The Plague by Albert Camus, published in 1947, is about an outbreak of bubonic plague in a small town in French Algeria. (Source: Getty/Thinkstock)
As we stumble through a pandemic for which there is yet no cure, telling ourselves this too shall pass, and we will resume life as it used to be, while knowing inside all that is lost and can never be regained, it is scarcely believable there was someone more than 70 years ago who wrote about the human condition as it is today — so exactly and in such detail that it seems he is right here now, watching, seeing, and speaking to us.
The Plague by Albert Camus, published in 1947, is about an outbreak of bubonic plague in a small town in French Algeria. But the story is also read as an allegory of Nazi Germany’s occupation of France during the second World War, and the Vichy regime’s collaboration with it.
Reading it today is like driving down both sides of a two-way street at once. The allegory has to be read literally for the amazing exactness with which it describes the world at this time, though the coronavirus is far less deadly than the plague, while the underlying story about human conduct in war-time France holds up to us a mirror about the moral diseases of our own times — the relentless “othering”, the search for someone to blame, for enemies within and outside, communal distancing, false equivalences, and the abysmal shortage of a human quality called empathy.
Oran is the Algerian seaside town in which Camus set this story. When dead rats start showing up in the town, there is, in Oran, at first bewilderment, then denial, bravado and finally, the moment of coming face to face with the truth. Hospitals overflow, schools and the stadium have been taken over. People protest at being taken into quarantine, and the police have to accompany doctors as they search house to house for the infected. No ships are stopping at Oran, and none sailing out to France. There is the wait for a vaccine, and a lockdown that hangs heavily over the town as it sucks the life out of the townspeople. Some forage from office to office for a rare permit to leave the town, though the welcome at the other end is uncertain. Others are shot down as they try to scale the gates and flee.
There is hunger. “Poor families. found themselves in a very difficult situation, while the rich lacked for practically nothing… in fact it heightened the sense of injustice in the hearts of men. They had the not unreasonable feeling that they should have been allowed to leave”.
There are bodies and rules for their disposal — after no land is left to bury people, they have to be cremated. “Victims died far from their families, and the ritual watch over the dead was banned”. There are doctors at the frontline, and others who plunge into the work of fighting the disease because being an onlooker is not an option; there are unlikely heroes and unlikelier profiteers. Even the timing is eerily similar. Winter turns into spring, spring gives way to summer, summer to autumn. There is even a doctor who pins his hopes on the cold weather bringing better news.
In real life, Oran, today the second biggest city in Algeria, never saw an epidemic. During the war, it was a Vichy France-German outpost that the Allies captured in 1942.
When Penguin Books published a new translation of The Plague in 2001, the historian Tony Judt, who wrote the introduction, said in a November 2001 essay in The New York Review of Books that The Plague “takes on fresh significance and a moving immediacy”. He was referring to the 9/11 bombing of the Twin Towers. Judt wrote that Camus’s “unwavering grasp of the difference between good and evil, despite his compassion for the doubters and the compromised, for the motives and mistakes of imperfect humanity”, showed up “in unflattering light… the relativisers and trimmers of our own day”.
The Plague is a deeply reflective work about the human condition. It was criticised at the time of its publication for not being political enough, or forthright about what had to be condemned. There is no mention in The Plague about the Nazis, or the Vichy regime, or even the year in which it is set, though it is widely understood to be in the early 1940s and the fictional shutting down of Oran as the prison France had become under Nazi occupation. Had he been more explicit, Judt wonders if it would have had the same resonance across the world, read at different times during the last 70 years to draw parallels with several moral contagions that have plagued us.
In 2020 India, where an already resurgent communal virus has locked on to the coronavirus in the way a heat-seeking missile latches on to its target, when blame for a biological contagion that has not differentiated between religion, race, or caste is sought to be pinned on one religious community, when social distancing becomes the new untouchability against Muslims or against the poor – at such a time, what can we learn from this work by a French writer from another era whose work strikes a chord at so many levels with our present situation?
Aside from the remarkable similarities between colonial France and present-day India, down to the department of Infodoc that daily puts out the numbers of infected people, what comes through is the firm conviction — the moral of the story — that it is vital to first “call the disease by its proper name” in order to be able to deal with it in the right manner, and then do everything to resist it even though such efforts may prove futile; that victory, if achieved, may bring no satisfactory solutions. “All I say is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims — and as far as possible, one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence,” says Tarrou, one of the main characters in the book.
As the plague recedes a year after it began, as “unaccountably” as it had appeared, and Oran limps back to normalcy and its people start smiling and laughing again, the novel leaves us with a final ominous prophesy, literally or otherwise. “[T]he plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely. it can remain dormant for dozens of years in furniture or clothing… it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers, and perhaps the day will come when, for the instruction or misfortune of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city”.
This article was published in the Indian Express Print by the title “The moral contagion”. nirupama.subramanian@expressindia.com