There are certain indelible artifacts and images from the early pandemic era: empty shelves and stockpiled toilet paper, distillery-made hand sanitizer, gardening gloves repurposed as protective gear, and suddenly omnipresent signage on how to scrub one’s fingers. Into this category, one can add chin-scratching meditations on Albert Camus’s 1947 novel The Plague. For a brief moment, seemingly every magazine in the Western world was commissioning something on the very first book that came to mind when thinking of a deadly disease.
Like our obsession with hand-washing, these early pandemic reflections on Camus have aged poorly. Some make for amusing rereading because of how much the conventional wisdom has changed. Eliot Cohen in the Atlantic, for example, urged readers not to place too much faith in “technocratic control” while reminding them of “the futility of face masks as a means of avoiding COVID-19.” One wonders what his magazine’s readers would make of these pronouncements today.
As we approach the second anniversary of the coronavirus outbreak, the most telling parallels between the book and the pandemic are quite different from those put forward in the early days. The “spiritual and physical emaciation” endured by the quarantined residents of the city of Oran certainly anticipated the psychological toll of prolonged lockdowns. The hope that the Oranians placed in a new serum recalls our obsession with vaccine development and distribution. Certain practices adopted by the quarantined townspeople, such as boiling cutlery before dinner and setting fires to disinfect apartments, are redolent of COVID-19-era hygiene theater.
But these early pandemic reflections on Camus also reveal why the past two years have been so frustrating. The early think pieces harp on certain common themes. We are, according to Vox, members of a community — not “atomized actors. And that means when we think of ‘preparedness,’ we’re thinking not just of ourselves but of how our actions will affect other people.” NPR’s resident Camus whisperer made a similar point: “The love and the solidarity and the dedication through death and loss — that was very meaningful to Camus. He was talking about resistance and about how people can come together in a situation to resist.”
The heroism of Dr. Bernard Rieux, the narrator of the book, is duly emphasized, an obvious parallel to the front-line nurses and doctors then desperately fighting a novel disease. Rieux’s unheeded early warnings certainly make for uncomfortable reading in 2021. To the New Yorker, Rieux was an exemplar of “our capacity as individuals to face the truth, endure, and contribute to success under extreme conditions.” The Los Angeles Times published a cringeworthy cartoon comparing Rieux to Dr. Anthony Fauci. For the Wall Street Journal, Camus’s “heroes, like ours, are the selfless medical workers. Doing his job, Dr. Rieux thought, was the necessary virtue: ‘The only means of fighting a plague is common decency.’” This last line, while admirable, seems to be the only part of Camus’s book that people remember.
Paeans to solidarity and front-line healthcare workers were often accompanied by calls for wartime-style mobilization. “We were about to enter, or re-enter, a state of war,” according to the London Review of Books. The New Statesman and NPR also picked up on the wartime metaphor, noting that Camus’s book was an allegory for the French Resistance during World War II.
Postwar mythmaking aside, most people did not actually join the French Resistance, just as most of us were never asked to do much of anything during the coronavirus. Proactive measures were required of certain specialized professions, such as doctors, nurses, virologists, and epidemiologists, even grocery store clerks, while everybody else stayed indoors and ordered delivery. Rousing calls for solidarity and mobilization seem terribly quaint after years of rolling lockdowns and enforced isolation.
Rieux is indeed the central figure of The Plague, but his dutiful, unheroic courage is supplemented by the efforts of other characters with no special training or medical expertise. The turning point in the novel takes place when Jean Tarrou, a visitor caught in the Oran quarantine, offers his services to Rieux to organize volunteer public health squads. Perhaps the most quietly moving scene in the book occurs when the journalist Raymond Rambert, another outsider trapped in the city, decides to forgo the chance to reunite with his wife in favor of joining Tarrou’s teams. The public health squads are organized by the tireless Joseph Grand, a quiet, unassuming bureaucrat who struggles to write even a single letter to his own estranged wife.
Future historians will find few Tarrous, Ramberts, and Grands in the COVID-19 era — not because people have become less heroic or charitable, but because our plague requires, or is said to require, a certain passivity. “Solidarity” has meant urging people to stay at home and avoid human contact. The rituals and ceremonies that instill fellow-feeling have been canceled or delayed indefinitely. Camus’s characters don’t enjoy their plague experience, exactly, but at least they are able to do something. The only outlet for our quarantine frustrations is yelling at the unmasked or strangers on the internet.
Yelling at strangers is satisfying because it allows us to indulge in the moralizing impulse, another feature of pandemics that Camus anticipated. In The Plague, this impulse is embodied by Father Paneloux, a Catholic priest who tells his parishioners the plague is God’s punishment for depravity. In one of the better early pandemic essays on Camus, Alain de Botton notes that Rieux resists this moralizing impulse. The doctor “has watched a child die and knows better: Suffering is randomly distributed, it makes no sense, it is simply absurd, and that is the kindest one can say of it.”
Our plague is not completely random. The aged and infirm die in droves, while the young and healthy are largely impervious, especially after the advent of mass vaccination. Yet the moralizing impulse remains, even as the rhetorical trappings have shifted from theology to pseudo-authoritative scientism. Those infected by the coronavirus deserve their fate. They didn’t obey social distancing guidelines or refused to wear a mask or spent too much time reading Facebook conspiracy theories. Periodically, the media will highlight a skeptic who died or got sick from COVID-19 as a cautionary tale. Decency and solidarity, the virtues celebrated by Camus and dutifully amplified by the educated class in the early days of the pandemic, have been replaced by a new moral code that attributes every infection to the sufferer’s failure to comply scrupulously with public health guidelines.
Heckling moralism and enforced inactivity are poor bedfellows. Was there another way? In the early weeks of the pandemic, one story fired the imagination. A group of workers volunteered to remain isolated for a month at a Pennsylvania factory to produce millions of pounds of protective equipment for doctors and nurses across the country. The factory remained closed to all visitors, including family members, to reduce the risk of a coronavirus outbreak during production. It was a profoundly decent thing to do, reminiscent of the volunteer efforts of Tarrou and Rambert and Grand. It’s too bad most of us never got the chance to do something similar.
Will Collins is a high school teacher in Budapest, Hungary.
