Camus’ classic ‘The Plague’ still relevant today
Sixty years ago, the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus died. Yet the books that earned him the Nobel Prize in literature are still alive. This is true not just for “The Stranger,” Camus’ best-known novel, but also for his second novel, “The Plague.” The former is about a man who cannot, absurdly enough, remember when his mother died. As for the latter, it is about a society that confronts something absurd — as absurd, say, as the plague — and how it responds.
Set in the Algerian city of Oran, the plague is the disease whose name dare not be spoken. After a massive invasion of dying rats, whose bloated and bloodied bodies litter the streets, residents develop symptoms that resemble the bubonic plague. Nevertheless, as the narrator, Dr. Rieux, notes, the residents refuse to recognize it as the plague. This was only normal. “They fancied themselves free,” Rieux explains, “and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.”
At first, the authorities also refuse to name the disease. They do not want to alarm the public and, like the public, they cannot believe what they see. Seeing is not believing if only because believing prevents seeing. This is why the officials, wrapping themselves in conditionals and subjunctives, finally agree to act “as though the epidemic were plague.”
Once the city is quarantined, the locals react in different ways. Some try to escape the city, others try to escape through alcohol, and yet others, who were visiting, insist they do not belong there. But as Rieux tells one visitor, this claim is absurd: “From now on you’ll belong here, like everyone else. We’re all involved in it, and we’ve got to accept it as it is.”
As what was unthinkable becomes unremarkable, most residents grow resigned. Yet a minority resists this new normal. Led by Rieux, volunteer sanitation teams seek to stem the plague’s rise. They clean the streets and keep the statistics; they care for the sick and carry off the dead. There was, Rieux concludes, “nothing admirable about their attitude; it was merely logical.” Yet logic can be as fatal as the plague. “There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death.”
At this point, the biological threat of yersinia pestis morphs into an ideological threat of totalitarianism. Camus started the novel after being trapped in France during the Nazi occupation of France. He soon joined the resistance, not only because he despised the racial and genocidal worldview of Nazism but because he also despised the French officials who, either from the desire for power or the delusion that they stood in the way of greater evils, collaborated with the Nazis.
For Rieux, we are called upon to recognize facts and draw conclusions regardless of the bacterium. This requires an unflinching fidelity, not to your future but to our future; not to a personal interest but to general interest. This alone, though, is not enough. By resistance, Camus also meant resistance to our tendency to swap reality for fantasy, information for ignorance. Here, too, Rieux is clear: “The most incorrigible vice is that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything.” By insisting on a world that one wishes, those infected by this vice threaten to undo the world that is.
Finally, we must watch over not just our world, but also our words. Resisting the authorities, Rieux calls the plague the plague, while another character, Jean Tarrou, insists that all of our “troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.” Both men understand that only by remaining vigilant over our language — making certain it corresponds to facts, not fabulations — can we keep both natural and man-made plagues at bay.
Were Camus alive today, he would not be surprised how the spread of COVID-19 has, in part, been enabled by authoritarian regimes like China and Iran that fear the transmission of truths more than they do the transmission of viruses. Nor would he be shocked to learn that this fear courses through our own administration. Swinging between denial and disarray, the White House has just ordered that health officials must first clear all public statements with Vice President Mike Pence — a man who has claimed that smoking does not kill and that condoms do not protect against sexually transmitted diseases.
Camus concludes his novel with the observation that the “plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good.” Indeed.
Zaretsky teaches history at the Honors College at the University of Houston and is the author of “Catherine & Diderot: An Empress, A Philosopher and the Fate of the Enlightenment.”