Solidarity in pestilence

The Plague serves as a parable of the German occupation of Paris during World War II

At the beginning of Albert Camus’s The Plague, Dr Bernard Rieux — the protagonist of the novel — puts his wife on a train. She is on her way to a sanatorium. Seeing her off, Dr Rieux begs her forgiveness for not taking better care of her. But he is also hopeful: “once you’re back everything will be better. We’ll make a fresh start.” The poor couple are unaware that the town in which the good doctor lives, Oran in Algeria, will soon be quarantined, with all its citizens prisoners within its walls, because of a plague epidemic. Dr Rieux and his wife will be separated from each other as the disease runs its course.

The novel, which serves as a parable of the German occupation of Paris during World War II, was published first in French in 1947. The situation of Dr Rieux and his wife was similar to the one Camus found himself in during the occupation. While he was stuck in Paris, editing the resistance newspaper Combat, his wife Francine Faure was stuck in Algeria. With the Allies invading North Africa, all communication between them stopped. Camus would not see her — or his mother — till the end of the war.

Of course, Camus had dalliance with several other women — his shibboleth in matters of love, as he wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus, was: “Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?” But separation from his wife — and possibly other lovers — struck a deep chord with him. Another character, Rambert, is also separated from his wife, who is in Paris. He is so obsessed with his own suffering — after all he is not a citizen of Oran but stuck there by circumstance — that he plans to escape the quarantine. On the eve of his departure, however, he realises how he is also a part of the community and decides to stay back in solidarity.

Camus uses the metaphor of pestilence for ideological death, for the defeat of democracy by fascists forces: “It was as though the very soil on which our houses were built was purging itself of an excess of bile, that it was letting boils and abscesses rise to the surface which up to then had been devouring it inside.” Many in France would have, like another character Father Paneloux, agreed: “My brethren, you have deserved it.” The novelist places great store by human solidarity in the fight against this pestilence — something most of us will learn during isolation due to COVID-19. “It may seem a ridiculous idea,” he wrote, “but the only way to fight the plague is decency.”

Arundhati Roy did something similar earlier this month. Writing on the anti-Muslim violence in Delhi, she referred to communalism as the coronavirus. “A democracy that is not governed by a Constitution and one whose institutions have all been hollowed out can only ever become a majoritarian state. …This is our version of the coronavirus. We are sick.”

Indeed, very often the speed with which a virulent disease spreads can seem alarmingly similar to the dissemination of an ideology. Writing for The Guardian in October 2014, Orwell Prize-winner Jonathan Freeland compared the Ebola epidemic to the Islamic State: “They are dark, unseen enemies, come from far away — and they are scaring us witless. ISIS is not a disease, and Ebola is not a terror organisation. But fear is their common currency.” Looking back at 2014, one might feel a sense of nostalgia for how innocent, how naïve we were.

Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros (1959), also uses the metaphor of disease as ideological death effectively, with people in a French town first falling sick and then becoming the animal of the title. The Absurdist play has often been read as a response to the rise of Fascism and Nazism in the run-up to World War II. At first, the townsfolk resist the animals that have suddenly arrived in their town, but soon all of them succumb to the herd mentality. The only one to resist it is the protagonist Bérenger. “I’m not capitulating!” he cries in the end.

This play has often seemed to me to be a precursor to zombie films that have become so popular now. Hordes of the living dead hungry for human brains made their entry into popular culture with George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and have now become a subculture in their own rights. Since 28 Days Later (2002) introduced the zombies who could also move very fast, several zombie films are released every year. Many of them are on Netflix and Amazon Prime, if you are wondering what you are going to do during this three-week lockdown. My recommendation: Kingdom on Netflix. Send me your thanks once the lockdown is lifted. 

The writer’s novel, Ritual, was published last month

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