To amuse myself during this period of Covid-19 isolation, I have started to work through a reading list of plague-based writings starting with Albert Camus’ 1947 novel, The Plague (La Peste). Camus imagines a major outbreak of the Bubonic Plague in the town of Oran in what was then French Algiers on the Mediterranean Coast. Such an account could easily be taken for non-fiction given the very real precedent for epidemics in Oran. The most serious of these was a cholera outbreak in 1849 which killed a large percentage of the town’s population. Outbreaks of Bubonic Plague also decimated the town in 1556 and in 1678 and there were three minor outbreaks in the 20th century.
The narrator relates events in a dispassionate voice and is explicit in his desire to maintain objectivity, as if he were a journalist or author of a medical journal. It is this desire which is a chief source of conflict in the novel. There is a cognitive dissonance in the competing languages at play: the detached language of medical science and the passionate language of human suffering. Indeed, the word passion is etymologically related to the Latin word for suffering. In Oran, when people contract the plague, they are “abstracted” from the community and placed in isolation. This happens in the passive voice, underscoring one of the great indignities of plague, the denial of agency.
The principal character is Bernard Rieux, a medical doctor who, at the novel’s outset, sends his wife to a sanatorium to recover from an unrelated illness. This means that, for the duration of the quarantine, Rieux lives in heightened isolation. Perhaps the dispassionate affect he brings to his work is a way of compensating for this isolation. It also allows him to identify the illness and, perhaps most importantly, to name it while his colleagues are still waffling. We’ve all had the experience of vague symptoms—a slight tickle in the throat, say, or a mild wooziness—which leads us to wonder if these symptoms might resolve themselves into something more concrete. Do I have the beginning of something? A cold maybe? We play mind games with ourselves and hope the symptoms disappear. Collectively, we play the same mind games. We dismiss reports of illness, rationalizing our lack of concern by pointing out that this is happening somewhere else to a people who were being careless or, in some other way deserved what they got. Then, at last, the symptoms are undeniable.
The word “plague” had just been uttered for the first time. … Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.
This is reminiscent of statements issuing from the World Health Organization which first hinted that it might have to declare Covid-19 a pandemic until, at last, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared that, yes, it was a pandemic. Naming it is the first step in making it real.
Naming, however, is not enough to stir political or social will to implement the stringent measures Dr. Rieux recommends. Instead, the town’s Prefect posts flaccid public notices.
It was hard to find in these notices any indication that the authorities were facing the situation squarely.
The measures enjoined were far from Draconian and one had the feeling that many concessions had been made to a desire not to alarm the public. The instructions began with a bald statement that a few cases of a malignant fever had been reported in Oran; it was not possible as yet to say if this fever was contagious. The symptoms were not so marked as to be really perturbing and the authorities felt sure they could rely on the townspeople to treat the situation with composure.
After reading the public notice, Rieux returned to his surgery and learned that ten people had died the previous day. Predictably, it is homespun conservative values, like public order and protection of commerce, that drive the political failure to take matters seriously.
In our current situation, no one better embodies this political impotence than Donald Trump who, for weeks, offered ineffectual assurances while remaining deaf to advice from epidemiologists until circumstances gave him no choice but to acknowledge that the entire world faces a crisis.
When, at last, the politicians acknowledge that the plague is real and demand action, they close the town’s borders—a full-on quarantine—with roads in and out under armed guard. Gasoline and food have to be rationed. The chief affliction of most citizens is a mixture of fear and boredom. Another affliction is disinformation. Dr. Rieux’s friend, Jean Tarrou, keeps a notebook in which he assiduously records the psychological effects of quarantine. He includes an incidental note: “[P]eppermint lozenges had vanished from the drugstores, because there was a popular belief that when sucking them you were proof against contagion.”
Similar nonsense has circulated in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Guardian states that a leaked EU report identifies a sustained Russian campaign to sow disinformation aimed at aggravating “the public health crisis in western countries, specifically by undermining public trust in national healthcare systems.” This campaign includes the dissemination of conspiracy theories: coronavirus is a biological weapon deployed variously by China, the US, or the UK; it was caused by migrants; it is a hoax.
In part, Camus’ novel could pass for a social and psychological pathology of an epidemic and quarantine. There is an uncanny correspondence between the early stages of the plague in Oran and the early stages of Covid-19. I remain curious to know whether the correspondence will continue. I hope not. But Camus did not write his novel to describe the pathology of Bubonic Plague; we have medical journals for that. Medical jargon lends verisimilitude to the account, but this is the least of his aims.
In part, too, Camus’ novel could pass for a modern reworking of the Book of Job: a virtuous protagonist is the pawn in a contest between the forces of evil and the forces of good. Like Job, Rieux loses everything. Everyone around him dies: his patients, his friends, and finally he receives word that his wife, safe in a distant town, has died all the same. Three friends visit Job to console him in his loss and each represents an account of theodicy, the question of how it is that an omnipotent loving god allows evil to be visited upon people, especially good people. In The Plague, the first person to defend a position in the debate on theodicy is Father Paneloux, a prominent priest in the town of Oran. As a culmination of a Week of Prayer, the Jesuit is invited to deliver the sermon. He opens by drawing a comparison to the plagues of Egypt recounted in the Book of Exodus. There, the plagues were visited by God upon the enemies of God. Are we to infer from this that Father Paneloux regards the people of Oran as the enemies of God? Evidently not, because the comparison is inexact. According to Father Paneloux, it is not God who has afflicted the people of Oran; God has simply turned his back on the town while evil metes the punishment for the people’s faithlessness.
If Camus modeled this novel on the Book of Job, we would have a succession of characters each representing a different position, a bit like a televised all-candidates debate before an election. What we get instead is a softening of the debate’s hard edges until the debate fades away. After all, questions of theodicy can only persist so long as the existence of God persists. After we dispense with God, what else remains? Perhaps because of his relentless exposure to sickness and death, even Father Paneloux softens in his position, turning away from abstract sermonizing to practical human decency and compassion. I surmise that it is because the characters—Rieux in particular—do not succumb to despair but turn, instead, to compassion that Camus took exception to claims he had written The Plague as an existential novel.
However, Camus does not let us entirely off the hook. Towards the end of the novel, Dr. Rieux’s friend, Jean Tarrou makes an extended confession. Although he has recorded keen observations of the people and events around him, until this point, he has disclosed little of himself. Now, he tells how, as a boy, his father prosecuted criminals. One day, the father invited his son to observe court proceedings where the man secured a conviction for a capital offence. The defendant went before the firing squad. The young Tarrou was so disgusted he left home and committed himself to social activism. In the 21st century, we might have called him a social justice warrior. However, Tarrou has grown disillusioned. He sees that he was complicit in the death of the defendant his father had convicted, as he was in the deaths of countless others. He calls this the plague: it is his complicity in and acquiescence to the way we order ourselves as social beings to produce injustices that appear as natural outcomes. Had his Jesuit friend lived a generation later, he might have called this plague structural sin. The sin at the heart of structural sin is that it enables us to evade personal responsibility. Our social institutions, our ideologies, and their underpinning bureaucracies appear to have arisen organically, and we as individuals are powerless to do anything about them. Perhaps this is the plague.
Like all good writers, Camus offers no specificity. This allows us to translate his account into the terms of our own circumstances. We do this by asking ourselves: what is the plague that afflicts us in 2020? We know that Camus is no literalist, so the answer cannot be Covid-19. Instead, we must look to our social institutions, our ideologies, and their enabling bureaucracies. These are the cause of our afflictions. And we must look, too, to those who insist we cannot take responsibility.