How “The Plague” infects the modern political mood

By N.P.B

AMID growing jingoism and populist revolt, literature from the so-called “midnight of the century” is being celebrated anew. Between 1930 and 1950—as imperialism, fascism and Stalinism collided across the world—nightmares were violently redefined as writers witnessed the greatest war, the greatest crimes, and eventually, the use of the greatest weapon in human history. Dystopian novels such as “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935) by Sinclair Lewis and “1984” (1949) by George Orwell are back in vogue as readers search for parallels with the past and clues for what to do next. Neil Bartlett, a theatre director, was particularly inspired by one book of that era. “Infection, invasion, panic, closed borders,” he mused, “this may be a classic novel, but re-reading it often felt like watching the ten o’clock news.”

“The Plague” by Albert Camus is set in the Algerian city of Oran, described as a dull and dusty coastal city “built with its back turned to the bay”. The novel starts when Dr Rieux, the protagonist, starts noticing dead rats. Soon humans are dropping too and eventually Oran finds itself quarantined from the rest of the world. Citizens are cut off from friends, family and lovers beyond the town’s borders and households that suffer fatalities are themselves quarantined from the rest of the city. It is not long before hundreds are dying each day: funerals are replaced by swift unceremonial burials behind closed cemetery gates. Soon there is violence and looting. As the bodies pile up, a climate of helplessness and resignation ensues.

Camus chose Oran for its underwhelming characteristics; in its ordinariness, Oran can suffer on behalf of almost any city on earth. In a similar fashion, Mr Bartlett’s stage production, currently being performed at the Arcola Theatre in London, takes place on a bare set with only tables and chairs. The pestilence is described coldly from behind a panel in the form of a macabre press conference. Later, the desk is repurposed as a hospital bed. Such genericism is poignant because while most of the dystopian canon was written to examine the tools of authoritarianism, “The Plague” seeks to expose the collective human reaction to an impossibly pessimistic situation. For Camus, this involved passively describing the reactions of people with no hope and no escape, without adding any specifically Algerian or French characteristics.

Throughout the book, Dr Rieux carries out his duties with consistent professionalism and an increasing indifference towards the fate of his patients. As the morbid day-to-day realities of the pestilence continue, a physical and emotional distance between the doctor and his patients becomes inevitable: compassion fatigue kicks in. Meanwhile, his wife is sick with an unrelated illness and is dying alone beyond the borders of the quarantine. The pivotal moment of the story occurs when Rambert, a roaming journalist who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time when the city was closed off, is offered an opportunity to escape and he refuses it. He stays behind to work with his friends and fight the plague.

Ultimately, the disease passes and Oran is once again open up to the world. The narrator reminds us in the book’s final pages that the celebrating townspeople clapped unaware that “the bacillus Plague never dies or vanishes entirely, that it can remain dormant for dozens of years in furniture or clothing, that 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.”

Some would argue that the day has come, or is dawning. Written as an allegory for life in occupied Paris, Camus’s novel is not an up-close portrait of evil or domination. Instead it acts as a guide to the victimhood and despondency of an uncontrollable crisis; it is why it resonates as strongly as anything else published during the midnight of the last century. Today the futility of Rieux’s efforts may speak to those with a creeping fear that good ideas are no longer considered valuable by angry and iconoclastic electorates. Suddenly millions of people are once again looking at their passports and wondering where and when they might be welcome. The usual prescriptions of facts, rational arguments and appeals to empathy merely underscore the impotence of being earnest. As of yet, there is no known antidote. Luckily our redemption is as true now as it was 70 years ago when Camus’s protagonist concluded that “there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”