Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > The Plague

3/19/20 As my village on the edge of a big city faces a "shelter-in" injunction, as Covid 19 steadily intensifies, I thought of this book. As I take my daily runs/walks people are friendlier, offering to help each other, barriers feel at times as if they are breaking down in certain ways here and there, and then when we went to the store there s the hoarding and some ugliness already. . . and it's just really beginning here.

The Plague: Resistance and Activism for This or Any Time

“I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: There are sick people and they need curing”—Rieux, in Camus

I first read The Plague, the second in the trilogy with The Stranger, and The Fall, when I was eighteen. I had just read The Stranger. [Note, this is not that kind of trilogy; you can read each of them independently from each other; they don't have any intersecting characters. It's kind of a thematic trilogy from the novelist/philosopher Camus, a way of fictionalizing a set of ideas about the world]. It was 1971, and I was committed, after years of anti-war fervor, and the civil rights and women’s and the slowth growth of the environmental movement, to Doing Good in the world, to be a healer and not—to the extent I was able—a hurter (That Michael Jackson-Paul McCartney "I'm a lover, not a fighter" distinction). So many of us at my small religious college made commitments to teaching, to social work, public health. The following quote was a kind of simple banner for me, a flag for me to wave, if only in my own heart.

"All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences”—Tarrou, in Camus

And this: “After a short silence the doctor raised himself a little in his chair and asked if Tarrou had an idea of the path to follow for attaining peace.

'Yes,' he replied. 'The path of sympathy'"—Camus

So I initially read this in the context of late sixties and early seventies activism, within my hope for playing a small part in changing the world. But Camus also wrote this in his own context, as it was published in 1948, written in the aftermath of WWII, the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a kind of plague that stunned the planet, where you had to make decisions about what side you were on, and the choices were not always clear or easy. The plague in one sense is ennui, malaise, passivity, silence in the face of horror, and as Camus makes clear, we have to resist, we have to act.

Set in Oran, Algeria, this novel chronicles a fictional plague that hits the town of 200k; they seal its borders, and everyone has to figure out how to respond to it. It’s like Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief; there is denial, escapism, rage, terror, grief, despair, all of it. And several characters in the tale reveal different attitudes to the dying around them: Selfishness, the need to retreat into individual love, and so on, but there are some like Rieux and Tarrou who manage to commit to Doing Good in the face of death.

So The Plague in this book is both figurative and literal:

“But what does it mean, the plague? It's life, that's all”—Tarrou

But in the early-going of this occasion of reading, I was just a little annoyed at the Existentialist tract tone, the This-Is-An-Allegory-On-How-One-Must-Live, especially in the face of possible meaninglessness:

“Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky”—Camus

I reminded myself that the writer was an Existential philosopher who was also writing novels and I worried he might be succumbing to abstraction. I compared it to The Brothers Karamazov which Fyodor Dostoevsky identified as a “cultural forum” on different perspectives on life and the search for meaning. But this range of perspectives I saw gradually emerge as well in The Plague in an inspiring and even thrilling away, through and within and against the inevitable march to widespread death. We come to care about the individuals in Rieux's world: His mother, Tarrou, Dr. Cattrel, Cottard, Rambert.

I was also reminded as I read of Cormac McCarthy’s dystopian novel, The Road where, facing the probable end of civilization, a father remains true to his commitment to his son and to principles of right and goodness. The Plague is also a dystopian novel where ethical questions about how one acts in the worst of times are crucial. And it’s not easy to be vigilant and committed to Doing Good in the face of greed and terrorism and devastation of various kinds:

“But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination”—Camus

And that point seems so prescient as we now face "compassion fatigue" over the multiplying global crises of climate change, pandemics, endless wars, including a burgeoning refugee crisis. But in his own version of what we now face, post-WWII, a time in which we (one could argue) narrowly averted the end of humankind, Rieux keeps doing his work with the dying, working to find a cure; he's not a hero, not a saint, just one man holding that proverbial candle in the wind, rolling that boulder up the hill only to expect it to come down again:

“The language he used was that of a man who was sick and tired of the world he lived in—though he had much liking for his fellow men—and had resolved, for his part, to have no truck with injustice and compromises with the truth”—Camus

And this inspiring paragraph:

“And it was in the midst of shouts rolling against the terrace wall in massive waves that waxed in volume and duration, while cataracts of colored fire fell thicker through the darkness, that Dr. Rieux resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise”—Camus

As in The Road, the message is clear:

“A loveless world is a dead world”—Camus

So I also read this book in a contemporary context with all its turmoil and dangers. Yet another plague year. So I'm glad I read it, re-inspired (for the moment; it might fade!) to face the worst, to act in love when I can manage, to resist passivity and bitterness and silence, to be part of the commitment to healing movements, with others, to the very end. I’m no saint, that’s obvious, but I’ll do what I can. . .

(Though, in occasional moments I also consider just saying: What the hell, let's forget about all that, and have a drink! Eat, drink and be merry. . .