This can’t be happening to us

by David Benjamin

“After the Black Death came the Renaissance. From the depths of economic horror came Roosevelt’s New Deal. From this horror, so far, come the senseless twists and turns of the orange Narcissus.” 

— Roger Cohen, N.Y. Times

MADISON, Wis. — Although I can’t explain why, I’ve always enjoyed reading books about fatal diseases. My all-time favorite in the genre is Hans Zinsser’s lyrical and philosophical biography of typhus, Rats, Lice and History. My current read is John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza, the sort of history I admire because Barry augments his narrative with social, medical, scientific and biographical detail that swells it into an epic sweep worthy of Tolstoy. 

Also among my beloved disease books is Sandra Hempel’s The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump: John Snow and the Mystery of Cholera, which unfolds the halting birth of public health like a Whitechapel murder mystery. 

However, during the Covid-19 crisis, the most illuminating book on rampant infection might be one about an epidemic that never really happened. In The Plague, Albert Camus imagines a modern outbreak of the Black Death as vividly as Daniel Defoe chronicled during a real plague in the 17th century. More important, Camus bares almost clinically the psyche of a population imprisoned and stalked by a stealthy, invisible and fiendishly democratic killer in its midst.

The Plague takes place in Oran, a city described by its protagonist, a doctor named Rieux, as a community of humdrum routine, its people ordinary, comfortable and shabbily bourgeois. At first, the intrusion of an ugly contagion into this complacent town comes to its residents as an oddity they’re loath to acknowledge. There is a feeling, suggests Rieux, that this can’t be happening to us. This rude disruption of their quotidian normalcy seems to the townsfolk of sleepy Oran “fantastically unreal.” Even as disease spreads and the city edges toward quarantine — cut off from the world — denial is the default attitude.

Camus writes, “They went on doing business, arranged for journeys and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views?”

But the contagion grows and restrictions follow. “Most people were chiefly aware of what ruffled the tenor of their lives or affected their interests. They were worried and irritated — but these are not feelings with which to confront plague. Their first reaction, for instance, was to abuse the authorities.”

Camus adds, “Thus they felt under no obligation to make any change in their habits, as yet. Plague was for them an unwelcome visitant, bound to take its leave one day as unexpectedly as it had come.”

Or, in the words of the current, non-fictional world’s Covid-19 Denier-in-Chief: “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

As the epidemic worsens and an outcry of “Why me? Why us?” becomes a mantra among the trapped citizens, a Pat Robertson forebear emerges. Father Paneloux tells his fearful congregation that they have not yet begun to fear. He proclaims that God has grown “wearied of waiting for you to come to Him. He loosed on you this visitation, as He has visited all the cities that offended against Him, since the dawn of history. Now you are learning your lesson, the lesson that was learnt by Cain and his offspring, by the people of Sodom and Gomorrah…”

As the mortal toll rises, as curfews fall and patrols of gendarmes roam the streets herding people into seclusion, civic authorities struggle against the mounting wave of panic. Cleverly, they cease to announce the ghastly weekly death numbers — which are creeping toward a thousand — and switch to daily totals, deftly dividing the horror by seven.

However, through the eyes of his equable hero, Camus reveals that horror does not — cannot — last. As months roll by without relief, with no escape, with no cure and precious little hope, terror turns into tired acceptance. Defiance and denial devolve into a smothering ennui. A city accustomed to dreary routine devises a new, drearier routine. 

“The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous. In the memories of those who lived through them, the grim days of plague do not stand out like livid flames, ravenous and inextinguishable, beaconing a troubled sky, but rather like the slow, deliberate progress of some monstrous thing crushing out all in its path.”

To the ear of Rieux, the plague is “a never-ending, stifling drone that, gradually swelling, filled the town from end to end, evening after evening gave its truest, mournfullest expression to the blind endurance that had  ousted love from all our hearts.”

Like his neighbors, Rieux settles back into a steady, time-devouring plod, but altered by the plague. Suspending his medical practice, he throws himself into the ordeal of tracing and treating, as much as possible, the victims of plague. Like the nurses and doctors battling Covid-19, he works endlessly, sleeplessly, courting exhaustion. It’s a routine that serves his sanity, numbing him to the tragedy of overseeing hundreds, thousands of deaths. He ceases to think — about the danger he faces, about the day when the plague will finally pass, about what was lost throughout the dark days of separation, isolation and fear.

“‘Ah,’ said Rieux, ‘a man can’t cure and know at the same time. So let’s cure as quickly as we can. That’s the more urgent job.’”

The epidemic wreaks changes in Rieux’s friends. Cottard, a suicidal misanthrope, is strangely refreshed and liberated, suddenly cheery and voluble. In one timeless passage, he says, “Say what you like, Tarrou, but let me tell you this: the one way of making people hang together is to give ’em a spell of plague.”

Rambert is obsessed with escaping the city. He hatches a series of plans that all fail until, finally, he becomes resigned and nearly forgets the lover with whom he was so desperate to reunite. Tarrou is a man who believes staunchly in nothing. But he finds meaning in the plague, organizing aid, succoring the sick and rescuing the forsaken. He does far more good, at last, than Father Paneloux.

The Plague has a happy ending of sorts. The pestilence, as it must, passes. But it takes longer than anyone could imagine, longer than the city could stand without sinking into despair, shedding a host of illusions and changing forever. The citizens greet the end cautiously, hesitant to believe it’s really over. Cottard, to symbolize the psychic devastation brought on by the plague’s departure and the “re-opening” of its economy, goes mad. He’s shot down by the police.

Tarrou is one of the last victims. On his deathbed, he articulates Camus’ metaphor: “… each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth, is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him.”

Rieux’ record is matter-of-fact, dismissive of his bravery and his pain, as though he was barely there. His benediction both evokes and tempers the bleak fatalism that readers typically associate with Camus. Ending a reminiscence in which he loses his exiled wife without seeing her for months, in which he buries two dear friends, including Tarrou, Rieux depicts himself in the third person:

“… he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.”