For the full series of “Lets read Camus’ La Peste” posts, please click here.
Everyone is writing about the pandemic right now, but we are not writing everything. There are some some impulses, some reactions, some fleeting thoughts that we prudently keep under our hats at a time like this.
Once the COVID-19 pandemic is over, once we have all achieved some distance from its horrors, once it becomes a subject of comedy and we have the COVID equivalent of JoJo Rabbit, then these private thoughts will finally be ushered out for public display, no doubt to be greeted by titters and mild embarrassment. But now, as I write, it’s still too early for stand-up comics and chroniclers to voice these illicit truths, and we must rely on the penetrating gaze of literature to shine light on the pandemic’s unspeakable side, revealing those obscene thoughts and impulses we are presently keeping to ourselves.
One of the marvels of literature in general, and of The Plague in particular, is that it gives voice to the whispers and nudges that populate our private worlds, those cruel or socially unacceptable opinions that, in Martin Luther’s delightful image, fly around our heads and occasionally make their nest in our hair.
So let’s gird our loins, take a deep breath, and plunge with Camus into the uncomfortable depths of the pandemic’s unspoken…
Sometimes, some of us enjoy the plague lifestyle. This is certainly the case for Cottard. Asked by Rambert if he plans to flee Oran, his reply is revelatory:
je n’ai pas, moi, envie de partir. J’ai mes raisons.
Il ajouta après un silence :
– Vous ne me demandez pas quelles sont mes raisons ?
– Je suppose, dit Rambert, que cela ne me regarde pas.
– Dans un sens, cela ne vous regarde pas, en effet. Mais dans un autre… Enfin, la seule chose évidente, c’est que je me sens bien mieux ici depuis que nous avons la peste avec nous. (157)
“personally, I’ve no wish to leave. I have my reasons.”
After a short silence he added: “You don’t ask me what my reasons are, I notice.”
“I take it,” Rambert replied, “that they’re none of my business.”
“That’s so, in a way, of course. But from another angle? Well, let’s put it like this: I’ve been feeling much more at ease here since plague settled in.”
When he is offered the chance to leave plague-infested Oran, Cottard politely turns it down:
– Pourquoi ne viendriez-vous pas avec nous, monsieur Cottard ?
L’autre se leva d’un air offensé, prit son chapeau rond à la main :
– Ce n’est pas mon métier.
Puis sur un ton de bravade :
– D’ailleurs je m’y trouve bien, moi, dans la peste, et je ne vois pas pourquoi je me mêlerais de la faire cesser. (174-5)
“Look here, Monsieur Cottard, why don’t you join us?”
Picking up his derby hat, Cottard rose from his chair with an offended expression.
“It’s not my job,” he said. Then, with an air of bravado, he added: “What’s more, the plague suits me quite well and I see no reason why I should bother about trying to stop it.”
The majority of our public discourse today rings with the value of life. We celebrate a life saved, and rightly hail those who save it. Almost certainly we want others to take good care of our lives, and not treat them lightly. But what about when it comes to ourselves? Faced with a choice between safety elsewhere and continued life in Oran, Cottard opts for the life-endangering option. “Better death than the health we are given” insists Gilles Deleuze in The Logic of Sense (182). Cottard’s mantra might be “better the thrills of the plague than the safety we are offered”.
Cottard is not the only one whose attitude to the plague transgresses the accepted canons of public morality, and plague exposes any number of scandalous attitudes to death. Paneloux expatiates that
Il y a bien longtemps, les chrétiens d’Abyssinie voyaient dans la peste un moyen efficace, d’origine divine, de gagner l’éternité. Ceux qui n’étaient pas atteints s’enroulaient dans les draps des pestiférés afin de mourir certainement. Sans doute, cette fureur de salut n’est elle pas recommandable. Elle marque une précipitation regrettable, bien proche de l’orgueil.
“Many centuries ago the Christians of Abyssinia saw in the plague a sure and God-sent means of winning eternal life. Those who were not yet stricken wrapped round them sheets in which men had died of plague, so as to make sure of their death. I grant you such a frenzied quest of salvation was not to be commended. It shows an overhaste, indeed, a presumptuousness, which we can but deplore.
Sometimes we enjoy the pandemic itself. We enjoy watching it unfold with the cadaverous fascination of a slow train wreck from which we cannot avert our gaze. We enjoy writing about it, like the chronicler Tarrou, gaining satisfaction from one’s wisdom and sporting a self-styled detachment from the pullulating masses. We enjoy how it proves we were right all along, about society or human nature or politicians or life or luck or liberty or “them”, whoever they are.
We enjoy how it gives us an excuse to claim a newly minted necessity for those of our ideas that fell on deaf ears or met resistance in the beforetime. We use COVID as an amplifier for the theories and plans we had prior to its arrival: the conspiracy theories, to be sure, but also the social theories and the crucial reforms, as if one wave of the pandemic magic wand made everything unavoidable and urgent. The great cypher of this human truth in Camus’s story is Father Paneloux, the Jesuite priest whose two sermons mark rhetorical and thematic highpoints of the text. The dramatic opening sentence of Paneloux’s first sermon is a study in framing the plague to justify a pre-existing agenda: “Mes frères, vous êtes dans le malheur, mes frères, vous l’avez mérité” (“Calamity has come on you, my brethren, and, my brethren, you deserved it”). But what we mock in Paneloux we are slower to see in ourselves: our own private states of exception, our bespoke sense of a temporarily open window through which we can now force our pet projects and visions in the period before peoples’ critical faculties recalibrate. We hear in our own calculations the echo of Paneloux’s warning:
c’est un regard neuf que vous portez sur les êtres et sur les choses, depuis le jour où cette ville a refermé ses murs autour de vous et du fléau. Vous savez maintenant, et enfin, qu’il faut venir à l’essentiel. (112-3)
you have been beholding mankind and all creation with new eyes, since the gates of this city closed on you and on the pestilence. Now, at last, you know the hour has struck to bend your thoughts to the most important things.
And then a little further on:
Le temps n’est plus où des conseils, une main fraternelle étaient les moyens de vous pousser vers le bien. Aujourd’hui, la vérité est un ordre. Et le chemin du salut, c’est un épieu rouge qui vous le montre et vous y pousse. C’est ici, mes frères, que se manifeste enfin la miséricorde divine qui a mis en toute chose le bien et le mal, la colère et la pitié, la peste et le salut. Ce fléau même qui vous meurtrit, il vous élève et vous montre la voie. (112-3)
The time is past when a helping hand or mere words of good advice could set you on the right path. Today the truth is a command. It is a red spear sternly pointing to the narrow path, the one way of salvation. And thus, my brothers, at last it is revealed to you, the divine compassion which has ordained good and evil in everything; wrath and pity; the plague and your salvation. This same pestilence which is slaying you works for your good and points your path.
History is forcing our hand, and what can we do but rise to meet its noble calling. Now, we have no choice but to do what we always dreamed. How we delight to proclaim our truth a command! Like Cottard and Paneloux, we have our reasons for preferring the plague, but we could never speak them out loud.