For the full series of “Lets read Camus’ La Peste” posts, please click here.
There has been much talk over the past weeks of COVID-19 being an “invisible enemy”. Setting the war metaphor aside for a moment, it is illuminating to reflect on the ways in which we make pandemics visible. In La Peste figures and statistics play an important role in giving the microscopic plague a tangible presence: the numbers make visible the scale of what otherwise would remain inapparent to any individual on the ground.
The phenomenology of statistics
For primary health workers the sensory experience of individual cases of COVID-19 is overwhelming, but none of us, not even those treating patients, has an experiential sense of the overall scale of the virus. For a sense of the pandemic’s scope, we have to turn to statistics. However, these statistics shape not only our understanding of COVID-19 but also our experience of being-in-the-world at this time, our relationships with other people, and even our mood. Our experience is shaped by numbers in what we could call a phenomenology of statistics.
The numerical sublime
The existence of the plague creeps up on Docteur Rieux in La Peste largely through the statistics collected by Tarrou. Rieux sees individual patients, but his sense of the broader extent of the outbreak is mediated by statistics: “Les chiffres de Tarrou étaient exacts. Le docteur Rieux en savait quelque chose” (42) [“Tarrou’s figures were correct. Dr. Rieux was only too well aware of the serious turn things had taken.”].
Rieux’s attempts to come to terms with the extent of the plague are filtered through statistics:
Il essayait de rassembler dans son esprit ce qu’il savait de cette maladie. Des chiffres flottaient dans sa mémoire et il se disait que la trentaine de grandes pestes que l’histoire a connues avait fait près de cent millions de morts. (50)
He tried to recall what he had read about the disease. Figures floated across his memory, and he recalled that some thirty or so great plagues known to history had accounted for nearly a hundred million deaths.
The problem, as Rieux well understands, is in mediating between this statistical reality—we might say, this numerical sublime—and an intuition of the reality it quantifies:
Mais qu’est-ce que cent millions de morts ? Quand on a fait la guerre, c’est à peine si on sait déjà ce que c’est qu’un mort. Et puisqu’un homme mort n’a de poids que si on l’a vu mort, cent millions de cadavres semés à travers l’histoire ne sont qu’une fumée dans l’imagination. (50)
But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.
From religious mysticism to mathematical statisticism
A death is only a death if you have seen it, Rieux muses, and while statistics surely do bring us face to face with something, what they do not bring us face to face with is death itself. They bring us face to face, perhaps, with the impossibility of coming face to face with death; they are a marker of our ignorance, a trace of something—of ten million deaths—that will always remain beyond our experience. In this sense, they take on a mystical dimension, signposts of an inaccessible “beyond” of our pandemic experience in the same way that gazing up at the handful of starry specks in the night sky reminds us of our inability to understand or come to terms with the vastness of the universe and its billions upon billions of unimaginably massive balls of gas. This is something like a negative statistics to set alongside negative theology, a mathematical statisticism that performs the same function as religious mysticism.
Truth, damn truth, and statistics
Statistics become our link to an intangible but supremely important reality, like the battle plan in the command room compared to the fog and confusion of the battlefield, spreading before our eyes an expression of a whole that, absent this mathematical representation, we can only experience in small part.
The hot and the cold
In La Peste we see statistics taking on a prophetic role:
Le docteur vit entrer Grand avec son voisin Cottard. L’employé brandissait une feuille de papier.
– Les chiffres montent, docteur, annonça-t-il : onze morts en quarante-huit heures. (54)
Grand, who was waving a sheet of paper, was accompanied by his neighbor, Cottard.
“The figures are going up, doctor. Eleven deaths in forty-eight hours.”
These numbers carry messages from this reality called “the truth” that is always beyond our immediate experience, but that shapes and controls our experienced reality.
In one exquisite exchange in the novel, Camus captures the simultaneously objective and evocative reality of statistics, their blend of quantity and imagination:
Rieux décida de téléphoner au préfet
– Les mesures sont insuffisantes.
– J’ai les chiffres, dit le préfet, ils sont en effet inquiétants.
– Ils sont plus qu’inquiétants, ils sont clairs.
– Je vais demander des ordres au Gouvernement général.
Rieux raccrocha devant Castel :
– Des ordres ! Et il faudrait de l’imagination.
– Et les sérums ?
– Ils arriveront dans la semaine. (75)
Rieux decided to ring up the Prefect.
“The regulations don’t go anywhere near far enough.”
“Yes,” the Prefect replied. “I’ve seen the statistics and, as you say, they’re most perturbing.”
“They’re more than perturbing; they’re conclusive.”
“I’ll ask government for orders.”
When Rieux next met Castel, the Prefect’s remark was still rankling.
“Orders!” he said scornfully. “When what’s needed is imagination.”
“Any news of the serum?”
“It’ll come this week.”
Clarity and worry, serums and imagination, are both inseparable in the statistical phenomenology of plague. Michel Serres would call these realities “cold” and “hot”, the cold reality of science that can articulate generalised trends and relationships, and the hot reality of the arts that can give expression to individual human suffering. Cold without heat is inhuman; heat without cold is parochial.
An illusion of exactitude
Statistics, furthermore, give an illusion of exactitude, and therefore of a measure of control. Why an illusion? Because first there is the time lag between events and their statistical reporting. Death rates for a given day are revised upwards in the days that follow as more reports come in; the effects of measures taken to throttle the spread of the virus become “visible” in statistics only weeks or even a month after they are taken. But the time lag is not the only statistical imprecision. We count confirmed cases, not actual cases. How many asymptomatic carriers pass under the radar of the statistics? Impossible to tell.
Statistics and war, même combat
It seems that we need to give our invisible parasite a body and an identity, and that is part of the reason that we reach for the metaphor of war: there is a comfort in having a foe with evil intent; one knows what one is up against. A foe has a plan that can be decyphered, it can be outmanoeuvred, can be vanquished. La Peste has been criticised, in fact, for using a viral metaphor to explore Nazism: viruses are natural, not intentionally malevolent, and impossible completely to wipe out. Unlike National Socialism, they are not evil.
This desire to make the virus into a malevolent foe also accounts in part for why some have called COVID-19 the “Wuhan virus” or the “Chinese virus” (there are, of course, additional problematic reasons for using those names). China and Wuhan are comprehensible on a human scale, and allow us to assimilate the invisible virus into our existing categories of struggle and prejudice, taming its invisibility somewhat. It is the same instinct that leads us to compare incomprehensible areas of land to “the size of Wales” or “the size of a football pitch”.
This, in fact, is exactly the sort of comparison Rieux attempts in order to come to terms with the intangibility of death:
Le docteur se souvenait de la peste de Constantinople qui, selon Procope, avait fait dix mille victimes en un jour. Dix mille morts font cinq fois le public d’un grand cinéma. Voilà ce qu’il faudrait faire. (50)
The doctor remembered the plague at Constantinople that, according to Procopius, caused ten thousand deaths in a single day. Ten thousand dead made about five times the audience in a biggish cinema. Yes, that was how it should be done.
In view of this mathematical light shed by statistics on an otherwise invisible situation, we might reflect on the long philosophical history of the reality of numbers, the geometrical and mathematical, in relation to the world we apprehend with our senses. Plato in the Republic considers the geometrical reality accessed through the intellect to be more real than the deceptive and changing universe of our senses. Today, we are being asked to adopt a Platonic perspective on the pandemic: don’t trust what you see with your eyes or what your intuition tells you (hardly anyone you know has the virus; it seems fine to meet with people) but trust the numbers, represented visually in the famous “curve”, and trust the mediators of those numbers: the scientists with their data. Isolated in your caves, do not believe the shadows on the wall but trust the radiant light of the daily government briefing that beams its noonday statistics into your cavern, complete with curves at varying degrees of flatness.
Now, one interesting feature of the unfolding COVID-19 narrative is that the differences in scientific opinion that are usually reserved for the pages of academic journals are being aired in public and made more apparent to laypeople than usual: we see changing advice (should we wear face masks, or not?), and we see different protocols in different countries all of which are professing to follow “the data” and “the scientists”. But that is for another post.
