The Plague by Albert Camus

Lockdown is beginning to creep away leaving a certain reluctance to throw oneself too ardently into former activities, despite longing to do so. This week, we are trying to reinstate Mahjong on my terrace and hopes are high! An attempt to re-start our Thursday evening get-togethers at Oud Huis Amsterdam has been thwarted owing to the immoveable barrier of the closure of the hotel which had been briefly open.

 Oud Huis Amsterdam, Genthof 4.

Boris, recently. 

A lovely idea that I have thought of, to visit Britain and go to see my sister on our birthday in late July, has caused me quite unexpected anxiety about the big effort neded to travel by train from Brugge to Bury St Edmonds. A considerable journey of at least 6-7 hours in a wretched mask amid other travellers, in a country (the U.K.) which has not so far been very successful at managing Covid 19. Incidentally I read a lovely little thumbnail of Boris by Christine Burns, a trans campaigner and author. “Johnson is a Pound Shop Trump, slightly more acceptable and less utterly crass.” Which rather cleverly manages to be rude about both men and cheered me up considerably!

I am currently reading The Plague by Albert Camus, published in 1947, thus, I discover, joining tens of thousands of locked-down readers during this Corona period, all fascinated by what seems to have become the defining book of Covid19. Camus “uses a biological epidemic to illustrate the dilemmas of moral contagion.” [Tony Judt. 2001] It is the story of a dreadful plague of rats in the fictional town of Oran in French Algeria when rats emerge from the sewers in their thousands to die with bulboes bursting. Soon humans are similarly affected and eventually, after disbelief in pestilences [“they only happen in history”] causes uncomprehending, comfortable stasis and scepticism, the enormity of what is happening hits home. The numbers afflicted rise; first slowly then exponentially and by time the plague-arriving Spring gives way to a sweltering summer, over 100 deaths a day are occurring. The New Normal governs lives. Emergency measures are rushed in; city gates and the commercial harbour are closed; sporting activities and beach bathing are prohibited. Food shortages emerge and rationing for basics is introduced. Plague profiteers prey on desperation and bewilderment; sufferers are isolated; entire suburbs are locked down; hospitals become overwhelmed and schools and other public buildings are converted into makeshift hospitals.

Part of the plague of Nazism

Mosque in Biskra in Algiers, similar
to the fictional Oban of the novel

Camus meditates tellingly on the psychological and social effects of the epidemic on the townspeople. A plague makes exiles of people in their own towns and homes; separation, isolation, anxiety, boredom and a quotidian claustrophobic repetition become their shared fate, seemingly without end to the sufferers. The living cannot even bid farewell to their dead. Camus’s plague is also a metaphor; when it was written, the plague was Nazism which had taken over and destroyed millions in unimaginable distortions of normal human behaviour. A character in the book, Tarrou, identifies the plague with people’s propensity to rationalise killing others for religious, philosophical or ideological causes. And it is in this sense of plague that the closing words of the novel observe:

 Camus, 1972

“..that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightenment of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”

But Camus’s narrator concludes, after the unaccountable dissipation of the plague when quarantine is lifted, gates open and families and lovers are reunited, that, in spite of all the horrors he has witnessed, “there are more things to admire in men than to despise.” He goes on to suggest that it is in ordinary virtue with people doing what they can for each other in the face of adversity, that extraordinary things happen to protect people from the worst depredations heaped on them by epidemics, whether from 'natural' causes or tyrannical governments or ideologies.. "There's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency."

The apparent prescience of The Plague considered in today’s pandemic seems extraordinary. Camus describes so exactly our present situation: our fears, our mystification, our boredom, our longing for normalcy to return. He illustrates the moral dilemmas faced by humanity when in the throes of a plague and the range of human behaviours in response. But when it was published, the plague was recognised as Nazism and its attendant evils and Camus was widely recognised as a genius and awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. It remains one of the most important books ever written.

 Triumphant post script. Mahjong this morning!