It has been weaponized by conservative critics to argue for a kind of “appropriateness,” to disavow the urgent necessity of radical self-expression. Restraint is a tricky concept, a tangle of literary and emotional implications. Yet readers react to the prose with emotion-they find it powerful and sometimes tender. Critics have called and continue to call Camus’s prose in The Plague “rigorously and studiously unbeautiful,” stoic, flat, or even blank. This stylistic strategy has provoked a bizarre paradox. The sentence ends with him and her, and only séparaient, the word for ongoing separation, divides them. The three prepositional phrases that front-load the sentence create the syntactic equivalent of the delayed gratification Rambert is experiencing, and the end of the sentence enacts the separation itself, forming a word wall between him and his love, which in the French is even more difficult to surmount : les murs qui le séparaient d’elle. Though the opening of the sentence promises immediacy, it is full of delays and distractions-the ambulances, the presence of the doctor, all the intervening time. But in writing, Camus manages to develop a style that encapsulates feeling within the sentence structures themselves-a kind of syntax that captures deep emotion in plain speech.įor example, the first time Rambert tries to get out of the city, the smugglers who might help him escape don’t show up, and he despairs at the thought of having to retrace his steps:Īt that moment, in the night spanned by fugitive ambulances, he realized, as he would come to tell Doctor Rieux, that this whole time he had somehow forgotten his wife by putting all his energies into searching for a gap in the walls that separated him from her.Ĭamus raises the emotional register of the language slightly here, but the words are quite plain, and most of the work is done by the structure of the sentence itself. The 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. When you pay someone to write your essay here, it is exquisite quality all the way.Mur de la Peste, Lagnes. Managers keep a close eye on every expert to ensure the quality of their work is always high. We have a transparent rating system that enables every customer to rate the provided service and expert’s work in detail. Lastly, our experts are verified by customers. Only tried and tested overachievers are asked to join the team. We also double-check their English language proficiency and assign several test orders to see how they perform in practice. Having an advanced qualification and proven experience in the field is not enough. Our team consists exclusively of graduates of US universities who have gone through a multi-stage recruitment process.įirst, we check all candidates for their mastery. All of them are native English speakers with at least 3 years of relevant professional experience. Their commitment to perfection has made us a leading service, trusted by customers worldwide. Our experts aren’t magicians but qualified humans who can work magic.
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