Pandemic temporality: the strange times of COVID-19. Let's read Camus' La Peste #4

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A pandemic does strange things to time.

We are used to living in different times at once. There is the clock time of regular 60-second minutes and 24-hour days. There is the joy of youthful infatuation when a day with one’s beloved passes like a fleeting breath. There is the dull, interminable drag of the watched pot. But a pandemic subjects us to new ways of experiencing time that overshadow and replace our normal rhythms. Camus relates many of these in a way that helps us to see what we are currently living through in the COVID-19 pandemic. In this post I want to discuss just two of the pandemic temporalities that have struck me in the media and in La Peste over the past few days.

First, there are the new temporal markers. We are accustomed to dividing time in two, usually in Western traditions around the birth of Christ. But come the pandemic, the division in time that most preoccupies us is no longer BC/AD or BCE/CE, but before and since the outbreak. In fact, these temporal incisions take on biblical proportions, tapping out the creation-fall-redemption rhythm of a pandemic biblical theology. The ubiquitous proclamations currently in circulation, insisting that things can never, and should never, be the same again (see Naomi Klein’s recent Coronavirus Capitalism for example) follow the pattern of theological claims about the incarnation driving an inexpungible, transcendent incision into the smooth flow of history. They frame the virus as an “event”, in the strong philosophical sense of a disruptive, insurgent moment that leaves the situation in which it irrupts irrevocably transformed.

The times before we heard of COVID-19 now take on in our memories the halcyon soft focus of youthful naivety; they strike us as an Edenic, prelapsarian epoch when, despite all our cynicism and complaining, a belief in the basic stability of our fundamental institutions and way of life was still the norm. Those were the days when, despite everything, we could still go to the pub or visit a restaurant, when elderly relatives did not see us as an existential threat, when our imaginations were not aching with images of columns of army trucks filling the streets of picturesque Italian towns, loaded down with coffins too many for the local crematorium to process. Even our most bitter rantings from those times strike us now as so many songs of innocence.

As for naming the period when the pandemic will have receded, in the past week I have heard it called the “aftertime”, a term dripping with both heavenly, eschatological hope and with post-apocalyptic trauma. This viral eschaton is brought home to the imagination by the speculative timetables in terms of which it is presented. It will, in Boris Johnson’s quaint anthrpomorphism, be twelve weeks before we “send the virus packing”, and the Parousia of a vaccine flickers dimly on the horizon for those with the eyes to see and the faith to believe in its redemptive advent.

Secondly, pandemics ruthlessly recode common temporal markers. This, for my money, is one of Camus’s masterstrokes in La Peste, an experience he renders with an exquisite lightness of touch that is only possible in works of fiction and that underlines once again, were it needed, why the arts have a central role to play in helping us understand, come to terms with and respond to this pandemic.[1] Let us take one temporal marker and follow its transformation in the pages of La Peste: Camus leads his reader on a painful journey in which the common associations of Spring are stripped away as it takes on a new symbolic meaning for the inhabitants of Oran. The onset of Spring before the plague is a pleasant, natural, delicate event in the dreamy Algerian city:

Le changement des saisons ne s’y lit que dans le ciel. Le printemps s’annonce seulement par la qualité de l’air ou par les corbeilles de fleurs que de petits vendeurs ramènent des banlieues ; c’est un printemps qu’on vend sur les marchés. (14)

The seasons are discriminated only in the sky. All that tells you of spring’s coming is the feel of the air, or the baskets of flowers brought in from the suburbs by peddlers; it’s a spring cried in the marketplaces.

This baseline serves only to render the transvaluation of Spring in the novel all the more painful. We are given the first subtle hint of this impending recoding only two pages later:

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)

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.

Camus also informs us in passing that Tarrou, the chronicler of the plague, appears in the early Spring (35), an incidental detail that gains a portentous significance in retrospect.

The aggressive recoding of Spring begins in earnest, however, with the death of the concierge, Camus’s description of the vernal weather making it complicit in the mounting claustrophobia and deathliness of the city:

Au lendemain de la mort du concierge, de grandes brumes couvrirent le ciel. Des pluies diluviennes et brèves s’abattirent sur la ville ; une chaleur orageuse suivait ces brusques ondées. La mer elle-même avait perdu son bleu profond et, sous le ciel brumeux, elle prenait des éclats d’argent ou de fer, douloureux pour la vue. La chaleur humide de ce printemps faisait souhaiter les ardeurs de l’été. Dans la ville, bâtie en escargot sur son plateau, à peine ouverte vers la mer, une torpeur morne régnait. Au milieu de ses longs murs crépis, parmi les rues aux vitrines poudreuses, dans les tramways d’un jaune sale, on se sentait un peu prisonnier du ciel. Seul, le vieux malade de Rieux triomphait de son asthme pour se réjouir de ce temps. (42-3)

On the day following old Michel’s death the sky clouded up and there were brief torrential downpours, each of which was followed by some hours of muggy heat. The aspect of the sea, too, changed; its dark-blue translucency had gone and, under the lowering sky, it had steely or silvery glints that hurt the eyes to look at. The damp heat of the spring made everyone long for the coming of the dry, clean summer heat. On the town, humped snailwise on its plateau and shut off almost everywhere from the sea, a mood of listlessness descended. Hemmed in by lines and lines of whitewashed walls, walking between rows of dusty shops, or riding in the dingy yellow streetcars, you felt, as it were, trapped by the climate. This, however, was not the case with Rieux’s old Spanish patient, who welcomed this weather with enthusiasm.

The overcoding of the now archaic pre-infection symbolism of Spring with a new set of AP (anno pestilentiae) meanings is pressed further when Camus explicitly juxtaposes the season to the plague with which it is now inextricably associated:

Le docteur regardait toujours par la fenêtre. D’un côté de la vitre, le ciel frais du printemps, et de l’autre côté le mot qui résonnait encore dans la pièce : la peste. Le mot ne contenait pas seulement ce que la science voulait bien y mettre, mais une longue suite d’images extraordinaires qui ne s’accordaient pas avec cette ville jaune et grise, modérément animée à cette heure, bourdonnante plutôt que bruyante, heureuse en somme, s’il est possible qu’on puisse être à la fois heureux et morne. (51-2)

The doctor was still looking out of the window. Beyond it lay the tranquil radiance of a cool spring sky; inside the room a word was echoing still, the word “plague.” A word that conjured up in the doctor’s mind not only what science chose to put into it, but a whole series of fantastic possibilities utterly out of keeping with that gray and yellow town under his eyes, from which were rising the sounds of mild activity characteristic of the hour; a drone rather than a bustling, the noises of a happy town, in short, if it’s possible to be at once so dull and happy.

Later, with the precision of a surgeon removing the last trace of the former vernal associations, Camus returns us to the quintessential symbol of Spring introduced in the novel’s opening pages, those “corbeilles de fleurs que de petits vendeurs ramènent des banlieues” (“baskets of flowers brought in from the suburbs by peddlers”). The plague has not only overcoded their meaning, but destroyed their beauty:

Pendant ce temps, et de toutes les banlieues environnantes, le printemps arrivait sur les marchés. Des milliers de roses se fanaient dans les corbeilles de marchands, au long des trottoirs, et leur odeur sucrée flottait dans toute la ville. (76)

Meanwhile, from all the outlying districts, spring was making its progress into the town. Thousands of roses wilted in the flower-venders’ baskets in the market-places and along the streets, and the air was heavy with their cloying perfume.

But I spoke too quickly. The plague has not exactly destroyed the beauty of these flowers; it has transformed how the narrator sees them. Camus is at pains to make clear that it is not that the roses, usually strong and healthy, are this Spring exceptionally wilting and malodorous. Indeed, “Apparemment, rien n’était change.” (“Outwardly, indeed, this spring was like any other.”) What is different is the mise-en-scène of these annual events, the way in which they are understood and expereienced by the narrative voice and, by extension, the people of Oran. It is, once more, a case of the same events being recoded, not of their being replaced by new realities. And yet, this recoding is everything: the old expectant, vivifying Spring has wilted and died, leaving in its place a new suffocating, stinking experience drawn from its unchanged events. This is a Spring that ends not with the bang of a vibrant summer, but with a whimper of decaying exhaustion:

On voyait clairement que le printemps s’était exténué, qu’il s’était prodigué dans des milliers de fleurs éclatant partout à la ronde et qu’il allait maintenant s’assoupir, s’écraser lentement sous la double pesée de la peste et de la chaleur. (129)

It was plain to see that spring had spent itself, lavished its ardor on the myriads of flowers that were bursting everywhere into bloom, and now was being crushed out by the twofold onslaught of heat and plague.

What temporal markers is COVID-19 recoding? It is, as I write this, too early to tell. Perhaps the European football championships and the Olympic Games, if they are shifted to odd years, will remain as visible scar tissue of a former trauma. There will no doubt be anniversaries: national peak infection days standing as each country’s “darkest hour”; perhaps there will be a VE (Victory over the Epidemic) Day?

In a future post I hope to return to pandemic time in order to discuss the temporalities left untreated here: the fourteen-day quarantine, the average number of days from infection to death or cure, as well as the way in which these recoded temporalities contribute to what we might call being-towards-virus, a new global mode of inhabiting the world that forces itself upon us in these quite exceptional times.

[1] In a future post I intend to write about how a pandemic is most emphatically not—as it is so often presented in the media—a predominantly natural phenomenon. This lazy characterisation is redolent of a dull scientism that, if it is tasked with bearing the weight of policy alone, hamstrings our comprehension of, and response to, the situation we are currently facing. The natural is one aspect of a complex lived experience that can no more be adequately explained in terms of its biological substrate than can the experience of love exclusively through the brain chemicals that accompany it.