Reflections on Camus’ The Peste/ Plague
Without planning this course, I decided to re-read Camus’ La Peste at the onset of the pandemic, and began reading it at the approximate rate of 10 pages a day. The evolution of the plague in the book closely mirrored the movement of covid 19. And when I turned the last page a couple of days ago, the plague having gone away,some countries have already been relaxing the lockdown.
I lived and worked in Oran for a few years, and as a result I was more privileged than most readers to be able to visualise the scenery.
Camus did not win the Nobel for nothing. He is a serious writer, and as a trained doctor, and his knowledge of medicine was put to good use. His description of the arrival of the plague, how it spreads, how it kills, is clearly authentic. Obviously a book of its calibre attracts theories. Is it a metaphor for Nazi occupation of France? Certainly parallels exist. Is it a historical account of a bubonic plague visited upon Oran? Fact is the calamity that struck that city was a century before the fictitious events in the book, but Camus had researched plagues in history, and he uses the knowledge acquired to enhance authenticity. One has the feeling that a plague striking Oran would evolve exactly as is described.
What’s the book about? It is about the human condition. No reader will dispute that what we see in the book is what could have happened. We meet cowards, heroes, saints, profiteers, but mostly ordinary people with a mixture of heroism and cowardice, saintliness and selfishness. Is it surreal? There are surreal moments. There is the old man who counts how many chickpeas he puts in his soup. The old mischievous chap who lures the cats under his window to spit at them. Bernard Rieux has no time to be a hero or a saint, he is too busy saving lives. Tarrou has the ambition to achieve sainthood, and is in every way an admirable man. Rambert the visiting journalist declares to the world that he is a stranger to Oran and the plague should have nothing to do with him. He will do everything in his power to leave the lockdown city to be with his lover, including slipping across the closed borders with the help of smugglers. He is completely preoccupied by his fate, until he acquires the means of leaving. Cottard is perhaps the most complex character in the story. He comes into his own during the évènements, and is completely lost when the plague goes away. There is Grand the aspiring writer who spends his life composing the one perfect sentence. But a more dangerous character is Père Paneloux who tells his congregation that they are responsible for the plague, but that they ought to go on their knees and thank the good lord for choosing them as beneficiaries of his ire.
Camus was too intelligent and too liberal to be a racist, he was even a contributor to the radical paper Alger Républicaine, which was banned for “subversion”, but deeply ingrained family notions seep in and contaminates one’s psyche. His other famous book L’Etranger is judged by some to be quite dismissive of the Arab population. Which is what prompted Algerian author Kamel Daoud to write his version of the story of the death on the beach, Mersault, contre-enquête. Were the book set in Nice or Toulon, my admiration for it would have been boundless.
But it is set in Algerian Oran.
My reservation is that Camus has written a book about the plague hitting Oran, in which there does not figure a single Arab!
