La pandémie dans les oeuvres littéraires d’Albert Camus et Octave Mirbeau

They are not new in Literature; they belong to universal and immemorial experience. The pandemic occupies a significant place in literary texts. Writers have used it to carefully depict illness, death, the inescapable contingency of existence. Describe AIDS, plague, ergotism, coronavirus, leprosy, cholera, influenza, syphilis to name just a few diseases so diverse in their mode of contamination, their symptoms, their evolution and their lethality. These diseases that occur in epidemic mode could undermine rationality; trigger moral crises and puts on the table the issue of confinement, isolation, quarantine, confinement. Our article proposes to study literary texts by Octave Mirbeau and Albert Camus dealing with epidemics by providing a tangible truth that can join the truth of scientific chroniclers because literature does not take us away from the real world but illuminates it. He could deconstruct the discourse: for example Octave Mirbeau in l’Epidémie, a play by Octave Mirbeau, a tragic farce created in 1898 which evokes with jubilant ferocity the elastic morality of a municipal council faced with an epidemic of typhoid fever in the city. Similarly, Albert Camus’s novel La Peste marks the horror of description, the withering of temporality, the trivialization of death by a chronic narrator of a carabineer epidemic that spread to Oran in Algeria in the 1940s. Human relations are upset, the plague delights to infest. A crucial question comes up with each epidemic: what attitude should we adopt? Is it divine wrath? How to overcome affliction? We are going to show how Octave Mirbeau and Albert Camus seized on epidemics.