In January 1941, the twenty-eight year old
French writer Albert Camus began work on a
novel about a virus that spreads uncontrollably
from animals to humans and ends up destroying
half the population of a representative modern
town. It was called La Peste/The Plague, eventually
published in 1947 and frequently described
as the greatest European novel of the postwar
period.
The book – written in sparse, haunting prose
- takes us through a catastrophic outbreak
of a contagious disease in the lightly fictionalised
town of Oran on the Algerian coast, as seen
through the eyes of the novel’s hero, a
Doctor Rieux, a version of Camus himself.
As the novel opens, an air of eerie normality
reigns. ‘Oran is an ordinary town,’ writes
Camus, ‘nothing more than a French Prefecture
on the coast of Algeria.’ The inhabitants
lead busy money-centered and denatured lives;
they barely notice that they are alive. Then,
with the pacing of a thriller, the horror
begins. Dr Rieux comes across a dead rat.
Then another and another. Soon the town is
overrun with the mysterious deaths of thousands
of rats, who stumble out of their hiding places
in a daze, let out a drop of blood from their
noses and expire.
The inhabitants accuse the authorities of
not acting fast enough. The rats are removed
- and the town heaves a sigh of relief but
Dr Rieux suspects that this is not the end.
He has read enough about the structure of
plagues and transmissions from animals to
humans to know that something is afoot.
Soon an epidemic seizes Oran, the disease
transmitting itself from citizen to citizen,
spreading panic and horror in every street.
In order to write the book, Camus immersed
himself in the history of plagues. He read
books on the Black Death that killed 50 million
people in Europe in the 14th century; the
Italian plague of 1629 that killed 280,000
people across the plains of Lombardy and the
Veneto, the great plague of London of 1665
as well as plagues that ravaged cities on
China’s eastern seaboard during the 18th
and 19th centuries. In March 1942, Camus told
the writer André Malraux that he wanted to
understand what plague meant for humanity:
‘Said like that it might sound strange,’
he added, ‘but this subject seems so natural
to me.’
Camus was not writing about one plague in
particular, nor was this narrowly, as has
sometimes been suggested, a metaphoric tale
about the recent Nazi occupation of France.
Camus was drawn to his theme because, in his
philosophy, we are all – unbeknownst to us
- already living through a plague: that is
a widespread, silent, invisible disease that
may kill any of us at any time and destroy
the lives we assumed were solid. The actual
historical incidents we call plagues are merely
concentrations of a universal precondition,
they are dramatic instances of a perpetual
rule: that we are vulnerable to being randomly
exterminated, by a bacillus, an accident or
the actions of our fellow humans. Our exposure
to plague is at the heart of Camus’s view
that our lives are fundamentally on the edge
of what he termed ‘the absurd’.
Proper recognition of this absurdity should
not lead us to despair pure and simple. It
should – rightly understood – be the start
of a redemptive tragi-comic perspective. Like
the people of Oran before the plague, we assume
that we have been granted immortality and
with this naivety come behaviours that Camus
abhorred: a hardness of heart, an obsession
with status, a refusal of joy and gratitude,
a tendency to moralise and judge.
The people of Oran associate plague with something
backward that belongs to another age. They
are modern people with phones, trams, aeroplanes
and newspapers. They are surely not going
to die like the wretches of 17th century London
or 18th century Canton.
‘It’s impossible it should be the plague,
everyone knows it has vanished from the West,’
says one character. ‘Yes, everyone knew
that,’ Camus adds sardonically, ‘except
the dead.’
For Camus, when it comes to dying, there is
no progress in history, there is no escape
from our frailty; being alive always was and
will always remain an emergency, as one might
put it, truly an inescapable ‘underlying
condition’. Plague or no plague, there is
always – as it were – the plague, if what
we mean by this is a susceptibility to sudden
death, an event that can render our lives
instantaneously meaningless. And yet still
the citizens deny their fate. Even when a
quarter of the city is dying, they keep imagining
reasons why the problem won’t happen to
them.
The book isn’t attempting to panic us, because
panic suggests a response to a dangerous but
short term condition from which we can eventually
find safety. But there can never be safety
- and that is why for Camus we need to love
our fellow damned humans and work without
hope or despair for the amelioration of suffering.
Life is a hospice, never a hospital.
Camus writes: ‘Pestilence is so common,
there have been as many plagues in the world
as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars
always find people equally unprepared. When
war breaks out people say: ‘It won’t last,
it’s too stupid.’ And war is certainly
too stupid, but that doesn’t prevent it
from lasting. The citizens of Oran were like
the rest of the world, they were humanists:
they did not believe in pestilence. A pestilence
does not have human dimensions, so people
tell themselves that it is unreal, that it
is a bad dream which will end. The people
of our town were no more guilty than anyone
else, they merely forgot to be modest and
thought that everything was still possible
for them, which implied that pestilence was
impossible. They continued with business,
with making arrangements for travel and holding
opinions. Why should they have thought about
the plague, which negates the future, negates
journeys and debate? They considered themselves
free and no one will ever be free as long
as there is plague, pestilence and famine.’
At the height of the plague, when five hundred
people a week are dying, one of Camus’s
particular enemies in the novel steps into
a view, a Catholic priest called Paneloux.
He gives a sermon to the city in the cathedral
of the main square – and seeks to explain
the plague as god’s punishment for depravity.
But Camus’s hero Dr Rieux loathes this approach.
The plague is not a punishment for anything
deserved. That would be to imagine that the
universe was moral or had some sort of design
to it. But Dr Rieux watches a young innocent
child die in his hospital and knows better:
suffering is entirely randomly distributed,
it makes no sense, it is no ethical force,
it is simply absurd and that is the kindest
thing one can say of it.
The doctor works tirelessly against death,
he tries to lessen the suffering of those
around him. But he is no saint. In one of
the most central lines of the book, Camus
writes: ‘This whole thing is not about heroism.
It’s about decency. It may seem a ridiculous
idea, but the only way to fight the plague
is with decency.’ A character asks Rieux
what decency is. Doctor Rieux’s response
is as clipped as it is eloquent: ‘In general,
I can’t say, but in my case I know that
it consists in doing my job.’
Despite the horror, Camus (who in an earlier
essay had compared humanity to the wretched
character of Sisyphus but then asked us to
imagine Sisyphus ‘happy’) maintains a
characteristically keen sense of what makes
life worth enduring. His Doctor Rieux appreciates
dancing, love and nature; he is hugely sensitive
to the smell of flowers, to the colours at
sunset and – like Camus – adores swimming
in the sea, slipping out after an evening
on the wards to surrender himself to the reassuring
immensity of the waves.
Eventually, after more than a year, the plague
ebbs away. The townspeople celebrate, it is
apparently the end of suffering. Normality
can return. But this is not how Camus sees
it. Doctor Rieux may have helped to defeat
this particular outbreak of the plague but
he knows there will always be others:
‘Rieux knew that this chronicle could not
be a story of definitive victory. It could
only be the record of what had to be done
and what, no doubt, would have to be done
again, against this terror… As he listened
to the cries of joy that rose above the town,
Rieux recalled that this joy was always under
threat. He knew that this happy crowd was
unaware of something that one reads in books,
which is that the plague bacillus never dies
or vanishes entirely, that it remains dormant
for dozens of years, that it waits patiently
in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs
and old papers, and that the day will come
when…the plague will once again rouse its
rats and send them to die in some new well-contented
city.’
Camus speaks to us in our own times not because
he was a magical seer who could intimate what
the best scientists could not, but because
he correctly sized up human nature and knew
about a fundamental and absurd vulnerability
in us that we cannot usually bear to remember.
In the words of one of his characters, Camus
knew, as we do not, that ‘everyone has inside
it himself this plague, because no one in
the world, no one, can ever be immune.’
