The cultural and humanistic crisis, consequent to the corrosive impact of World War II and the German occupation of France, fractured the sensibility of the French. The period of the rise of Hitler to power appeared to Albert Camus as the `days of wrath' in the man-made hell and war was no adventure but a disease, like typhus. Camus uses plague as symbol of this disease in his novel, The Plague. Different from his earlier stance of solipsist indifference evident in his first cycle of novels, in the second cycle, which includes The Plague, Camus prefers the ethic of revolt and resistance. The outbreak of plague in Oran, and the responses of exclusive subjectivity at first and inclusive engagement later on, are skilfully exploited by Camus to bring out not only the consequences of moral evil but also the problem underlying revolutionary terror. This paper attempts at examining the complex symbolism of the plague as "the yellow mucus of vice", in the novel.

Camus belonged to a generation that grew up with the smoldering scars left by World War I and for whom history was an unmitigated trial. As Auden writes in New Year Letter, "We are conscripts to our age/Simply by being born" (1976, p. 183). The great war, its terror and its destruction, altered people's perception of themselves and of Western civilization. The war that was touted as a "war to end all wars" had opened in high spirits, but ended with an almost universal cry against such madness. When it drew to a close, European society had to confront not only the wiping out of millions, but also the appalling number of blinded, maimed, gassed, or simply stunned survivors. It also had to grapple with the dissolution of its values, the collapse of its finances, and the wreckage of its monuments. Paul Valery, French poet and philosopher, wrote in 1919, "The swaying of the ship has been so violent that the best-hung lamps have finally overturned" (1962, p. 26). The politically and economically turbulent postwar decades too failed to offer any redeeming solace. Instead, it thrust upon the people a world of staggering duplicity, propaganda, violence, deportations, and torture, perpetrated by emerging Communist, Nazi, and Fascist regimes. The unprecedented geopolitical, cultural, and humanistic crisis that engulfed Europe in the early 1940s in the form of the World War II ravaged the already fractured European sensibility. It convinced Camus that "mechanical civilization has ... reached the last degree of savagery" (qtd. in Lottman, 1980, p. 362). The tidal wave of mass murder and execution, unleashed in the name of necessity and ideology, culminating in the bombing of Hiroshima, revealed to him the truth in Sainte Exupery's words that "war is not an adventure. War is a disease, like Typhus" (qtd. in Bespaloff, 1962, p. 98). What Camus attempts to capture in The Plague is a world engulfed in a terrible `abstraction'. He skilfully exploits the inherent symbolism of the plague to unleash a trenchant critique of ideologies that hide behind abstractions, infusing the work with a dual, dialectical edge and signification.

The experience of World War II shifted the axis and the climate of Camus' writings. It displaced the invincible Algerian summer's "benign indifference" (Camus, 1984, p. 117), one that had suffused his early writings with a touch of warmth and vitality. In its place, he faced a new indifference - the indifference of mud, blood and iron. It was an indiffere - nce that had no faceone that made people raise searching, unsettling questions. In Camus' works belonging to the first cycle, his emphasis had been on the presentation of the absurd as a crisis for the self's yearning for lucidity and meaning in a world that is opaque and unresponsive, as well as on the self's earnest attempt to consent and revolt against the existential condition. If it is the trial of nature and the implicit revolt against it that characterizes the works of the first cycle, it is the trial of history and the concern to formulate an implicit ethic of resistance and revolt that dominates The Plague, The Rebel, and The Just, which belong to the second phase.

English Studies Journal, Cultural Crisis, European Societies, Geopolitical Crisis, Moral Implications, French Resistance Movement, Metaphysical Nihilism, Moral Tags, Metaphysical Mystifications, Ideological Implications, Metaphysical Dimensions, Linguistic Games.