BOOKS 30: FRIGHTENINGLY RELEVANT: ALBERT CAMUS'S THE PLAGUE

WITH CAROLINE WEBER

 "It is impossible it should be the plague, everyone knows it has vanished from the West. -- Yes, everyone knew that, except the dead."

Albert Camus's world-famous 1947 novel The Plague is about the human response to extreme circumstances. For a long time the book was read as an allegory of people resisting fascism, but the plague never quite stays only a metaphor in Camus's book. His chronicle of a town's response to a frightening, invisible enemy, from initial denial, then gradual realization and finally the lockdown that traps the citizens with nowhere to go but in a full-fledged panic, can leave you in a cold sweat. 

Why read such a book today, during the global Covid-19 pandemic? 

I spoke with Caroline Weber, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College within Columbia University and an expert on French literature and culture. Caroline and I discussed how brilliantly Camus shows the wide range of human responses to extreme conditions, and how literature provides a model for making sense of and getting though our current crisis- of living in a pandemic- without losing hope or our humanity. In their initial denial of the plague, "our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences."

But gradually several characters find ways of creating meaning in the midst of a senseless and absolutely brutal assault not only on their town but on their very humanity. In his Novel Prize acceptance speech in 1957, four years before his untimely death at age 45 in a car accident, Camus said a writer "cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it." 

The Plague, written from the perspective of someone who makes the deliberate choice to help in concrete ways but also to record the suffering of those around him, allows us to see how to make sense of our current, difficult moment. Camus was no optimist, but like his protagonist Rieux, he considered it his inalterable obligation "to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”

Let's hope that books such as Camus's courageous and bold work may inspire some of us to do the same, and see more things to admire in others than to despise.