Five Stars!

Pestilence Then and Now

The Plague was first published in 1946.  Eleven years later, its author, Albert Camus, became the youngest person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.  The place of this masterpiece is cemented in the canons of literary fiction and existential philosophy.  This review presents the prescience of The Plague and shows that it is not an anti-fascist fable.

The Plague is set in the Mediterranean seaport of Oran, Algeria during eleven months in the late 1940s. It purports to chronicle an epidemic of bubonic plague from the point of view of two characters: Bernard Rieux, a physician in his early thirties (Camus’s age when he wrote the novel), and Jean Tarrou, a visitor to Oran who is trapped within the city walls when a quarantine is imposed to prevent spread of the disease. 

As a result of COVID-19—Coronavirus Disease-2019—many people are now reading or rereading The Plague.  As I write this review on April 1, 2020, The Plague is an Amazon bestseller.  The main takeaway from this novel is a warning not to forget past disasters.  If a disaster is forgotten, lessons learned from it will be forgotten as well. The Plague concludes:

“And indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered such joy is always imperiled.  He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.” (Emphasis supplied)

The chronicle of the fictional Oran plague is conveyed through the eyes and thoughts of Rieux, as though the story were told by a third-person narrator, and through the diaries of Tarrou, which the narrator argues are objective because Tarrou is a visitor to and not a resident of Oran. With the flourish of an elegant literary twist, in the last section of the book the narrator reveals that he is Rieux.  He has concealed his identity because he wants the reader to trust his chronicle as objective.  Objectivity is significant.  If the reader trusts the narration, she is less likely to forget the horrors of the plague the narrator describes, its bane (the extent of the catastrophe) and its enlightening (its lessons).  

The novel explores fundamental issues of western philosophy: is the Christian god benevolent or wrathful, do we have free will or is our fate divinely determined, and how do we derive meaning from life or from death?  Rieux and Tarrou are atheists.  Their lack of belief in god or in death having meaning contrasts with the beliefs of Father Paneloux, a Jesuit priest.  Paneloux delivers a sermon, preaching that the plague has been sent by an angry god to punish the citizens of Oran for their wickedness and sin.  Well who could blame Paneloux for confusing what plagues could be—divine vengeance—from what they must be. This is an error in interpretation of Scripture that is delivered to this day from the pulpits of some American Evangelists.  These sermons often invoke the story in “Exodus” of the pharaoh who on ten occasions broke his promise to let god’s people go.  In retaliation god visited ten plagues upon the pharaoh’s people, each more terrible than the one before it.  The lesson?  Plagues must be punishments for breaking covenants with god because in this instance they were.  

But Scripture does not say that divine wrath is the only cause of plague, a lesson neatly tucked into the novel by Camus.  As the toll of the Oran plague increases, it takes the life of Jacques Othon, a small child, an innocent boy, whose excruciating losing battle with the ravages of the plague is witnessed by Rieux, Tarrou, and Paneloux.  When Rieux asks Paneloux if Jacques was punished for wickedness, Paneloux reconsiders. He then delivers a new and different sermon in which he claims (without referencing Job) that the plague was sent by god to test the faith of the residents of Oran rather than to punish them for sin. Later Paneloux is infected with the plague.  He declines treatment or palliative care, claiming that god alone will determine whether he suffers, survives, or dies.  As the plague is no respecter of age, race, innocence, guilt, political persuasion, faith, or the lack thereof, it inflicts Paneloux with grievous pain and a gruesome death.  A plague is indiscriminately insidious.    

A week after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, The Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr. and Pat Robertson asserted on a telecast that a wrathful god had allowed the terrorists to succeed in their deadly mission because the United States had become “a nation of abortion, homosexuality, secular schools and courts, and the American Civil Liberties Union.”  Falwell, Robertson, and others of their ilk never have explained the contradiction between a sinful America being at fault for the 9/11 tragedy and their other contention, that Islam is at fault. 

It has been said that Donald Trump will not read a memo or briefing paper that is longer than one page. Whether this is apocryphal or literal, with confidence it can be surmised that as late as, March 31, 2020 when Trump extended his social distancing “guidelines” until the end of May, Trump had still not learned the lessons of the importance of isolation to combat the spread of pandemics. Today, April 1, 2020, Trump was asked if he would change his social-distancing guidelines into a national stay-at-home order that conformed with the policy of most of the states, he said that he would not because there had to be flexibility. 

The evidence that sequestration and quarantine is a necessary tool confront plague (pandemics) can be found in the history of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, The Plague, or other books that would have alerted Trump to the “thirty or so great plagues known to history [that] had accounted for nearly a hundred million deaths” that Rieux thinks of in the early days of the Oran plague.  “The doctor remembered the plague of Constantinople that, according to Procopius, caused ten thousand deaths in a single day.”  Had Trump learned from these books or accounts he would have understood what doctors since the Dark Ages have known: quarantines limit the toll of highly infectious diseases. Yet he was late promulgating his guidelines and still has not acted on the need for a national stay-at-home order.

This brings me to my first thesis, that The Plague is prescient in that the lessons from disaster will be forgotten.  Although warnings of the threat of a novel coronavirus pandemic were presented to Trump in late 2019 and throughout 2020 by epidemiologists, until three weeks ago he used his bully pulpit to politicize the disease, using it as a weapon against his opponents while claiming that it was his opponents who were responding to the pandemic to victimize him.  On March 19, 2020, he tweeted:

“The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat (sic) Party is doing everything . . . to inflame the coronavirus situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant.”

Trump did not acknowledge the pandemic until March 17, 2020, when he asserted that he’d always known about it.  He did not pronounce his social-distancing guidelines until March 21.  On March 9, 2020 there were 23 recorded deaths in the United States attributable to COVID-19.  On March 21, there were 302.  On March 31, there were close to 4,000 deaths.  Trump still has not learned lessons from books or from experts who told him what was in those books about plagues and how society must respond to them. Lessons about quarantine and isolation learned in the Dark Ages and practiced since were lost on Trump. Rather, despite public warnings by his chief medical advisors that a tsunami of infections and death was headed our way, he relied on his solitary fantasies of reality that so happened to conform to edicts of religious-right faith that have no basis in the pandemic lessons of history or science, lessons that have still not been learned by Falwell, whose Liberty University remains open and requires students to attend classes. 

The Plague is prescient in its prediction that lessons from past disasters will be forgotten.

My second thesis is that The Plague is not an anti-fascist fable as stated in an article published in The New Yorker on March 30, 2020 by Dr. Jill Lapore, chair of the history department at Harvard and a prolific contributor to the magazine. In her article titled “What our Contagion Fables are Really About,” Dr. Lapore misstates what The Plague is about.  She says of the pestilence in Oran: “The plague is, of course, the virus of fascism.”  Well, no it is not. Camus knew how to spell fascism. 

The Plague is not, as Dr. Lapore would suggest, satire, like Animal Farm. The rats are not characters with human traits. They are mere rodents carrying fleas that carry the disease.  There is no evidence in the pages of The Plague that supports Dr. Lapore’s “the rat as metaphor” understanding of the novel. Her contention that Camus thought that fascists were rats is not presented in the novel or reasonably gleaned from it.  It is unavailing to her fable theory of The Plague.  

To interpret The Plague as political satire is to dismiss illness as a worthy subject of literary fiction.  It is to miss an important lesson about plagues: they are indiscriminate killers, blind to politics, although the ideologies of those blind to the disease can affect its outcome.  To proclaim that The Plague is an anti-fascist fable is to belittle this serious book about a public health disaster, it diminishes the severity of plague, it obscures if not ignores the salient public-health lesson that plagues must be confronted with quarantines and isolation.  To emphasize this point, consider by way of example that while Jerry Falwell and others with a similar religious axe to grind may be rats, nothing would be accomplished by promoting, erroneously, The Plague as a fable or as an anti-religious right polemic.   Promoting the novel thusly would be a distraction, turning a blind eye to Trump’s criminal neglect or ineptitude, his breach of his oath of office to provide for the common defense, to promote the general welfare.

For the President of the United States not to have learned a millennial-old lesson about plagues—the efficacy of quarantine, of sequestration—is a travesty and a tragedy.  To misunderstand the concluding message of the plague—the dangers of forgetting the travails of disaster by trivializing a dreaded disease with a too-cute metaphor of rats as fascists is to misunderstand this literary and philosophical jewel.