Reading Albert Camus' "The Plague" During a Time of Pestilence

A Plague of Dragons, by Justin Gerard

Like a lot of people, my reading list is determined by various factors.  Mood, certainly.  Passing fancies?  Absolutely.  Even current events can be the nudge that suddenly pushes a title to the top of my reading list.  Hence, Albert Camus' The Plague.  Yeah, yeah: this was the book to read during the past months of pestilence in America, so I wasn't doing anything unique.  Be that as it may, having now read it, I am much wiser for the experience as Camus description of an unremarkable town gripped by plague served to bring understanding to events I witnessed during America's trial by virus.

Hmm.  "...Past months of pestilence in America."  Those are words I never thought I would have cause to write.  What a remarkable thing to experience in the high-tech 21st Century world.  As we lounged in the comfort we conjured from our domination of the material world, we thought we were masters of all we surveyed.  Pride goeth before the fall, as the old adage warns, and indeed our pride as wizards of the biological world would in the early months of 2020 take a mighty blow.  An old enemy - mankind's oldest enemy, in fact - would reveal itself as being still fit for battle and ready to take advantage of the modern world's complacency.  Plague had returned, much to the astonishment of its soon-to-be victims.

Coincidentally, the propensity of mankind to be taken unawares by plague is precisely what Albert Camus observed in the opening moments of his novel, The Plague:

"Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of reoccurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from out of a blue sky.

Why are people always so surprised by its return?  

Again, Camus: 

"In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences.  A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away.  But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all because they haven't taken their precautions."

As soon as I read these words, I was hooked because Camus, in describing the blissful arrogance of his fictional town, also described America in March of 2020.

Now, "The Plague" is not a story of superheroes and supervillains.  There are no dead resurrected by the virus, and no miracle cures waiting in the wings.  Rather, the people of Oran, in particular, a certain Doctor Rieux who is the primary narrator of Camus' tale, soon discover the truth in Simone Weil's observation that real evil is boring and monotonous.  Our narrator describes the condition of plague thusly:

"The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.  In the memories of those who lived through them, the grim days of plague do not stand out like vivid flames, ravenous and inextinguishable, beaconing a troubled sky, but rather like a slow, deliberate progress of some monstrous thing crushing out all on its path."

Like bacilli in a test tube, they - and we! - were trapped, and needed to learn how to endure the unendurable boredom of life under siege.  

As the plague unfolds, the reaction of the people of Oran mirrored those of contemporary America.  Initially, the plague was dismissed as a passing oddity, something that can't last long because it is too stupid.  But as Camus warns, "stupidity has a knack for getting its way" and, indeed, the plague persists and only grows deadlier.  Even when the daily death toll begins to precipitously rise, the public reaction is one that ran contrary to mounting data.  As with those who I like to call "COVID-Truthers"  - those odd individuals, particularly of the political right, who wove elaborate conspiracy theories to attack the public health measures put in place to combat the virus - Oran's Prefect soon found himself being attacked for following the advice of his town's medical experts.  Dr. Rieux, Oran's equivalent of America's Dr. Fauci, observed that reaction of the public was "slower than might have been expected" because the death toll had yet to "strike their imaginations."  So, despite Oran's medical community sounding the tocsin, the people of Oran, their imaginations of calamity having yet to be pricked, continued to go about their business, self-deluded that warnings of plague were overblown and it would all soon go away (echoes of a certain president's opinion that "...like a miracle, it will disappear.").

But it doesn't go away.  Instead, it gets worse.  Much worse.  This is when reality begins to kick the people of Oran in the teeth.  And then, as now, the people of Oran, having not taken the proper precautions due to their willful ignorance, began to panic.  In their fear, many sought the comforts of their Roman Catholic faith.  It is here that Camus introduces us to the character of Father Paneloux, a Jesuit priest who is the shepherd for this flock besieged by the wolves of pestilence.  In what I thought was a bit of a simplistic caricature of Paneloux's fath, he is initially portrayed as believing that the plague was simply the wrath of God let loose on the people of Oran, the "flail of God" threshing out the sinful wheat.  "Too long this world of ours has connived at evil, too long has it counted on the divine mercy, on God's forgiveness.  Repentance was enough, men thought; nothing was forbidden." But now, Paneloux suggests in a sermon to a church of full pews, God has grown so weary of waiting for man's repentance that he has turned his face from Oran. "And so, God's light withdrawn, we walk in darkness, in the thick darkness of this plague."  

While Camus' initial portrayal of the zealous preacher might be cliche, Camus deserves credit for showing the spiritual growth of Paneloux as the plague progresses.  After witnessing a particularly heartrending death of a child stricken with the plague, Paneloux reevaluated his pandemic theology in a surprising way.  While he never renounced his "fire and brimstone" sermon, and he certainly does not renounce his faith, something the self-proclaimed atheist Dr. Rieux expected in the wake of such a heartrending experience, he does embrace something more sophisticated.   Time of plague, Paneloux posits, is a time for heroic faith, the faith of "All or Nothing."  He explains in a subsequent sermon, this time to a church with pews emptied by death, that there are times in history where "...it was impossible to speak of venial sin.  Every sin was deadly, and any indifference criminal."  Even the suffering of children needs to be seen not as a crisis of faith, but as faith in crisis:

"It is wrong to say: 'This I understand, but that I cannot accept'; we must go straight to the heart of what is unacceptable, precisely because it is thus that we are constrained to make our choice.  The sufferings of children were our bread of affliction, but without this bread our souls would die of spiritual hunger."

Paneloux goes on to cite the heroic stand of a medieval monk who, despite seeing the death of seventy-seven of his brothers during a time of plague, did not flee along with three other surviving monks, but rather stayed to give witness to what it means to have faith in times of crisis.  Paneloux draws this conclusion from that monk's heroic act of faith:

"There was no question of not taking precautions or failing to comply with the orders wisely promulgated for the public weal in the disorders of pestilence.  Nor should we listen to certain moralists who told us to sink to our knees and give up the struggle. [R.R. Reno? - ed.]  No, we should go forward, groping our way through the darkness, stumbling perhaps at times, and try to do what good lay in our power.  As for the rest, we must hold fast, trusting in the divine goodness, even as to the deaths of little children, and not seeking personal respite."

Paneloux's point concerning those who wish to just give in to the plague reminded me greatly of those COVID-Truthers who were determined to convince others that the great plague of our time, one that had killed more Americans in two months than the entirety of the Vietnam War, was no worse than the flu and merited no special effort to combat its effects.  This complacent attitude is one that Dr. Rieux, along with a small army of volunteers who rally around Rieux's tireless efforts, constantly strove against.  Like that medieval monk, these brave men were resolute in the struggle against plague:

"...a fight must be put up, in this way or that, and that there must be no bowing down.  The essential thing was to save the greatest possible number of persons from dying and being doomed....And to do this there was only one resource: to fight the plague.  There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical." 

Whether motivated by theology or by secular logic, the heroes of Oran's bubonic testing were those who fought the good fight, just as it was the healthcare workers, along with those in essential services, who were the steadfast heroes of our 2020 plague.  A time of plague is not a time to give up.  Nor is it a time to withdrawal into a type of atomistic individualism.  Rather, it is a time to pull together and do whatever can be done to save as many as possible.  To do anything less is to surrender to the viral enemy and to hang separately.  "No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and the emotions shared by all."  

As the novel progresses, so do the months of plague for Oran. It is only with the onset of a frigid winter that relief finally arrives, slowly at first, but steadily.  The plague, at long last, loses the battle for control of the town. And then, quite suddenly, to the surprise of many, the quarantine is lifted, leaving the survivors to pick up the pieces of their lives. This proves to be such a jarring experience that some even begin to deny that "we had ever been that hag-ridden populace...." This revisionist attitude greatly concerns Dr. Rieux because he knows that there could be "no final victory." Rather, the story of Oran would serve only as a record of:

"...what had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers."

To pretend that there never was a plague, or it was not as bad as everyone believed it to be at the time, would accomplish little more than to leave the door open to another plague. 

Final Thoughts

Albert Camus's The Plague was the perfect book to read during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.  In the tradition of all great literature, it not only wove an entertaining tale, but it also provided insights into the human condition common to all times and places.  As such, I found many similarities between pestilence-stricken Oran and pestilence-stricken America.  The year might change, the nation, and perforce, the people, but reaction to the plague seems to be a constant.  This is an observation made by a somewhat eccentric elderly resident of Oran who, despite his fragile health, avoids contracting the plague.  In its aftermath, he offers Dr. Rieux these words of wisdom:

"All those folks are saying: 'It was plague.  We had the plague here.'  You'd almost think they expected to be given medals for it.  But what does that mean - 'plague'?  Just life, no more than that."

Indeed.