For the full series of “Lets read Camus’ La Peste” posts, please click here.
Camus, drawing his reader into the heightening tension of La Peste, calibrates attitudes to the plague with an escalating vocabulary. Each shift in terminology is accompanied by a dramatic event or realisation that causes a paradigm shift in the understanding of one of the novel’s characters, a realisation that their previous ways of trying to make sense of the plague have been outstripped by events.
First, there is the narrator’s premonition that the inhabitants of Oran simply have no clue what is about to descend upon them:
Arrivé là, on admettra sans peine que rien ne pouvait faire espérer à nos concitoyens les incidents qui se produisirent au printemps de cette année-là et qui furent, nous le comprîmes ensuite, comme les premiers signes de la série des graves événements dont on s’est proposé de faire ici la chronique. (16)
it will be easily understood that our fellow citizens had not the faintest reason to apprehend the incidents that took place in the spring of the year in question and were (as we subsequently realized) premonitory signs of the grave events we are to chronicle.
How slow they are—how slow are we—to know, viscerally, when we hear of a strange new disease in a far-flung province, how quickly it might upend our own lives.
The first paradigm is one of interest: how curious that rats are being found on the streets of Oran; how curious that there is a new coronavirus (what is that, anyway?) in Wuhan (where is that, anyway?).
This paradigm of curiosity is shattered when interest gives way to unease and concern, as warehouses begin to disgorge hundreds of rats:
C’est à peu près à cette époque en tout cas que nos concitoyens commencèrent à s’inquiéter. Car, à partir du 18, les usines et les entrepôts dégorgèrent, en effet, des centaines de cadavres de rats. Dans quelques cas, on fut obligé d’achever les bêtes, dont l’agonie était trop longue. Mais, depuis les quartiers extérieurs jusqu’au centre de la ville, partout où le docteur Rieux venait à passer, partout où nos concitoyens se rassemblaient, les rats attendaient en tas, dans les poubelles, ou en longues files, dans les ruisseaux. (25)
It was about this time that our townsfolk began to show signs of uneasiness. For, from April 18 onwards, quantities of dead or dying rats were found in factories and warehouses. In some cases the animals were killed to put an end to their agony. From the outer suburbs to the center of the town, in all the byways where the doctor’s duties took him, in every thoroughfare, rats were piled up in garbage cans or lying in long lines in the gutters.
Two short pages later this paradigm of concern is itself overtaken by a sense of lingering threat:
jusqu’alors, on s’était seulement plaint d’un accident un peu répugnant. On s’apercevait maintenant que ce phénomène dont on ne pouvait encore ni préciser l’ampleur ni déceler l’origine avait quelque chose de menaçant. (27)
Hitherto people had merely grumbled at a stupid, rather obnoxious visitation; they now realized that this strange phenomenon, whose scope could not be measured and whose origins escaped detection, had something vaguely menacing about it.
Threat and confusion, in turn, escalate to panic, when the concierge of Dr Rieux’s apartment block succumbs to the plague:
La mort du concierge, il est possible de le dire, marqua la fin de cette période remplie de signes déconcertants et le début d’une autre, relativement plus difficile, où la surprise des premiers temps se transforma peu à peu en panique. Nos concitoyens, ils s’en rendaient compte désormais, n’avaient jamais pensé que notre petite ville pût être un lieu particulièrement désigné pour que les rats y meurent au soleil et que les concierges y périssent de maladies bizarres. De ce point de vue, ils se trouvaient en somme dans l’erreur et leurs idées étaient à réviser. (34)
The concierge’s death marked, one might say, the end of the first period, that of bewildering portents, and the beginning of another, relatively more trying, in which the perplexity of the early days gradually gave way to panic. Reviewing that first phase in the light of subsequent events, our townsfolk realized that they had never dreamed it possible that our little town should be singled out for the scene of such grotesque happenings as the wholesale death of rats in broad daylight or the perishing of concierges through exotic maladies. In this respect they were wrong, and their views obviously called for revision.
I have experienced a number of such escalating paradigm shifts in recent days, a number of times when my views have “obviously called for revision”: sporting fixtures cancelled, travel bans, Colbert and Fallon broadcasting from home, stock market crashes, school closures, hundreds of deaths in Italy. Each time, my sense of the seriousness of the sitaution has been overtaken by events, leaving me to recalibrate once more. It is hard to avoid either minimising or catastrophising.
One such paradigm-shattering moment came tonight, when we had a friend from the UK over for dinner. It was a delightful time, but during the course of the evening our guest realised that she was in a position that would have been inconceivable to me only a week ago: the stuff perhaps of overly dramatic Hollywood movies or airport novels, but not the grim material of real life. It is, in her perfectly apt turn of phrase, “bonkers”.
She was due to fly back to the UK next week, but seems now to be effectively stranded in Australia because one leg of her flight has been cancelled and the other is impossibly hard to reschedule. Even if she does make it back home, she can’t stay with her parents because they are over 70 years of age and in strict self-isolation until further notice. In the car on the way to our house I reassured her that, if her flight was scheduled for before the end of the month, she would surely be able to return home without any problems. In the course of the evening my false confidence was shattered. It soon became abundantly clear that getting home will be, at best, a long-winded drama and, at worst, impossible. Having come to Australia for a holiday only two short weeks ago, she now finds herself both stranded and homeless. Bonkers is the new normal.
It is evenings like this that precipitate those paradigm-crumbling jolts that are becoming all too frequent these days. We think we have a frame for what is happening, only for that frame to be outstripped by events within hours. It seems that, whatever understanding we cling to, one twenty-four hour news cycle will show it to have been too small, too naïve, too superficial. There are, La Peste warns us, several more such painful jolts to come before this bonkers saga is over.
