just how amateurish it now looks should be familiar to any writer. Sometimes, a reevaluation of the quality and aptness of a written sentence can occur instantly. A slightly different way of seeing it; a change in how the words sound in one's head; an altered mood. Voicing the words can be murderous. Or it can be revelatory—it depends on what happens next. If what happens next is that one is satisfied and moves on to the rest of what needs to be written, or if one makes the necessary adjustments and moves on, then all is well. But the moving on must happen. And this is precisely what Grand cannot do.

The cage in which Grand finds (really, locks) himself—his first sentence—has been interpreted in a number of ways. It can be seen as an example of writer's block, as the inability to get past a certain point in one's writing. That it is the very first sentence does not matter. (Is having a first sentence better than having nothing, if one is not happy with it? Would it not be better, after much frustration, to let go of it and begin afresh? Or to move on and return to it later?) I do not find the writer's block view all that interesting. The commonest explanation by far is that Grand is a perfectionist; that his struggle with perfectionism in extremis is what ultimately holds him back from ever approaching what he wants to achieve: an actual, completed book, full of sentences that coherently bring about what one had in mind. This final, overarching goal must, after all, be kept in mind while writing any book. To focus on smaller details at the expense of the larger overall project is what will hold many people back in their literary and artistic endeavors, including Grand. "'Evenings, whole weeks, spent on one word, just think! Sometimes on a mere conjunction!'" It is precisely because there is no objective standard for Grand—there is no collectible, compilable statistic corresponding to reality—that the task of writing the perfect sentence is probably doomed from the beginning. If the mind is a shifty source, no sentence will ever be nailed down precisely.

There is clearly truth and merit to the perfectionism interpretation. It matches the character of Grand, and it tells us something important. Grand's toil over his young lady on horseback is the best fictional representation of the straightjacketing effect of perfectionism that I know. But there is more to it than that. It seems to me that the key lies in a chapter from The Myth of Sisyphus, specifically on Absurd Creation. For Camus, life is absurd. This means that life has no inherent meaning; there is no God or eternal truth or absolute, transcendent value as a reference point. Nothing is given to us. This, to refer back to the introduction, is why Camus preferred the label of 'absurdism' to 'existentialism'. As Sartre famously put it, existence precedes essence (and with this, Camus would agree). We exist—or, better yet, we suddenly find ourselves existing—and then it is up to us to give meaning to that (to our) existence. Not the other way around.

Camus opens The Myth of Sisyphus with the pronouncement, probably as famous as Sartre's formulation, that there is "but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide."[2] In the face of the metaphysical meaninglessness of existence, we must decide: do we even want to live? Camus's answer to this question is positive. The absurdity of life demands not suicide, but revolt. To be clear, this is an existential rather than a political revolt. As Camus writes in the Myth, there is "a metaphysical honor in enduring the world's absurdity." This is why he chose the myth of Sisyphus as a metaphor, and this is why he insisted that one must image Sisyphus happy—even in his thankless task of pushing the giant boulder up the mountain in endless repetition. One of the means at our disposal to revolt against the absurd is art. However, Camus warns that this may not be any better than other forms or acts of creation. "In this universe the work of art is then the sole chance of keeping [one's] consciousness and of fixing its adventures." But, at the same time, "it has no more significance than the continual and imperceptible creation in which the actor, the conqueror, and all absurd men indulge every day of their lives. All try their hands at miming, at repeating, at re-creating the reality that is theirs. […] Creation is the great mime."

"All those folks are saying, 'It was plague. We've had the plague here.' You'd almost think they expected to be given medals for it. But what does that mean—'plague'? Just life, no more than that."

If Grand's struggle to get past the opening line of his book seems like a mime, that is because it is. But it is not just he who is miming—so is everyone else who writes, whether they manage to get past the first sentence or not. I will leave it up to you to decide whether Joseph Grand, through his unhappy first sentence, revolts or submits.

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[1] I rely on the Stuart Gilbert translation here and elsewhere

[2] I rely on Justin O'Brien's translation here and in what follows.