Book Discussion: The Plague, by Albert Camus. Translated by Laura Marris
Introduction
Have you ever found a situation, piece of information, or something else in your life to be equally comforting and depressing? It’s an odd feeling, comfort and depression sound like they should be mutually exclusive emotions. However, the more I’ve learned about history and the past has shown me that these two emotions can coexist quite happily together. Reading The Plague by Albert Camus produced the same feeling of comfort and depression in me. The Plague tells a fictional story set in the real city of Oran in Algeria, set sometime in the 1940s. The book was originally released in 1947, and it is a fascinating exploration of how the people of Oran react to a citywide quarantine as the bubonic plague methodically sweeps the city.
The Plague could have been written in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. It could be written in the wake of all the pandemics that have yet to happen. Camus’ work has lost none of its relevance since it was published in 1947. On the one hand, there is some comfort to be found in knowing that people of the past have had to deal with similar trials, and suffered many of the same tragedies. The entire history of our species is inextricably linked with disease. Sometimes those diseases are ever present, but low level killers. Other times a pathogen fells half a population in a year or two. Yet despite this specter constantly haunting our collective existence, humanity has persisted. Even in the wake of unimaginable tragedy people find a way to pick up the pieces and persist. There is something to admire in that tenacity against futility. On the other hand, it’s unsettling to recognize that people have always had the same irrational, unhelpful, or even harmful coping mechanisms to deal with wide scale disease outbreaks. Intellectually and philosophically speaking, humanity appears to be stuck running on a treadmill. We’re running really fast, but not moving forward. The Plague is a work of fiction, and Camus also wrote it to be a metaphor for France under occupation in the Second World War. Despite that, anyone who has lived through an epidemic or pandemic can read this book and wonder if Camus was reaching into the future to describe events they lived through, or reaching into their minds to extract their thoughts and feelings.
Camus didn’t have to reach into the future though. He simply had to reach into the past. From the past Camus had plenty of examples to inform him how people might react to a citywide plague. In The Plague Camus describes a city of people hounded by a gnawing sense of separation. For some, this separation is figurative, they are separated from the normalcy and opportunities that the plague and the quarantine deny them. For others, their separation is much more literal, they are trapped in the city while their loved ones outside wait without knowing exactly what’s going on. Camus is chillingly accurate when he tells the story of the desperate measures the city takes to deal with the increasing number of dead. As more and more bodies literally pile up, all the ceremonies and rituals people create to give death meaning are crushed under the weight of logistical demands. First the city buries several people to each grave, then in mass graves, then when that becomes insufficient, they start incinerating the bodies. It all mirrors real life to a disturbing extent.
There is so much more to The Plague. Like I have with other book discussions in the past, I’d like to share some of my favorite quotes from the book. I have already given away some of the details the reader will find in The Plague, and the quotes below will reveal more. This does not mean, however, that I am giving away everything in Camus’ work. There are plenty of details I am leaving out on purpose, to encourage the reader to experience The Plague for themselves.
Book Quotations
-This first quote from the book is short, but it speaks for itself.
”How could they have imagined that a plague would cancel the future, their travel and conversations?”
-This second quote is between two characters, one of them a doctor. They are discussing issues relating to plague and faith, and what a doctor’s mission should be in times of plague.
“Yes,” agreed Tarrou, “I can understand. But your victories will always be temporary, that’s all.” Rieux seemed to darken. “Always, I know it. That’s not a reason to stop fighting.”
-The next excerpt is describing people’s growing indifference to the deaths from the plague. Unlike many other disasters, when a disease ravages a population month after month, they grow exhausted, and are unable to feel the same terror or sorrow that they did in the beginning.
“But nothing is less spectacular than a scourge, and, by their very duration, great misfortunes are monotonous. In the memories of those who lived through them, the terrible days of plague didn’t appear as tall flames, sumptuous and cruel, but rather as an endless stagnation that crushed everything in its path.”
-The text below is near the end of the book. One character just asked Tarrou what he thought would change with the plague winding down in the city.
“Tarrou thought that the plague would both change and not change the city, that, of course, our fellow citizens’ strongest desire was and would be to act as if nothing had changed, and so in that sense, nothing would be changed, but that in another sense, you can’t forget everything, even with necessary force of will, and the plague would leave traces, at least in their hearts.”
Comparison: The Plague & A lot of Questions…
Before concluding I also wanted to compare a section of The Plague with one from my own book. To be clear, I’m not trying to compare myself with Albert Camus, judging by his success he was clearly a better writer than I am. However, I wrote my own book years before I ever heard of The Plague. I was astonished and humbled to find out that Camus had anticipated what I would write in response to the Covid-19 pandemic in the late 1940s. No doubt other people before Camus made similar observations. Which, as I said in the introduction, is both comforting and depressing. None of the tragedies that befall us, or any of the uncertainties we have about the future are unprecedented. Calamity is a constant in human history. It’s comforting to know we aren’t alone in our suffering, but it’s discouraging to see the same patterns repeating. I wonder if people living through future pandemics will write something they think is clever and insightful, only to find out Albert Camus was way ahead of them.
But I’m digressing, I’ll start with a section from The Plague, and then quote my own book. I’ll leave the quotation marks off of my own writing since I can hardly plagiarize myself. Also, the quotation from my book will begin in the middle of a section where I am discussing an imaginary modern pandemic that is killing thousands of people everyday all over the United States.
“But what were a hundred million dead? When you’re at war, you barely have any idea of what a dead man is. And since a dead man carries no weight unless you’ve seen him dead, a hundred million corpses strewn across history are nothing but smoke in the imagination. The doctor remembered the plague of Constantinople, which according to Procopius killed ten thousand victims in a day. Ten thousand dead equaled five times the audience of a large movie theater. That’s what they should do. Gather up the people at the exits of five cinemas, take them to a city square, and make them die in piles to see it a little more clearly. At least then they could put faces they knew to that anonymous pile.”
Can the human brain process the idea of, “I can’t see them, but thousands of people died today from a pandemic, that’s terrible?” Does that idea really sink in for the animal that is concerned about locality, what it can see, and affects that animal specifically? What would it take for that abstract idea to sink in for everyone?
How about this, at an appointed moment every single day, all of those who died as a result of the ongoing pandemic (we will say two thousand five hundred daily) get magically transported out of the hospitals they died in all over the country. Their bodies are then all magically transported to one location, Times Square in New York City…All the bodies in one place allows everyone who looks upon them to physically see, not just imagine, the price of the pandemic that created the bodies they now look upon.
Conclusion
I’ll close out this discussion with one more quote from The Plague. It’s the final paragraph of the book, a warning about how the bubonic plague could one day return to the city of Oran. It doesn’t take much imagination to broaden this warning to the entire planet, and there are more diseases to be worried about than just the plague. All it takes is a simple genetic mutation to start the next pandemic.
“Indeed, as he heard the cries of delight rising from the city, Rieux remembered that this delight was always threatened. For he knew what this joyous crowd did not, and what you can read in books–that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears, that it can lie dormant for decades in furniture and linens, that it waits patiently in rooms, in basements, in trunks, among handkerchiefs and paperwork, and that perhaps the day would come when, for the sorrow and education of men, the plague would revive its rats and dispatch them to die in a happy city.”
Postscript– I’ll include a link to The Plague below. I also recommend Plagues Upon the Earth, written by Kyle Harper. I’ve reviewed another one of his books in the past, and Plagues Upon the Earth is a fascinating and accessible work. Also, I highly recommend the 2011 film Contagion. It was released 9 years before the Covid-19 pandemic began, and yet it predicted what a 21st century pandemic would look like to an uncanny degree.
Plagues Upon the Earth: https://bookshop.org/p/books/plagues-upon-the-earth-disease-and-the-course-of-human-history-kyle-harper/16402399?ean=9780691230597
Contagion: movies unlimited link for contagion