The Plague: A Story of Our Times

burial).

Superimposed upon these events are the stories of the individuals who are contending with the epidemic. Dr. Rieux finds himself on the front lines in the battle, and we are introduced to other main characters through him. There is Cottard, a petty criminal who profits from the plague through smuggling and black market trading. There is Tarrou, a wealthy tourist with an interesting past, who happens to be in Oran at the wrong time—he becomes one of the main organizers of volunteer brigades to help manage the sick, and he keeps a plague diary. Paneloux, a fire and brimstone Catholic priest, tries from the pulpit to make sense of the calamity. Rambert, a Paris journalist, attempts ceaselessly to effect an escape while railing at the unfairness of it all.

A recurring motif in literature is that humanity is best revealed under circumstances of imprisonment and deprivation. Think Solzhenitsyn in his gulag, Dostoevsky in Siberia, 12 Angry Men in a jury room—you get the idea. Curiously, though, this recurring motif is not so much about the source of the suffering or deprivation as it is about the human behaviour that arises in the crucible.

The main question posed in The Plague is how the individual can face up to the overwhelming despair, isolation, loneliness, and loss of humanity that result from the infestation. The gruesome deaths level all human hierarchies and pretenses, and they assault normal human emotions and interactions.

Father Paneloux, waxing Augustinian, preaches that the plague comes as divine retribution for sins, and that the best course is to embrace the fate that God has assigned and trust in ultimate redemption through love. This suffering is visited upon believers to test their faith—to force them into an all-or-nothing reliance upon divine will. This approach rings hollow for the other characters, especially Dr. Rieux. Together these other characters articulate a more human response to suffering, a response which involves the acknowledgement of the arbitrariness of the evil but the necessity of sharing the burden and acting with integrity. It is Tarrou who has experienced first-hand in the Spanish Civil War the meting out of death as punishment, and he recognizes a greater pestilence: a power structure that systematically victimizes and kills. It is he who comes closest to articulating a moral center: “What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest, health, integrity, purity (if you like), is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention.” In short, the evil in the pestilence lies in the attitudes people assume towards it.

Although Camus’ work is widely understood to be a metaphorical representation of the Nazi occupation of France, it transcends its particular historical circumstances. Camus had indeed lived through France under the Nazis and the infamous Vichy collaboration, but in a broader context he was conscious of the more universal ravages of war, slavery, and oppression. In The Plague, Camus provides a metaphor for any kind of massive, traumatic destabilization of normal life.

Our very own Covid-19 surely comes as a metaphorical visitation revealing some fatal flaws in our social and economic organization. We have outsourced/globalized our means of production to achieve greater wealth, but we have instead achieved greater vulnerability. We have unwittingly embraced relentless growth and frenetic hyper-consumption, and the stability of our society actually depends on maintaining our habits and mindsets. In terms of fairness and justice, this pandemic has shown how empty are our notions of freedom, liberty, equality, and democracy. And the human behaviour that has arisen in THIS crucible has shown the very same extremes of self-interest and saintliness that Camus evokes. Moreover, given the way the natural world is breathing a sigh of relief at the cessation of human consumption, the questions arise: Who or what is the real pestilence?

In the words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us!”