Lisa's Reviews > The Plague

If you lived in an ordinary community quite unexpectedly facing an existential stress test, what would you do?

How would you deal with the situation, and which character traits of yours would all of a sudden come to the surface? How would you treat your friends, neighbours and fellow citizens? What would you do to change the situation?

These questions have been haunting me ever since I first read “La Peste” in school, over two decades ago. I have reread it since then, with the same fascination, and with growing compassion and understanding for the less heroic characters and their fears and petty actions. To me, it is a masterpiece, one of the great examples of timeless world literature. As a student, even though I was worrying just as much about exam questions, French vocabulary and grammar difficulties as about the message, I felt that I finally grasped the totalitarian systems of the 20th century, and their strange morbid attraction despite (or because of) their absolute negativity. I asked myself to what extent I would have remained human facing the terror of the rats and their invisible, yet deadly load.

One thing, though, remained completely unthinkable to me as a young adolescent, despite the horror of the reading experience, and the sincere sympathy for the generations of Europeans that had experienced societies worse than plague-ridden. I thought it COULD NOT happen again. Not here, not in Western civilisation, not with our KNOWLEDGE! Being an adolescent in Germany in the mid-1990s, I was convinced that walls were breaking down, that democracy was on the rise, that human rights and welfare were secure goods, and that the world was beyond the plague of totalitarian, all-consuming ideas spreading like wildfire - like a plague befalling a whole community.

“C’est impossible, tout le monde sait qu’elle a disparu de l’Occident.”

In a way, I was in the situation of doctor Rieux at the very beginning of the story, convinced that the plague was completely gone. But Rieux, narrator and participant in the story, documenting his own private worries along with the catastrophe of the spreading plague, has to choose between sticking to his ideas or to accept the evidence he witnesses. Chronicling the development of his community in crisis, as well as actively working to help those stricken with the plague, he slowly but steadily grows as a human being and realises that nothing is actually ever GONE!

Even in the end, when people are celebrating their survival of the epidemic, in drunken happiness forgetting all their losses, their suffering, their fears and pain, he stays vigilant. For he has learned something beyond the lesson of the immediate crisis:

“Écoutant, en effet, les cris d’allégresse qui montaient de la ville, Rieux se souvenait que cette allégresse était toujours menacée. Car il savait ce que cette foule en joie ignorait, et qu’on peut lire dans les livres, que le bacille de la peste ne meurt ni ne disparaît jamais, qu’il peut rester pendant des dizaines d’années endormi dans les meubles et le linge, qu’il attend patiemment dans les chambres, les caves, les malles, les mouchoirs et les paperasses, et que, peut-être, le jour viendrait où, pour le malheur et l’enseignement des hommes, la peste réveillerait ses rats et les enverrait mourir dans une cité heureuse.”

What would you do if you saw those rats? Who would you choose to be? It is time to dig out the masterpieces of existential questions again, I think. Knowledge of the different facets of human nature under stress can never be overestimated as a means to choose wisely, should your town be stricken unexpectedly by a plague. I wish I knew for sure I would make a decent appearance in Camus’ scenario.

But fear is powerful!