The Plague (1948)

Albert Camus

Read: 06/20

It is strange to find oneself in the midst of a pandemic and to feel compelled to read Camus’s The Plague. Upon receiving my copy in the mail, that night I settled into bed thinking I would begin reading it, only to find within the first few pages the image of the dying rat, with blood spurting from its mouth, too much to bear so soon before sleep. I recall switching to “Heart of Darkness,” which was not much of an improvement (and since then in addition to reading The Plague I have balanced my literary diet with Stella Gibbon’s Cold Comfort Farm, a book that amuses rather than appalls).

Still, notwithstanding the travails of Camus’s work, The Plague is worth reading, and especially at this time when the coronavirus has slouched forth onto the global stage and, at this point, claimed over one hundred thousand American lives (a number of whom no doubt died as a direct result of our current president’s inability to countenance and react to objective reality). What is most striking about the book is how closely it reflects our own experience. Over and over again ideas and scenes that could be drawn from contemporary pages of the New York Times or the nightly televised news reports: officials unwilling to refer to the illness descending on Oran as plague for fear of unnecessarily exciting the ruble, the necessity of lockdown, those who chafe under lockdown and protest the injustice of it all, and, of course, those who find it within themselves to stand up to and selflessly combat the epidemic.

One of my favorite scenes early in the novel is the sermon by Father Paneloux wherein he pronounces from his elevated pulpit, “For plague is the flail of God and His world his threshing floor, and implacably will he thresh out His harvest until the wheat is separated from the chaff.” Father Paneloux will go on to preach a second sermon later on with somewhat less apocalyptic tones, and with greater sense of humility, but also posing the perplexing claim wondering whether a priest should ever summon a doctor.

We often find Dr. Bernard Rieux (ultimately the narrator of the tale), quite unlike the Father, wondering about notions and situations to which his final answer ultimately is that he does not know. His is a dogged presence, exhausted and yet determined to do his job in the face of horrendous odds. I think midway through the novel he states very clearly if not the major theme of the book certainly one of them, and that is, “there’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency.” He goes on to state that that is the only means of fighting a plague — common decency.

Enduring this pandemic of 2020, I’ve seen that in large measure that this seems to be true. We see healthcare workers dealing with sickness and death with stalwart professionalism, but we also see them regaled as heroes. I think a photo of a nurse with a placard clarified a suspicion I had with regard for this mantle. It simply said something like, “Don’t call me a hero to make me a martyr.” Our media is quick to celebrate slogans and shortcuts, but The Plague doesn’t.

It is a short book but a difficult read. It depicts scenes of awful sadness, like the awful death of M. Othon’s son, which was as difficult a passage to read as I’ve come across in some time, but then the terrible sadness of Othon returning to the quarantine camp after release to work because it kept him nearer his son.

I think perhaps the most profound line in the book comes in Part 2, which echoes Rieux’s view on heroism. Tarrou has set up teams to go about cleaning and disenfecting the town as an effort, but Rieux (or the narrator at this point) refuses to aggrandize this work, rather he considers doing so would cast the rest of humanity in a dim light, as though “callousness and apathy are the general rule.” He then follows with the line in question, “The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much hard as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; however, that isn’t the real point. […] the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.”

I find, at this time, “the ignorance that fancies it knows everything” resonates with our situation as our own protestors deny the existence of the virus, decry our public health officals and nefarious and shadow actors in the so-called “deep state,” and refuse to wear masks because they compromise their freedoms.

Common decency indeed.

06.18.20