For the full series of “Lets read Camus’ La Peste” posts, please click here.
In the previous post in this series I reflected on how literature can reveal the hidden side of a pandemic. Attitudes that would be incendiary if voiced in the first person can be exposed and explored in literary texts, absent the heat of indignation and accusation that would attend their expression in polite society. In this post I want to continue reflecting on how Cottard reveals the unspoken, unacceptable side of our attitude to the plague: why some of us, sometimes, enjoy it so much.
We enjoy it because it is a communal experience, affording a rare period of apparent commonality in a fragmented and oppositional world. What other moment has provided such a pan-global sentiment of solidarity and shared experience? Not the two World Wars. Not Princess Diana’s death. Not the moon landing. Everyone we meet and everywhere we look is touched by this virus: it is something we share, and shared experience is precious, the basis of friendship. As Camus rightly notes, “La seule façon de mettre les gens ensemble, c’est encore de leur envoyer la peste” (214 ; “the only way of getting people together is to send them the plague”).
We also enjoy flouting the lockdown rules, in minor or dramatic ways, even if they are rules we have drawn up and enforced ourselves. The pandemiccreates a whole new category of transgression, providing novel opportunities to expreience a frisson of delinquency, reassuring ourselves that we are the exception, that we won’t be caught, or that the rule is meant for them, but not for me.
We enjoy entertaining the thought that we, perhaps through our cunning, physical strength, or force of character, have the beating of the plague. How curious that those who have survived COVID should be praised for their steely determination, as if the virus conducted a psychological profile before deciding how virulently to attack the lungs. We are the exception to everyone else’s rule, either by directly thinking ourselves an exception or by reassuring ourselves that we are among those exceptional people who do not consider themselves an exception.
We enjoy looking down on others who flout the rules, pontificating about what sort of people (certainly not OUR sort of people) would do a thing like that. If our self-identity is in our intellect we will likely think them dumb; if we prize our civic mindedness we will probably brand them selfish; if we resent our poverty we will tend to dismiss them as entitled and privileged. We can tell a lot about ourselves by what we look down on in others.
Whatever our reasons some of us, like Cottard, will be sad to see the plague pass:
Mais au moment où la peste semblait s’éloigner pour regagner la tanière inconnue d’où elle était sortie en silence, il y avait au moins quelqu’un dans la ville que ce départ jetait dans la consternation, et c’était Cottard, si l’on en croit les carnets de Tarrou. (296)
But in those days when the plague seemed to be withdrawing, slinking back to the obscure lair from which it had stealthily emerged, at least one person in the town viewed this retreat with consternation, if Tarrou’s notes are to be trusted.
To experience the pandemic only through the news media, statistics and personal conversations is to skate along a glittering surface of presentable, scrubbed-up appearances. What Camus gives us is something altogether more unpalatable in its truth and uncomfortable in its reality.
