Time Period in The Plague
When I read the line
“A few moments later all the street-lamps went on, dimming
the sky…”
on page 42 of The Plague, the line was surprisingly jarring
to me as it brought me back to the time period the book was set in. To me the
book has a strange quality of feeling pretty timeless and perhaps from a time
period before the 20th century – the descriptions of the streets, fashion,
and behaviors of the characters for some reason bring the 1880s or so to mind,
though I know it was clearly mentioned at the beginning to be set in the 1940s.
Why is this so? I think the fact that a mention of electric street lamps that brought
me to this analysis of time in the book, directly relates to exactly what about
the book gives me the vibe of an earlier time. Of course, streetlamps themselves
aren’t even modern technology – according
to a Google search, they’ve been in use since the 1890s. So why is it them that
made me think?
Skimming the earlier parts of the book, I’m unable to find
more than a handful of mentions of modern (or not) technology of any kind. It
is also the setting of Oran, a small town with a doctor that makes house visits
and other historic seeming traits, that gives that vibe. I also found that the
lack of communication and mass news made it seem like a story from an earlier
time, as in my mind the 1940s would have more solid news coverage of an outbreak
of disease with a ½ to ¾ death rate. They
seem to look at occurrences like 10 deaths in one day as weirdly unalarming,
which seems quite disconnected from modernity to me. I could be quite wrong
there, of course, and perhaps Oran is too small and isolated of a town to have the
news get out so quickly. Next, of course the 1940s are not exactly modern times
at all, so I may just not have a very thorough grasp of the setting, and
everything that I have seen about the 1940s would be about large cities where
of course the story would have taken a very different route.
Overall, I mainly got that 19th century feeling
during the first 30 or so pages, and as the story progressed I became more
grounded in the setting, as Richard began to meet with people, a laboratory
analyst was mentioned (page 48), later the radio, and the language used to
describe the situation seemed to get more modern and global.
I’d like to know if anyone else got the same feeling as me
when reading it, and if that effect was intentional – I’d think that it wouldn’t
quite make sense to purposefully write that in, since the time period is important
if it’s being used as an allegory for the Nazi occupation. At the same time,
perhaps the time period is not important at all and the way that the towns
inhabitants interact with each other is far more relevant, and some aspects of the
timelessness are useful to the plot (such as very little panic at the beginning
of an epidemic).
I agree that Oran feels like a timeless and isolated place. A different blog post that I read focused on how bland the city of Oran is, and how its qualities of ugliness and dullness make it a perfect "control" environment in which Camus can fully focus on human responses to the plague. While this might not be intentional, I think that the "timeless" elements of Oran (like the vague mentions of technology and medical specialists) are meant to facilitate the "plot," but not to get in the way of the raw human actions and reactions which Camus is so interested in exploring.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I still don't think I'm very "grounded in the setting," as I don't see Oran quite the same way that the narrator described it in the beginning. Oran was made out to be a very impersonal and business-like port city, but I actually get a sort of small-town, community-oriented vibe from everyone in the city. In particular, I'm thinking of Tarrou's sanitary squads, and the conversation that Rieux(?) has with Rambert about how people are beginning to notice his association with smugglers and how he'd better hurry it up.
I also felt like the time period in The Plague was very wishy-washy. Every time they mentioned cars, I was kind of surprised because they seemed so out of place. However, I think this quality of timelessness was very intentionally crafted. I wrote a blog post about the intentional neutrality of Oran as a setting (which Noel also mentions in her comment lol), and I feel like the time period is a similar situation. Defining a distinct time period would restrict the relevance of the warning story that Camus is trying to tell, and consequently water down his message.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if it was intended by Camus, but I also got that feel that it was set a lot earlier than it actually was. For me though, it was less because of things that people actually did/how people actually acted, and more because there was little that would contradict the idea that it's set in the 19th century, as you mentioned. At certain points, I think I might've set it even earlier in my mind, near the 18th century. I would say the biggest reason I kept doing that was the fact the bubonic plague just automatically sends my mind to the 18th century.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the time period painted by Camus wasn't very clear at all, but I think this is part of what makes the story so relatable and applicable to modern day. Even if it feels like an earlier time period because so little focus is put on that and all the focus is put on the characters and the human reaction. We can connect to technology, but above anything we can connect to the human experience and we can recognize the same kind of reaction regardless of the time period.
ReplyDelete