Let us update Camus with a sequel set in Louisville. KY as methamphetamine is dispensed freely and in large quantities to all who cannot say no thanks while all those who seek help to stop are attended to
The world-wide Spanish influenza epidemic that began in 1918 killed about 50 million people, more than all the combined deaths in World War I. The current coronavirus epidemic is just as frightening. Official reports convey unpreparedness rather than reassurance. No one knows how long it will last or how much damage it will cause. The disease incites panic in the streets and in the shops, and infects us with fear and insecurity.
For this reason, it’s the right time to consider the brave wisdom of Albert Camus’s “The Plague” (1947). Camus (1913-1960) was a French-Algerian novelist, dramatist, actor, essayist and Existential philosopher. Handsome in his Bogartian trench coat, he won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and died—like James Dean—in a car crash. “The Plague,” his most ambitious novel, has a lucid style, ironic tone, complex characters, riveting plot, emotional intensity and exalted themes.
Camus’s uninspiring setting, Oran on the coast of North Africa, is ugly: baking in summer, muddy in winter; treeless, glamorless, soulless. Its citizens are smug, placid and bored. Their passions are short-lived, their vices banal. They cultivate mechanical habits to get through life and have no interest in anything but money and pleasure. They don’t think about morality, religion or death. The plague begins suddenly with the swarming appearance of festering rats, who carry their infectious bacilli to man and die in the streets. Camus observes, “It was as if the earth on which our houses stood were being purged of its secreted humors; thrusting up to the surface the abscesses that had been forming in its entrails.” Like our virus, the infection is an evil visitation that seems to come from nowhere and puts everyone at risk.
“The Plague” is a vivid allegory of the then-recent Nazi occupation of wartime France. The mass burials and crematoria recall the concentration and extermination camps; there’s an organized Resistance to the plague and the invading bubonic rats finally retreat. But the novel is also a grim account of the threatening contagion. It shows how desperate citizens fight the disease that ravages the city, how they respond to the quarantine and lack of a cure during the overwhelming disaster.
Extending his focus, Camus describes an entire town in the grip of disease and emphasizes the separation of the survivors, not the suffering of the sick. He writes with detachment and scrupulous veracity in a clinical yet lyrical manner. The authorities cannot explain, control or eliminate the plague. They are not prepared for its arrival, unwilling to recognize its existence and unrealistic about its effects. Oran suffers dire consequences: cuts in electricity, rationing of food and gas, severe shortages and restricted traffic; the sudden appearance of a black market, smuggling, looting, curfews, press censorship, police surveillance and martial law.
The characters express various attitudes about the plague and comment on the human condition. The doctor Rieux, the criminal Cottard and the clerk Grand are aware that the plague implies evil in mankind; the journalist Rambert, the magistrate Othon and the priest Paneloux develop their understanding as the plague proceeds. Trying to reconcile belief in God’s goodness with the evil in their midst, Paneloux delivers two sermons. In the first he justifies God’s punishment and declares, “This same pestilence which is slaying you, works for your good and points your path.” In the second he changes his argument. He now asks if the promise of “eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment of human suffering” yet challenges his congregation by asserting there is no room for doubt: “We must believe everything or deny everything. And who among you, I ask, would dare to deny everything?”
“The Plague” portrays people’s sense of unreality and lack of readiness; their denial and despair, suffering and isolation, selfishness and sacrifice, indifference and affirmation, hatred and sympathy; the power of love and the will to prevail in philosophically absurd conditions. The selfless hero Dr. Rieux, who fights the plague and narrates the book, is outraged by the anguish of the victims and expresses the transcendent theme of love. He believes in the collective destiny of human beings and promises a better life after the plague disappears.
Like his hero, Camus gives us hope. He believes that the deadly crisis will encourage solidarity and bring out the best qualities in people, that endurance and courage will prevail. Camus writes, “No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague” and the emotions of exile and deprivation, fear and revolt. The chastened people return to normal life with a clearer vision and deeper understanding of the precarious nature of human existence. He concludes, “what we learn in time of pestilence is that there are more things to admire in men than to despise. . . . By refusing to bow down to pestilence, they strive their utmost to be healers.”
—Mr. Meyers, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has recently published books on Thomas Mann, Robert Lowell and the realist painter Alex Colville.
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