The theological dimension

in Nick Joaquin’s fiction

By Dr. Lucio F. Teoxon Jr.

One of the fundamental problems of human existence is the age-old question of man’s relation to God. Man is ceaselessly torn between the antithesis of matter and spirit, of the temporal and the supernal. Exemplifying this elemental contradiction of humanity, Goethe’s Faust exclaimed: “Two souls, alas! Are lodg’d within my breast,/which struggle there for undivided reign….” One is earthbound, but “Above the mist, the other doth aspire,/With sacred vehemence to purer spheres.” Indeed, even while man is rooted to terra firma, he reaches out beyond the here and now. He so tugs at himself in two opposite directions that the tension in maintaining equilibrium becomes his source of creativity. If literature, then, is to render a truly comprehensive vision of life, it should not gloss over the essential dimension inherent in the human condition, that is, the spiritual.

T. S. Eliot must have had this consideration in mind when he remarked that “modern literature…is simply unaware of, simply cannot understand the meaning of, the primacy of the supernatural over the natural life: of something I assume to be our primary concern.”

In a similar vein, Fr. Miguel A. Bernad, in his article “The Future of Philippine Literature” included in Brown Heritage: Essays on Philippine Cultural Tradition and Literature, edited by Antonio G. Manuud (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1967) drew attention to the lack of theological dimension in much of Philippine writing in English during the past four decades despite the Christian culture of Filipinos. Not that a work of literature is necessarily of paramount importance simply because it happens to be theological or about God. In fact, art that is predominantly didactic is tantamount to moral propaganda. The point is that a literary work invested with theological interests widens, as it were, the breadth of its range to include what is truly central to the reality of man and existence—the transcendent aspect. The essence of the Filipino reality is undoubtedly one that is at once secular and religious. Yet, as Father Bernad maintained, much of our writing is secularist in outlook or suffers from a kind of temporal provincialism that cannot see beyond the corporeal order. Nick Joaquin’s writings were singled out by Father Bernad to be among the few exceptions. It is the intention of this essay to probe the theological aspects of Nick Joaquin’s fiction, in particular his novel, three of his early stories and three of his later stories in which theological concerns are evident.

In bringing out the theological ideas in his fiction, specifically in The Woman Who Had Two Navels, “Dona Jeronima,” “Candido’s Apocalypse” and “The Order of Melkizedek,” Nick Joaquin has made extensive use of the dialogue as a means of discussing and putting across ideas not only among the characters themselves but also to the reader. Nick Joaquin also employs the method of making the story serve as a metaphor or parable of the theological idea or ideas as in the case of “The Mass of St. Sylvestre,” “The Legend of the Virgin’s Jewel” and “The Legend of the Dying Wanton.” Symbols are among Joaquin’s principal tools in giving artistic expression to his spiritual imagination. The use of images, metaphor, and myth also enables him to avoid stale abstractions in stating his thoughts on religion.

Nick Joaquin’s theological stance as reflected in the selected early stories is orthodox Catholic in orientation. In “The Legend of the Virgin’s Jewel” Brother Fernando’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin signifies the Catholic piety of the faithful who accord her the honor as Theotokos, the Mother of God. The prominent place she is made to occupy in the story (rare in Philippine fiction in English) implies nothing less than Nick Joaquin’s hyperdulia of the Virgin of the Rosary. Similarly, the spiritual vision projected in “The Legend of the Dying Wanton” is one steeped in a religious consciousness that is fundamentally Christian in its sympathy for the sinner. Salvation in the story, as taught by Catholicism, is all-embracing, i.e., open to everyone (no matter how wayward) for whom Christ shed His blood on Golgotha. The key moment of Currito Lopez’s beatific vision reveals the heart of Christian faith: the human person has a share in the divine life which is attained not so much through his own natural capacity as through the sanctifying grace God gratuitously infuses in his soul. “The Mass of St. Sylvestre” likewise expresses the theological principle that access to the eschatological reality of the immortality of the body is not acquired by means of black magic but through the divinely revealed way of Christ. The dire fate that befell the pagan magus, Mateo the Maestro, tells by implication what happens when one seeks the gift of eternal life out of vanity and self-love along avenues other than those made known by Christ.

In the latter stories, however, as in his first novel, Nick Joaquin’s theological thought assumes a revolutionary, unorthodox aspect, that is, the intense religious fervor evident in his early stories has become more anguished and cerebral in the later stories written in the sixties. The kernel of Nick Joaquin’s theological reflections in the later stories and his novel may be said to be contained in his reaction against what the Church traditionally abhors as “the world, the flesh and the devil.” Rather than regard these anathemas as sources of temptation to be shunned, Nick Joaquin points out that these are the very means by which Christians can find their way to God.

One of the central theological themes of The Woman Who Had Two Navels (Regal Publishing Company., 1961; Solidaridad Publishing House, 1975) is the theme of affirmation of the world despite all its corruptions. Connie Escobar is given to understand by the elder priest—in her imaginary dialogue with the latter—that she has done wrong in fleeing from the world and retreating into a phantom world of her own making because it will not do to try to reach the Civitas Dei by bypassing the City of Man. Only in and through the terrestrial can the Christian find the road to the celestial city, for it is by the agency of the natural that the supernatural works. The Christian ought not to be a Platonic dreamer, looking upon the world as an imperfect illusion while cherishing an otherworldly Absolute. In more explicit terms, as in his article, “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil—and the Death of God” (Philippines Free Press, March 25, 1967), Nick Joaquin writes of the Christian vocation as he perceives it: “The living God must be sought in the very realm that godly people once…abominated as ‘the world, the flesh and the devil’. If God is not there, he is not anywhere.” The search for God need not turn Christians into schizoids—like Connie Escobar—out of touch with the world and humanity. Christians should not reject the world in favor of heaven. To be for man and the world is to be for God who so loved the world that He gave it His only son. Thus, what in fact is done in the interest of man is done for Him who said: “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” (Mt. 25:40)

The later stories, “Dona Jeronima” and “Candido’s Apocalypse,” take up the question of the flesh heretofore considered in traditional Catholicism as one of the pitfalls of temptation. In both stories, Nick Joaquin makes a case for man’s body not as something filthy, degrading or sinful but as a reality to be accepted and prized.

The Archbishop’s search for the heart of stillness in ‘Dona Jeronima” brings him to a rediscovery of the flesh not as the only reality, but as one reality that cannot simply be ignored nor dismissed as unreal. The flesh and the heats of the flesh are the bush that burns unconsumed, to use a Biblical metaphor. In other words, the flesh is an integral part of one and the same Divine Reality, the ultimate reality of God who found, as revealed in Genesis, that everything He had made was good. Thus, the human body is not just a thing to possess in point of time, but a being to love in the light of eternity. The human body is that precious; and, hence, to try to possess it as a mere instrument to promote one’s selfishness is to prostitute that which is holy. This is the crime that Dona Jeronima atones for by living as a recluse in the cave. She did not really love the Archbishop (as she herself confessed) as a person and for his own sake but tried to possess him as an object to gratify her own vanity.

Even more forceful is Nick Joaquin’s apologia for the corporeal in “Candido’s Apocalypse.” The whole point of Candido’s mirage is that the body is of paramount importance not only to man’s social nature but also to his individual identity as a unique human person. The body individualizes the human being, invests him with a separate and distinct character so that without it, he becomes a nameless automaton, indistinguishable like an X-ray photograph. Thus, for Joaquin, soul is flesh and flesh is soul. A corollary of this theory of the soul is his anthropomorphic conception of God in the story. It dawns on Candido that God has effaced the faces of the people around him so that he may see the ultimate face—the face of God Himself. So Candido strives after God who keeps on eluding him until finally he sees that God has the face of Pompoy Morel, his avowed enemy. Candido’s ultimate discovery shows that God may be encountered, if at all, in our fellowmen like Pompoy Morel who bears the indelible imprint of the Creator who made man in his own image.

The problem of the Devil, the last of the three anathemas traditionally decried by the Church, recurs in many of Nick Joaquin’s stories, both the early and the more recent ones. Is Nick Joaquin, then, evil-intoxicated? Nothing could be further from the truth. In the three legends analyzed in this essay, the Evil One is hard put to assert his wickedness in the face of the sovereign power of God. Brother Fernando symbolically hacks the jeweled serpent into shreds; Currito Lopez’s inherent goodness ultimately gets the better of the dark side of his nature, and the pagan magus is punished for daring to force God’s hand to confer on him what is actually reserved for the Last Day. All this points to the author’s highly moral or religious consciousness.

In The Woman Who Had Two Navels, however, the mystery of iniquity is given an altogether different treatment. The facts of evil and sin are recognized for what they are. But he gives the devil his due when he says (speaking through Father Tony) that even evil can be a way to God, that in the scheme of redemption, even sin is necessary insofar as without it, there can be no repentance or spiritual progress. This amounts to saying that nothing evil can exist of itself, for it is somehow bound up with something good—a concept favored by some “new” theologians. Thus, Father Tony gives Rita Lopez to understand that Connie Escobar’s running away with Paco Texeira might eventually lead her to the path of righteousness.

The irrationality of evil being locked up with good is perceptively portrayed in “The Order of Melkizedek.” In this story, there is the parallel theme of paganism and Christianity. Whereas in “The Legend of the Virgin’s Jewel” evil and paganism were vanquished for good by a Christian champion, Melkizedek, the pagan high priest presented in the story as le Diable, makes a vow to return after the failure of his underground movement to restore paganism via Christianity. It is worth noting that God involves Father Lao with Melkizedek’s gang to make him an instrument in the destruction of the forces of evil. But as it turns out, Melkizedek himself emerges unharmed. Does this place the author on the side of Satan? In the context of the story the problem of evil is shown as something absurd in that evil may take on the trappings of good; and conversely, good may assume the guise of evil. Thus, the tragedy of Guia is that she is hoodwinked by the new Christian image worshiped by the prophet’s group in a Black Mass. There is nothing wrong with the image of a naked Christ with the fig leaf taken off. In fact, it is an interesting image, small wonder Guia is drawn to it. But Melkizedek uses this unorthodox Christian image to serve an evil purpose unknown to Guia: the establishment of heathendom upon the very grounds of Christendom. It is not actually the Christian Mass that Melkizedek celebrates in Salem House but a parody, if not an outright mockery of it. What is worshiped is not Christ but an idol, a statue of a naked Christ which is but a step to devil worship or idolatry. Hence, the story demonstrates, the author himself stated in a personal interview granted in 1971, how Christianity may regress to “paganism which in a sense paved the way for Christianity.” The two are bound up with each other in Nick Joaquin’s fiction in the same manner as good with evil.

Are Nick Joaquin’s later theological views on the whole radical? Yes, they are from the standpoint of the traditional Church that spurned the “world, the flesh and the devil.” But they are not from the point of view of post-Vatican II Catholicism.

Nick Joaquin’s theology of involvement with the world is not really a new, isolated voice in the wilderness. The call to commitment with the world was sounded as far back as ancient times. The Lord, speaking through the prophet Isaiah, sternly spoke of the true fast which is not the irresponsible pursuit of one’s pleasure but the spirited participation in temporal activities like freeing the oppressed, clothing the naked, feeding the hungry and building up the world for the betterment of man. Christ Himself prayed to the Father not that men should be taken out of the world but that they be kept from evil. The Apostle Paul rebuked the Thessalonians for their idleness; and they were commanded in the name of Christ to engage in labor because “if any one will not work, let him not eat.” (2Thess 3:10) In our time, Pope John XXIII’s encyclical letter Mater et Magistra (1961) underscored among other things the need for Christians to attain spiritual perfection through the building up of their earthly abode. The Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes, promulagated on December 7, 1965, stressed the development of the world. And so did Pope Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio (1967).

What about Nick Joaquin’s plea for the flesh? Actually, the concept of the flesh as sin, which Joaquin would dispute, is Manichaean rather than Christian. Manichaean dualism holds that nature is essentially evil and that the human body is the product of Evil but the soul springs from the realm of Light governed by God. Thus, man becomes the bone of contention between God and the Devil. Now, it is a fundamental doctrine of Christianity that the spiritual operates through the machinery of matter. God assumed and sanctified the flesh of man in the person of Christ; and “He will raise up the flesh of the just on the Last Day.” To harbor loathing for the flesh, therefore, simply because it is flesh is not Christian but spiritual snobbery, pure and simple.

Man is not a disembodied spirit. As created by God, he is body and soul forming a single substantial unit. Why do some pious Christians then mortify their flesh and dream of living in the realm of pure spirit like the angels? Is not the chasm between matter and spirit, body and soul bridged in man? There is no point at all in drawing an imaginary conflict between what was heretofore considered as irreconcilable opposites: flesh and spirit. To insist on doing so would be downright Manichaeanism. At the heart of the Christian faith is the belief that Christ Himself suffered and shared the human condition; His very humanity was to be the instrument of our salvation.

“Though this has been a basic Christian image from the beginning, institutional Christianity has so obscured it that, when restated, as in the Dutch Catechism, it shocks,” writes Joaquin in his Free Press article, “The world, the flesh, the Devil—and the Birth of God.” (December 14, 1968). “The more familiar image developed by the Church is of God apart from, and hostile to the temporal process it condemns as the World, the Flesh and the Devil. How could God be at one with that? The meaning of the Incarnation was thus perverted. God came into the world and took on flesh—but the imitation of Christ was to leave the world and doff the flesh!”

It was presumably to counteract this negative, Manichaean attitude towards the flesh and an overly “spiritualized,” otherworldly Christ-image fashioned by traditional Roman Catholicism that the Second Vatican Council decreed in the first chapter of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (December 7, 1965) that “though made of body and soul, man is one….For this reason man is not allowed to despise his bodily life. Rather, he is obliged to regard his body as good and honorable since God has created it….” Joaquin, then, must be credited for his affirmation in his prose works of the dignity and value of the human body which is regarded in our time, in the words of Graham Greene, as “expendable material to be eliminated by the atom bomb, a kind of anonymous carrion.” The Christian Filipino, who happens to fear or abhor the “sinful” flesh will do well to pay heed to Joaquin’s summons to a true appreciation of the human body. Thanks to his call to a return to the world of down-to-earth reality, the Christian Filipino dreamer of otherworldliness may be jolted into his this-worldly responsibility to develop the City of Man.

Joaquin’s affirmation of the world may nevertheless run the risk of being too uncritical. Acceptance of the world does not mean acceptance of evil in the world. This matter is a bit obscured by his approval of the world and by his sin mysticism which in effect holds that the graver the sin, the more heroic the saint. While it is true that sin can lead to spiritual growth, it is preposterous to say that one must first commit a grave sin in order to ascend the heights of moral perfection. If one knowingly commits sin because one can just be sorry for it afterwards, may not a person sin and repent alternately until repentance becomes an excuse for remaining in the vicious circle of evil? And yes, evil is his later stories, specifically in “The Order of Melkizedek,” is closely bound up with good. That good and evil all too often coexist cannot be denied. But to assign equal category or rank to both good and evil (or paganism and Christianity) amounts to ascribing to the Devil a power as primordial as God’s. Christ’s triumph in the wilderness gives the lie to Satan’s power. It devolves upon the Christian to struggle along with God against the Devil by not conforming to the evil ways of the world.

Nick Joaquin’s celebration of the flesh, too, may invite mindless idolization of the flesh. This can readily lead to sensuality for which gratification of the senses is the highest good to the utter disregard of the things of the spirit. When Joaquin says that flesh is soul and soul is flesh, he is of course restating in the context of his celebration of the flesh the Aristotelian doctrine of the soul which maintains that the soul and body are together one inseparable substance. But just as Aristotle formulated his theory of the soul in reaction to his teacher’s idealism, so Joaquin presumably swings to the opposite of the traditional Church’s extreme spiritualism in rebellion against it. The truth remains, however, that Joaquin, for all his impassioned defense of the flesh at the risk of sounding flesh-obsessed, does not blot out the reality of God in his fictional world. To be for the flesh is not to be against God, who the Christian faith teaches, became man and dwelt among us.

It may be said that Joaquin is a Christian humanist in his own right. His fictional works as a whole dramatize in their own way the elemental dialectic of the human situation—good and evil, flesh and soul, Christianity and idolatry. To the extent that he succeeded in delineating the Christian aspects of the Filipino reality and his own reflections on Catholic Christianity, to that extent is Fr. Bernad and like-minded critics justified in citing Joaquin’s literary works as exemplars of Philippine writing in English with a theological dimension.

The egocentric predicament and
self-transcendence in Albis' short stories

By Dr. Lucio F. Teoxon Jr.

Big or small happenings in the literary scene surely have their own place in that amorphous body of cultural creation we call belles lettres. And, in our country, literary events, major or minor or midway between, like the publication of a novel or a collection of short stories either by a multi-awarded author or by an unsung writer or the merely respectable one, should be rung in in the general interest of Philippine literature in English, still young as it is and in the process of development.

Abelardo S. Albis’ publishers deserve kudos on the publication in book form of his stories—some of which are prizewinning ones—that first saw print in various national weeklies from across the pre-war era through the martial law regime. The book, The Bell Ringer and Other Stories (New Day Publishers, 1982), released in low-priced paperback, should not only be welcomed by literary scholars but should find favor with readers interested neither in cheap entertainment nor in the avant-garde but in conventional serious fiction.

The fact that Albis’ stories previously appeared in popular periodicals may suggest the idea that they are of the category of the sob stories that constitute the regular fare in pulp magazines. A closer look at them reveals that there is more to the stories than their deceptively simple narrative frame. And the stringing together of these pieces into a single accessible volume has brought in bold relief a pattern of life that is immensely human, drawn in scattered fragments in the stories separated from one another in printed space and chronological time.

When the reader reads any of these stories without preconceptions, without allowing the screen of fashionable critical precepts to stand between him and the stories but rather let the narratives unfold themselves as they are, he cannot fail to be stirred by the ironic drama enacted in the lives of these characters who are a conglomeration of the middle class and simple folks caught in the conundrum of their own humanity, the contradictions in the human situation. While the stories do not consciously confront the socio-political issues of the times, they explore the more fundamental problems of the heart. It is in his probing into the Filipino psyche that Albis is in his element. And only such a limpid mind like Albis’, without the pretensions to intellectual superiority and expressing itself in a clear, almost cut-to-the-bone prose, that can capture the inner movements of the soul. This inwardness, this three-dimensional delineation of character easily escapes casual, let alone hurried reading. The more careful reader who reads these stories in the same spirit in which they were written may ultimately do justice to Albis’ book.

Albis’ penetrating dissection of the psychological make-up of his characters can be noticed by the discerning reader right through most, if not all, of the collected fifteen stories.

In both the lead story, “The Unfinished Portrait,” and the title story of the book, “The Bell Ringer,” he has shown a sensitive understanding of the ambivalent reactions of the self as it tries to reach out and relate itself to another self and yet fails in the end. Successful communion or coming together of souls is aborted by the appearance of a third party. Thus, for instance, the artist-narrator’s oneness of spirit with his subject (a woman) gets destroyed when he learns that his model will soon be married to another man. Unable now to gaze at the “window” of the soul meant for another, all he could do is look at her hands and work over them on the canvas, leaving the face of the portrait no more than a sketch.

Timo, the bell ringer who might just as well be called Timid, fares no better in his fate. Frail, nervous, and unsure of himself, he has lived since childhood in his “little corner” which somehow affords him a feeling of security. Even his work as a bell ringer ironically serves to accentuate all too well his otherness, his isolation from the very people whom he calls out to the community of the Mass. For Timo, the belfry is both at once a haven and a prison; and from its enclosing walls he issues out to meet the choir singer, the girl in whom he has hoped to find a reason and a larger meaning to his life. Timo might have in a way grown in his personality had he succeeded in relating himself to the girl. But he misreads the signs. The chorister does not fall for him. Soon the third self comes along to bring about the ruin of his dreams. Bernie, his enemy and rival, from whom he suffered untold humiliations, easily wins what could have been his own salvation and his only hope. Timo thus falls back on his sanctuary. He turns in upon himself and, finding only emptiness there, hurls himself from the belfry to his certain death.

The whole trouble of Timo and no less of the painter in “The Unfinished Portrait” hinges on their attempt to achieve a fullness of being by possessing another self. As long as the “me” operates and adds to itself another “me” which is actually a “not-me”, no real integration is possible. The existentialist dialectic of subject and object demonstrates the futility of effecting intersubjective harmony between the “I” as subject and the “other” as object. This is so because the “other” is himself a subject. And a “subject vis-à-vis subject” relation is in the main doomed to failure. Timo cannot in fact possess the girl all for himself. Nor can the painter-narrator his beautiful model. Not only is the bond impossible. There is always the danger of the subject as such turning freely to another.

Less technically, the bell-ringer and the painter have not really achieved maturity by completely bursting into freedom the confining shell of their little selves. The same thing may be said of some other characters in the book. There is the mother who unknowingly entraps the son with her own handcrafted blanket, a symbol of protective security that rather enslaves than permits the living of one’s own life. Luckily, the son, an Igorot mountaineer but already nurtured in another milieu, sees through the danger of it and asks his mother to give that token of love to the right person, his father. In the end though the mother realizes that her son must be right. “Like the pine tree he had reared his head far above the others. And like the pine tree she must be strong so that she would not drag him down.”

Cast in the same mold as the bell-ringer is Silverio Cruz, who rises from being a utility boy to becoming a soil scientist. Like Timo, he is shy and uncomfortable with people, but unlike the former he is blessed with a better intelligence which enables him to rise above his circumstances. There is, too, in Silverio’s story a breaking away from the old self, from the country and people that could not fully make him grow into his full human stature. His departure does not however mean a complete severance of old ties. In fact he responds to the summons to adventure with a view to returning with the boon of a better self transmuted in the life-nourishing center of the cosmos which for most Filipinos is a distant land like America. His past weighs him down—the many humiliations he endured owing to his lowly origins, the privations he suffered to earn him and his family the right to a better life. From a girl named Fe, his sweetheart, he has sought faith to encourage him to carry on. And considering Silverio’s personality, it indicates that he has the resilience of a quicksilver needed for his task and the experience he is to undergo. As the ship sails away from Manila harbor, Silverio sees in the clouds an image forming into a chrysalis from which emerges a moth that flies first uncertainly, then freely into the surrounding air. That moth is a projection from the back of his mind, an unconscious representation of his own self on its way to being released yet still within the thralldom of the past.

The Albis characters we have thus far commented on at least make the attempt to break out of the shell of selfhood even if they remain caught in its clutches. The other ones simply refuse to let go the entrenched ego and thereby fail to attain the moral and spiritual growth that comes with the annihilation of the personal ego. Florencio Rosario, Gustin, Oniang, and Tanang, not to mention the vain Carmelina, in their respective ways chase their own tails.

Florencio Rosario is far from being a stock character in a stock situation appealing to a stock response. He is the embodiment of the self-centered person whose moral weakness prevents him from achieving a humane, harmonious relationship even with those of his very own flesh and blood. He could have disclosed to the prisoner on the eve of his execution that he is the father who sired him although not man enough to assume responsibility for his passion. Florencio is the kind of person who recoils from “what the other people would say” no matter if it leads to his own disaster or of those whom he loves. Telling the truth even if it entails loss of face could have gained for him moral growth. In preserving the lie that shields his ego, he remains what he is—a man of straw.

A similar withholding of identity occurs in “The Magnolia Fower.” Here, it is the father who is the prisoner and on the loose. He visits his family for the last time, but refrains from telling his son who he is. Gustin is clearly a victim of events twisted as it were by the Furies to seal his doom. Even so, it still lies within his power as a human agent to make the moral choice. Gustin “…swapped a four-walled prison cell that had imprisoned him only for a definite term in favor of an unwalled prison cell that held him indefinitely, and which had no foreseeable future other than a grisly death.” Actually, Gustin escapes from his own shadow so that locked up now in himself he cannot anymore open himself to the world, much less to his son who anyway believes him to be already dead. He should see in death his own final liberation even as the magnolia flower renews its fragrance after dying countless times.

If the fathers in Albis’ stories are totally estranged from their sons because of the separative tendency of the ego, the mothers smother their children in more ways than one. Not to speak of the Igorot mother with her gift of s/mother love, there is Nena who drives away her two boys with hurting, spiteful words that only serve to draw apart rather than bring people close together.

Then, also, there is Tanang who holds, selfishly if innocently, her daughter Fina as a helpless pawn in the prison of her own thinking. Her only child with Edong, a farmer who died in the war, Tanang has brought up Fina in her own likeness and according to her prudish ideas of sexual purity spawned by a conservative religious education. Tanang wants Fina to be like herself on her wedding day, “chaste, immaculate, unkissed.” Fina, on her part taught early in the ways of obedience by her convent school training, does not take umbrage at her mother’s views and even respects them. The rigidity of Tanang’s false morality reaches its supreme expression when she refuses to let a man perform artificial respiration on her after drowning in a swimming spree. She boldly declares right in the presence of everyone around: “Only the man who will be her husband will press his lips upon the lips of my daughter.” These words are actually a sentence of death, inexorably sealing the girl’s sad end. Tanang’s naïve resignation of Fina’s fate to the will of God when she could have easily lived by being artificially resuscitated betrays the stern bigotry of a one-track mentality.

It may be further said of Tanang that she does not really love Fina for what she is. What she does love is not the person of her daughter but the image she has fashioned about her—as being like herself, refined and chaste. So, when it comes to deciding between her child as she is and her child as she thinks she should be, Tanang chooses the latter. She prefers her own ideas about her daughter to her very life itself. And that for Tanang is what counts.

The case of the other mother, Oniang, is quite pathetic. For while her possessive affection does not smother its object, it is she who gets smothered instead. An old widow of eighty, she does not really live for herself but for her only son, Lando. He is her alter ego for the sake of whom and by virtue of whose existence, she, too, lives. Even when Lando raises his own family, they live together in their own farmhouse in the village. He is their chief means of support. Thus it is that when one evening a band of armed men takes Lando along with them, his family naturally becomes disconsolate. Then as their place grows too dangerous for their own security, his wife Selma evacuates the family to their sister’s house in the town. Oniang, half-crazed by her son’s absence, resolves to stay put in the stubborn hope that Lando will come back. Prevailed upon to go, she walks along with them only up to the railroad station, then determinedly retraces her steps back home where she thinks of receiving her son and cook for him, as is her wont, his favorite food. A bullet hits her and overnight she bleeds to death.

With Lando gone, Oniang is understandably lost. When one self derives its reason for being from another and practically becomes its extension, it recoils upon itself and is rendered helpless with the loss of the other. Oniang’s complete dependence and desperate fixation to her son becomes her own undoing. Left alone to herself, she is nothing. Her “dream” of a happy life of reunion with Lando is the refusal of the ego to relinquish the strings of its attachment to the things that give it the illusory sense of personal perpetuation. In turning back to her illusions, she goes berserk. Crossing past the threshold of the unknown region, she may at last find real peace and freedom denied her on this plane. Whether it is Lando or just another man who afterwards comes to the dug-out does not matter any longer. For Oniang now, it makes no world of difference.

At least two of Albis’ characters, Ana and Letty, attain a measure of maturity. By that we mean the ability of a person to force back the centripetal pull of the bounding self towards the larger reality of the not-self. This involves sacrifice of self-interest in favor of the well-being of others who, in point of fact, are not something different and removed from the personal self. From the moment the self stops thinking only in terms of what it can get for itself and begins to consider what it can give of itself, it may be said to have really come of age. It is in this sense that we may speak of Ana as being far different from the other mothers previously described whose life-generating womb has turned into a life-denying tomb.

In Ana’s story, the self dies to itself before its time that another self may live. Ana is a helpless widow immobilized by a paralytic stroke. She gives away for good her only child, a two-year old daughter to the midwife Maria. It has not been easy for her but a prescience of her impending death adds strength to her decision. She assures Maria: “If I recover from my sickness…I promise you, I’ll not take the child from youl I give up my child to you—all my rights to the child to you….” Thus, Ana makes her covenant irrevocable. Her act of renunciation is indeed heroic because she does not wait for death to end it all. No sentimentality gets the better of her resolve to make secure her child’s future even if it means having to part with her forever. It takes no philosophic acumen to see no greater love than this that all is given for nothing.

In the same heroic breath, Letty ascends to the heights of nobility by deciding against using for her convenience an innocent human being not only as a salve to her bruised self but as an instrument to camouflage her disgrace as a fallen woman. For Letty has been deceived by Lino to whom she yielded, unsuspecting that he is a married man. That she is on the family way aggravates her trouble. As though by God’s grace, Ciano, a widower fresh from abroad, takes fancy to marrying her. A providential development for Letty is at hand. Without giving it much thought, she consents to his proposal. That is her moment of indiscretion. Letty comes to her senses so that even as the preparations for the wedding are under way, she clandestinely bolts from the place to the city. She shrinks from compounding the deception around her with another deception and bring the “suffering of the deceived to an innocent man.” Nothing less than strength of character can keep the integrity of a self already torn asunder by the evil of human dissimulation. In abandoning the false defenses of the ego, Letty gains in moral stature.

The psychological transformation or lack of it in Albis’ characters is coextensive with their rise or fall in the moral sphere. Those who tenaciously cling to the obsessions of the self destroy the human in them as in others. Whereas those who turn away from the self as the point of reference become the agent of an expansive force that deals life and not death. In other words, the slavish absorption in the concerns of the ego is their source of destruction just as altruism delivers them from themselves. Sometimes, though, the death-force in Albis’ fiction takes on the shape of the non-human like the violent wind that wreaks havoc on man and beast and vegetation alike. Yet nature ever heals itself even as the human spirit builds anew from the ruins.

Albis, in the span of almost two quarters of a century, has relentlessly pursued his vision of the self tossed about in the universal rhythm of becoming and dissolution in the familiar grounds of human reality. His stories as a whole reaffirm the fundamental truth of the death and rebirth of the self bound and unbound in the smithy of interpersonal relationships. He has drawn the picture. It remains for the Filipino reader to see himself there. 

Pasternak’s Christianity in Doctor Zhivago

By Dr. Lucio F. Teoxon Jr.

At a time when Marxism is no longer in vogue in its home country like it used to be; when its decline as a political ideology has reached rock bottom with the Communist Party in the parliament of the Russian Federation no longer in dominant control, it may seem unfashionable or even out-of-date to take up Doctor Zhivago as a topic for serious discussion. But this fictional work is not a period piece that has outlasted its significance. It has enough elements of universality in it to justify our interest in it this early in the 21^st century.

Its publication in the late fifties caught the attention of the global community. Explosive events surrounded its appearance. It was banned in the then Soviet Union and had to be smuggled from Russia and translated from the original Russian to English and other languages before it reached the Western countries and the rest of the world. Its author, Boris Pasternak, was pressured into rejecting the Nobel Prize for Literature that was awarded to him in 1958 by the Swedish Academy. He was prevented from leaving his country in order to receive it. Against his will, he budged. (A similar story happened in 1970 when another Russian novelist was given the same prize but declined to receive it for fear of reprisal. Alexander Solzhenitsyn--of The Gulag Archipelago fame--was expelled from the Soviet Union four years later and lived in exile in the United States).

In the judgment of the Soviet authorities, Doctor Zhivago was anti-communist and highly critical of the totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union. Definitely, it was not expressly a political tract disguised as fiction designedly written as a diatribe directed against the failures of Marxism. Nor is it an apologia for Western liberalism. It is simply an artistic work embodying Boris Pasternak’s worldview. But what the repressive Soviet censors must have found offensive in the book is its undisguised religious allegiance to Christianity and its all too frank criticism of the ideas peddled by the Bolsheviks. We will then train our critical eye mainly on these ideational aspects of the novel more than its other novelistic elements.

In this work, the author looks at the world through the eyes of Dr. Yuri Zhivago, its protagonist. But Zhivago is not a saint, much less a perfect hero. As Tonia herself, his wife, told him in a letter, “I love all that is unusual in you…your great gifts and intelligence which, as it were, have taken place of the will that is lacking.” (p. 347)* He is weak-willed. His greatness though consists in his power of intuition and depth of spirituality. He is the intellectual and contemplative type. He is a poet and also a doctor. In a larger sense Zhivago may be said to be Pasternak’s alter ego as the former, like the author himself, is a deeply committed Christian. His Christianity is one born in a country where religion is persecuted, where atheism is a qualification for party membership and a passport to advancement in the bureaucracy. Pasternak is a Christian witness in a world ruled by crass materialism. His revolt is not one of existentialist nihilism but the protest of life crushed by repression and intolerance. He is all for an out-and-out change from the inhuman world of unfeeling ideologues into an ideal socio-political order where Christian values prevail. However—

…you cannot advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can’t make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with, love of one’s neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and expand itself. And then the two basic ideals of modern man—without them he is unthinkable—the idea of life as sacrifice….There was no history in this sense among the ancients. They had blood and beastliness and pockmarked Caligulas who had no idea of how inferior the system of slavery is….It was not until after the coming of Christ that time and man could breathe freely….Man does not die in a ditch like a dog, but at home in history, while the work toward the conquest of death is full swing, he dies sharing this work….(p. 13)

Pasternak does not of course have in mind enlisting police or military force in bringing about this new humanism, this transformation of the mechanical world into a humanized one. The prescription he recommends is love, not hate; peace, not war; amelioration, not destruction. If there should truly be a regeneration of this earth to make it more habitable, the change must commence with every single individual himself. He stresses the supreme importance of this transformation in the attitude the individual adopts in relation to his fellowmen. Pasternak’s Christianity sounds a bit individualistic as he is of the belief that the individual stands above the herd or the “people” in the totalitarian sense. Gordon, commenting on the scene in the novel in which a young Cossack torments an old Jew in the war-torn field, and speaking the author’s mind, comes to discuss with Zhivago the question of what constitutes a nation:

What is a nation? …And who does more for a nation—the one who makes a fuss about it or the one who, without thinking of it, raises it to universality by the beauty and greatness of his actions, and gives it fame and immortality?

When the Gospel says that in the Kingdom of God there are neither Jews nor Gentiles, does it merely mean that all are equal in the sight of God? …In that new way of living and new form of society, which is born of the heart, and which is called the Kingdom of Heaven, there are no nations, there are only individuals. (p.104)

Pasternak’s preoccupation with the question of the individual’s worth, the concept being essentially Christian, makes of him a true Christian humanist. Each individual created in the image of God has inherent dignity and freedom as a guarantee of such dignity. So, no man should hand himself over to any superior structure or force other than his Maker. The state exists for man, not vice versa. Pasternak then lashes at communism which stands for all that Christianity is not. For communism strips the individual of his freedom and human dignity. While this ideology appears to be on the side of his economic well-being, full of pity for him after the manner of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, it is in fact his enemy because in exchange for the material comfort it offers, he forfeits his liberty which is sacrificed to the higher interests of the collectivity. The bird flutters away from its golden cage as only the open air can give it the freedom to fly. Those who hearken to the song of Marx’s sirens cannot but be reduced to mere cogs in the vast totalitarian machinery, appendages, as it were, that are easily discarded once they outlive their usefulness to the Politburo or Presidium or the Soviet state in general. And those who stubbornly refuse to toe the official line are herded like cattle in concentration camps or else summarily liquidated without compunction. 

Lara, the novel’s heroine, ruefully talks about her husband, Strelnikov (Pavel Antipov) who is a victim to his own ideals:

…He is a doomed man. I believe that he’ll come to a bad end. He will atone for the evil he has done. Revolutionaries who take the law into their own hands are horrifying not because they are criminals, but because they are like machines that have gone out of control, like a runaway trains….His alliance with the Bolsheviks is accidental. So long as they need him, they put up with him, and he happens to be going their way. The moment they don’t need him they’ll throw him overboard with no regret; and crush him, as they have done with other military experts. (p.247)

It is Pasternak’s religious philosophy that cannot understandably make him come to terms with atheistic communism. This, of course, does not necessarily mean that he repudiates his countrymen as a whole. There is always a dichotomy between an ideology and those who profess it. What he decries is not his own people but communism, not the patient but the disease. He is not against all revolutions either. His position in this matter is clearly seen in the scene when Lara explains to her panic-stricken mother, Amelia Guishar, at the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution that “All that’s being done now is done in the name of humanity, in defense of the weak, for the good of women and children….” (p.14) The success of the Russians in forcing down the Czar from his throne was really the dawn of freedom in the land of Russia. But the 1917 counter-revolution of the Bolsheviks was history’s fatal accident which reversed the destinies of the Russians. This is what Pasternak deplores because:

The main misfortune, the root of all evil to come, was the loss of confidence in the value of one’s own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people’s notions; notions that were being crammed down on everybody’s throat….The social evil became an epidemic. It was catching. And it affected everything; nothing was left untouched by it. Our home too became infected….Instead of being natural and spontaneous as we had always been, we began to be idiotically pompous with each other. Something showy, artificial, forced, crept into our conversation—you felt you had to be clever in a certain way about certain world-important things. (p.336)

What he finds unacceptable about communism is its materialistic interpretation of reality. In its view, man is only what he eats so that when Christ declared that man does not live by bread alone, the Galilean carpenter was preaching a lie. When Christians yearn for the heavenly bread, they forget the earthly thing. In hugging the illusion of an afterlife, they neglect to improve their earthly lot. Religion is an opium, as Marx put it, which alienates man from himself by subordinating him to a non-existent God. Christianity is a religion of beaten resignation, which, unable to cope with the realities of the present, falls back on the thought of the sunshine tomorrow. Such wistful attitude is the morality of the weaklings. The apologists of Marx take it upon themselves to liberate man from the thralldom of this illusion and deliver them to a temporal order where practical people dwell in equality, “from each according to his ability; to each according to his need.”

But Pasternak finds it impossible to say yeah to the panacea designed by the communists who are wont to mouth democratic rhetoric and phraseology but do quite the opposite. In a dialogue with the Bolshevik commander Liberius, he made Zhivago rant in righteous indignation of his enforced imprisonment:

The people you worship go in for proverbs, but they’ve forgotten one proverb—“You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”—and they’ve got into the habit of liberating and showering benefits on just those people who haven’t asked for them. I suppose you think I can’t imagine anything in the world more pleasant than your camp and your company. I suppose I have to bless you for keeping me a prisoner and thank you for liberating me from my life, my son, my home, my work, from everything I hold dear and that makes life worth living for me! (p.283)

The "classless society" peddled by the communists is no less an illusion. Pasternak sees communism as offering but another utopia. He knows all too well that the Tower of Babel failed because it attempted the impossible—that of bringing heaven to earth by dispensing with God. A world without God becomes a confused arena where might is right, where the powerful rule through violence or brute force and give their subjects their material needs at the price of their freedom. To live without God is a temporal provincialism that reduces humans to the level of the beast. The question of the existence of God, which the communists deny, is actually the question of life and its larger meaning. Exclusion of the transcendent reality leaves man no way to go in the face of the ultimate questions like that of death. A tormented communist who feels the Grim Reaper with its scythe close in upon him may do well to listen to Zhivago with his idea of life and resurrection:

Resurrection. In the crude form in which it is preached to console the weak, it is alien to me. I have always understood Christ’s words about the living and the dead in a different sense. Where could you find room for all these hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn’t big enough for them. God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded out. They’d be crushed merely by animal life.

But all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations and transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn. You are anxious whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and you didn’t notice it….

There will be no death, says St. John. His reasoning is quite simple. There will be no death because the past is over; that’s almost like saying there will be no death because it is already done with, it’s old and we are bored with it. What we need is something new, and that new thing is life eternal. (p.59-60)

Nowhere in the novel do we notice Pasternak try to pose as a learned theologian well-versed with the intricacies of the discipline. His religious convictions stem from his own deep spirituality and personal insights as a poet. He is but an ordinary believer like you and me, but in his capacity as a literary artist he successfully integrated his religious views in his novel’s framework and thereby gave it a good measure of multivalence. One more thing need to be said about Doctor Zhivago. It is not a historical novel, although in a sense it is history enacted in the lives of fictional characters that come to grips with the moral, political and human dilemmas during the stormy period of Russia’s history as a nation. The hero dies of heart attack. The heroine disappears without a trace in the Gulag. This may all suggest a tragic end to the story. But the prevailing sentiment conveyed in the novel is that life goes on after the storm and stress of socio-political upheaval. With Tanya surviving her parents Yuri and Lara and carrying along with her the balalaika which she has learned to play well, then we know that things are bound to turn out alright.

NOTE

*All page references are to Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, trans. by Max Hayward, Manya Harari, Bernard Guerney (New York: New American Library, 1958).

Man, nature and the spirit of Zen

By Dr. Lucio F. Teoxon Jr.

The “tanka” is a short poetic form of thirty-one syllables arranged into 5,7,5,7,7 syllable scheme of five lines. It is one of the forms of traditional Japanese court poetry dealing with a variety of topics ranging from the most seemingly commonplace to the preeminently sublime. It is also the form used by many contemporary Japanese poets in giving expression to the “cry of their hearts” as they respond, like other human beings, to the world that at once allures and rebuffs them. The tankas selected here are taken from Fujiwara Teikas’s collection titled, Superior Poems of Our Times, compiled in the early thirteenth century.

One of the striking features of these poems is the preoccupation with the cycle of seasons. The poets experience a communion with nature so that its ambivalent moods which change with the seasons also become their own. Oe No Chisato writes: “A thousand things overcome me with their sadness/As I gaze upon the moon./Although autumn surely was not meant /To be felt by my one self alone.” The image of the solitary moon upon the background of an autumn night objectifies the poet’s feeling of sadness. At the same time, he is aware of the fact that somewhere in the autumn night other human beings share with him the same experience. Hence, the “thousand things” which with sadness overcome him are not his own burden alone. And the thought that one’s comrades and those close to one’s heart are confronted with the same situation cannot but reinforce the bond of fellowship that links one human being with another. Indeed, even the beautiful things in nature assume larger significance only when appreciated not by one’s own self alone but in the company of friends or a partner.

The priest Sosie’s poem, for instance, is an invitation to a shared enjoyment of the pleasures afforded by springtime when cherry blossoms are in bloom. He writes: “Come, just for today/Let us lose ourselves wandering/Deep in spring hills—If darkness falls, how can we fail to find/A place to sleep beneath those blossoming boughs?” There is here an expression, too, of intense delight and of faith in the live-giving powers of nature. One is here reminded of the Russian theme of Sophia—a kind of cosmic, rapturous love for all creation. Yet the Japanese love for the “spring hills” and the “blossoming boughs” takes on a mystical aspect—that of the Zen wedding of spirit and matter. In the contemplation of the poet-priest Sosei the “falling darkness,” if it comes as it must, cannot overcome the luxuriant beauty of the blossoming boughs nor the sensuous delight derived from them since in the Zen consciousness everything resolves itself into the final harmony of the universe.

In another poem, however, Sosei presents a gloomy perspective, a distinctively Buddhist vision of the evanescent character of the phenomenal world of men and things. The world is Maya, an imperfect and pale reflection of the unmanifested realm of Being. He says: ”Here it is, yes here,/Where these set forth and those return/and others come to part/Both friends and strangers meet together/At the Barrier Post of meeting!” Sosei is said to have composed these lines upon watching the passers-by outside the hut that he had built at the Osaka Barrier. He regards from a detached vantage point the ceaseless coming hither and going thither of human beings as they proceed with the business of daily living. As he contemplates the scene, he was moved to compose this metaphysical allegory. The incessant flux of human life pictured in this poem is reminiscent of the Shakespearean metaphor of the world as a stage. But unlike Shakespeare who ends on a note of utter nihilism and black despair, the despair of Sosei springs from what in the Oriental lore is believed to be a privileged and higher knowledge--the common inability of human beings to liberate themselves from the wheel of rebirth which they could have done by the generation of new and good karma that would offset the old evil ones that pin them down to the sufferings of “samsara.”

Another poet-priest, Bishop Henjo (816-90 A.D.), a contemporary of Sosei (ca. 890), echoes the same note of subdued sadness about the human lot. He laments: “In this mortal world,/Whether we linger on or pass away ahead,/Our brief span is like/The greater fall of dewdrops from the leaves,/Or the shorter drop of moisture from the stalk.” The formation of dewdrops upon the leaves or of moisture upon the stalks corresponds to our coming into existence in the phenomenal world; and the expulsion of dewdrops from the leaves of grass and moisture from the stalks are analogous to the long or short duration of human life before its expiration.

There is really nothing new about the above notion; but Henjo succeeds here in not sounding too platitudinous in his use of the “dew” imagery to convey the motif of life as an insubstantial, ephemeral thing. But the evanescence being lamented on is only of life as it is lived right here and now. There is no dramatic posturing here of a defiant existentialist faced with the irrational prospect of being blotted out of the universe. The dewdrops fall and evaporate. However, they do not really vanish into absolute non-being. They return to the elements whence they came, just as life at the moment of death becomes merely transformed into other states of being. As Chuang Tzu, the great Taoist sage, said on the occasion of Lao Tzu’s death: “What we can point to are the faggots that have been consumed; but the fire is transmitted elsewhere and we know not that it is over and ended.”

In the treatment of the theme of love, a tanka selected here gives it a careful honing so that what could have easily fallen into mawkish sentimentality becomes an oblique, artistically understated expression of an intensely felt emotion. This is achieved by the figurative use of image that reinforces the sense of the discursively worded lines. Sakanoue Korenori writes: “If we cannot meet,/Joining together like the threads I twine/Now so, then thus,/To make a cord to string my jewels upon,/Of what shall I make up my thread of life?” The power of this poem consists not only in what is being said, but also in what was left unsaid. The lady speaker in the poem conveys the intensity of her love by implying that she could not go on living without the company of the man she loves or without consummating their love as suggested by the imagery of the joining together of threads in the second line. But this is precisely what she left unsaid but merely hinted at in the lines, “If we cannot meet,/…Of what shall I make up my thread of life?”

This poetic device of expressing the unknown in terms of the known is employed more deftly in the three-line haiku which is the shortest poetic form in the world. It is similar to the tanka minus the last two lines of seven syllables each. In Japanese graphic art, its counterpart is called “portraiture by absence,” in which the painting of an object or objects is indirectly evocative of something else, as, for example, a chrysalis implies the butterfly.

The overall tone of these poems is one of sadness even as the poets celebrate the beauty of nature. It is as if the pure act of living is already an act of supreme sacrifice instead of a blessing. This is essentially a Buddhist outlook. While we are not asked to adopt the same view of life, we can at least understand the mental attitude and conditioning factors underlying such sensibility. After all, there is a measure of truth in what the poet Shuzei says: “O wretched world, That affords no pathway to release!/Even the mountain depths/To which I fled when overcome by care/Echo with the anguished cry of deer.” Is this not also expressive of the mood of the twentieth century which was dubbed by W. H. Auden as the “Age of Anxiety”? 

A reading of Camus’ The Plague

By Dr. Lucio F. Teoxon Jr.

To discuss from the standpoint of form Albert Camus’ novels exclusive of his ideas is next to impossible. This is so because Camus is in his element as a writer of what is called as the novel of ideas. His characters though are not mere embodiment of abstract notions even if it is true that his characters are what they are because of what they think. In other words, ideas are lived through; and by their ideas, they are defined and take on identity. This way Camus’ meaning is better understood and appreciated because felt and experienced by the reader. “What decides the world view of a writer,” says Arnold Hauser, “is not so much whose side he supports as through whose eyes he looks at the world.”

Camus has given us Clamence (The Fall), Meursault (The Stranger) and Dr. Rieux (The Plague), to mention some of his characters, through whose eyes we have enlarged our own vision. It is for this reason that Camus engaged generations of readers. Had he relied solely on the essay to give expression to his thoughts, it is doubtful if he could soar, as he did, to the heights he reached. His philosophizing however witty would have mattered little, if at all, considering that his colleague Jean-Paul Sartre, a comparatively profound thinker, would have easily outshone him in this respect.

Of late, Camus has become a literary god among the “Now” generation at a loss to find the fundamental values that have relevance to the problems of living. This is borne out by Eric Oatman who says in “Restless Youth” in one of the issues of the Free World: “If you haven’t read The Plague, you haven’t read anything.” This statement is evidently an exaggeration. The Plague is not everything if we consider that its author has written to his credit other relatively fine books. If anything, Oatman’s assertion is indicative of burgeoning awareness of the pertinence of Camus’ works to the modern times.

In The Plague we are presented with a miniature world in turmoil so well wrought that it assumes an air of reality all its own. The rendition of the whole story is convincing enough for one to confuse it easily with a historical event which it is not. This he achieves through the use of an impartial observer for his point of view. The narrator, Dr. Bernard Rieux, gives a faithful account of the events in the form of a chronicle with the result that the author’s hand is deftly detached from the makeup of the narrative. This reportorial method lends an objective tone like that of a news story. To offset the limitations inherent in this kind of point of view, Rieux is made to avail of other documents such as Tarrou’s diary notes which throw light on the personality of other characters particularly Cottard. Through Tarrou’s recorded observations, too, other aspects of the phenomenon are brought to the fore. The opinions or feelings included are either his own or expressly conveyed to him or his interpretation of the looks on the faces of the other characters.

The trouble in the city of Oran begins with the all too sudden appearance of rats that die out in the open. Local authorities are slow to recognize the danger in their midst, but as victims increase in number daily, the place is proclaimed in a state of plague. It is cut off from the outside world. The exile brought about by the epidemic creates varied reactions on the part of the populace. Parted lovers impatiently long for the absent partner. Couples who take each other for granted suddenly realize that they cannot really live apart. Others take to vice and drinking as escape mechanism of sorts. A number of the populace are merely indifferent. Some of them take advantage of the crisis situation to promote their personal agenda. And there is the group who puts up a fight against the public enemy. The Black Death lasts for a long period, from April, the month it set in, till the first days of February the following year. In the course of these months many have suffered and countless have died. Those lucky enough to survive the ordeal have cause for revelry afterwards, while for them whose friends and loved ones have succumbed to the bubonic plague, the nightmarish experience is scarcely over. Interwoven with those incidents are the individual stories of Dr. Rieux and his wife, Rambert’s efforts to get away, Cottard’s opportunism and the episode of his arrest, Grand’s disillusionment and eventual happiness, Tarrou’s account of his personal life, and Fr. Paneloux’s role in the general crisis.

All this is expressed in a language (at least in translation) that is a happy mean between the extremes of the high-strung and the all too simple. His selective details fulfill definite novelistic purpose and his descriptions serve to produce the tension that permeates the gripping mood of black gloom.

The “plague” is an integrating symbol. It is the “absurd,” an “abstraction” as inevitable as two and two make four. The plague is the irrational element in the universal order. The plague forces upon humans their unwanted privation and imprisonment. In many scenes, the dominant image of prison recurs. The city of Oran is a virtual “madhouse” or a “prison house” peopled with exiles of the pestilence. Isolated and unable to get in touch with the outside, the townsfolk are doomed to put up with “silence, sunlight, dust”—things one with the tropical disease. They like to regard the state of affairs to be temporary, hoping for a return to the normal order. The pestilence however goes on with its ravages, making the plague-bound townspeople feel abandoned “under the vast indifference of the sky.” Hence, they live only for the present moment and lose a sense of time. Time is at a standstill. The watch or clock has become a “silly-gadget.” “Hostile to the past, impatient of the present moment, and cheated of the future, they were much like those whom men’s justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison bars.” This is the picture of man under sentence of death. This is the fundamental problem posed by Camus around which his philosophical speculations center.

For Rambert, the journalist from Paris, who happens to be cut off from the woman he loves, the pestilence is a stumbling block which he can turn his back on so as to be with his love. He feels he does not belong to the place. On the eve of his getaway, however, he comes to realize that it is shameful for one to be happy while others suffer. He changes his mind and joins the group committed to stemming the curse. The plague has become his own business as it is everybody’s.

Cottard, the criminal, is abnormally jubilant over the epidemic. He looks upon it as a chance whereby he can stay safe from the police and enrich himself through questionable activities like smuggling. He doesn’t want the plague stopped since it suits well his self-interests.

Jean Tarrou, another witness of the event, relentlessly fights the plague by organizing the sanitary squad. He nurtures a hate of all forms of injustice and always takes the side of the victim. He disapproves of murder and maintains that we are all murderers in approving of acts and principles that lead to murder, including legalized killing. He wants peace through sympathy, but asks if there could be a saint without God. He doesn’t believe in one.

Father Paneloux tells the townsfolk in a sermon that the plague is the flail of God. The people have forsaken the Lord so that He abandons them in the grip of the pestilence as a reminder that man should repent and turn to God.

Radically opposed to Fr. Paneloux’s is Dr. Rieux’s stand. Like Tarrou, he spares no effort in putting up resistance against the plague. But his struggle is one of revolt.  He hates death and cannot get used to seeing people die, especially those who refuse to die. Unlike Paneloux, he has no trust in God, otherwise he would abandon curing patients and leave the business entirely to Him. He says: “…since the order of the world is shaped by the death, might it not be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes toward heaven where he sits in silence.” 

Rieux’s defiance has a metaphysical dimension. His non-acceptance of God’s creation is premised upon the unjust cruelty perpetrated around him. For instance, after witnessing the final death-throes of M. Othon’s son, Rieux tells Paneloux: “…until my dying day I shall refuse to accept a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.” He finds no justification for the sufferings of innocent children and a God who allows these things to happen is a sadist, pure and simple. (It will be recalled that Ivan Karamazov's atheism is premised on the same ground as Rieux's.) Thus, Rieux cannot simply come to terms with Paneloux’s position of all-out resignation to the Divine will. Paneloux’s views that “we should love what we cannot understand” and that “we should make God’s will our will” cannot have a place in the doctor’s thinking since for him, it devolves on man to put up a struggle against forces that threaten his dignity and happiness. We are doomed after the manner of Sisyphus to contend with the absurdity of our condition. And even if we lose the match as does Tarrou, even then it does not matter. The thing is to have fought well.

There can be no mistake that Rieux is speaking the mind of Camus. We see the shift of Camus’ position here, that is, from Meursault’s indifference to Rieux’s commitment. The former remains a helpless stranger, the latter stands involved. Meursault loves life for its own sake; Rieux loves human life and man in the general sense. Both of them deny God in order to affirm man—and this is their common denominator. In championing the human cause, Rieux has chosen to assert his will. He believes man, condemned to die as he is, can yet be free up to a certain point. Man can still choose whether to smash his head against the wall or not. For all the odds, man can somehow decide his destiny and at least be for a moment independent of nature and pestilence and what not.

It is interesting to note that through the efforts of the group led by Tarrou and Rieux the plague is finally averted so that Oran is free at last. But their triumph is not conclusive, for the plague could come back. One thing important though is demonstrated by it: “There are more things to admire in men than to despise.” Camus humanistic philosophy is nowhere given more forceful expression than in this novel. His world view is man-centered to the point of deifying man. The clarion call he makes is the rediscovery of man dehumanized by things that get the better of him—social codes, disease, death and war. This is the reason why scholars read existentialism in his works even if he himself refused to be categorized under any school of thought.

There is no denying that as a literary artist Camus has rendered a penetrating depiction of the pathological condition of our times, small wonder the present-day youth claim him as their kind of novelist. The Nobel Prize citation makes mention of “his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problem of the human conscience of our time.” All told, herein lies his significance as man and writer.