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| Gallimard Press, 1951 edition of "La Peste" |
PHILIP J
CUNNINGHAM
The city is on lockdown. Transportation grinds to a halt. Shops are shuttered, rumors fly,
early reports play down severity of epidemic. Doctors toil round the clock, families
are torn apart, the death toll mounts and no ready cure is in sight.
Sounds
chillingly familiar, doesn’t it? Albert Camus wrote of these things in
harrowing detail in The Plague. (La Peste, 1947).
The novel is set in the Algerian city of Oran, but one could be forgiven for thinking it Wuhan. Camus artfully describes a city under lock with hardened realism, heartfelt sympathy and philosophical heft.
The novel is set in the Algerian city of Oran, but one could be forgiven for thinking it Wuhan. Camus artfully describes a city under lock with hardened realism, heartfelt sympathy and philosophical heft.
It doesn’t
make for easy reading, but it is essential reading, especially when a
modern-day epidemic of unknown proportions is raging across the Chinese
heartland and elsewhere. It’s a tribute to the author’s wry humanism that many
of the uncomfortable truths, human frailties and quiet heroism he depicts are
the stuff of news headlines today.
If a hero emerges, it’s Doctor
Rieux, who works around the clock and seeks to console others despite grim conditions.
His dedication to his profession against difficult odds will remind modern
readers of the already legendary Li Wenliang, who lost his life in Wuhan trying
save others from the much-feared contagion.
"The whole town was running a temperature” is
how Camus describes Oran, but it is apt metaphor for any one of the number of cities
now on lockdown.
“Our
townsfolk were not more to blame than others,” Camus says, tackling the
tendency to blame the victims. “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?”
“There have been as many plagues as wars in
history,” he adds. “Yet always plagues and wars take people equally by
surprise.”
Camus understands that this surprise is often met
with denial. As one of the doctors explains, “he knew quite well that it was
plague and, needless to say, he also knew that, were this to be officially
admitted, the authorities would be compelled to take very drastic steps. This
was, of course, the explanation of his colleagues' reluctance to face the facts
and, if it would ease their minds, he was quite prepared to say it wasn't
plague.”
"The newspapers and the authorities are
playing ball with the plague,” complains one of the characters when statistics
are subject to manipulation.
Then there is the economy to consider. “…For a long
while to come travelers would give the town a wide berth. This epidemic spelt
the ruin of the tourist trade.”
Even after the “rumors” are verified, the doctors
are on guard: “It's not a question of painting too black a picture. It's a
question of taking precautions."
Prodded by a rising death toll, the state takes
over.
“Compulsory declaration of all cases of fever and
their isolation were to be strictly enforced. The residences of sick people
were to be shut up and disinfected; persons living in the same house were to go
into quarantine; burials were to be supervised by the local
authorities.”
As Camus tells it, intervention can only do so much:
“As for the ‘specially equipped’ wards, he knew what they amounted to: two
outbuildings from which the other patients had been hastily evacuated, whose
windows had been hermetically sealed, and round which a sanitary cordon had
been set.”
The main characters in the novel bide the “intolerable
leisure” enforced by quarantine to muse about their fate, describing how they
felt to be “in exile,” still indignant at the “unmerited distress” that had
befallen them. “They had been sentenced, for an unknown crime, to an indeterminate
period of punishment.”
"But I don't belong here," the journalist
cries, demanding special treatment.
He is reprimanded. "Unfortunately, from now on
you'll belong here, like everybody else."
Realizing he is locked in, the journalist learns to
savor “that bitter sense of freedom which comes of total deprivation.”
Mandatory quarantines are followed by “batterings
on the door, action by the police, and later armed force; the patient was taken
by storm.”
“Now and again a gunshot was heard; the special
brigade recently detailed to destroy cats and dogs, as possible carriers of
infection, was at work.”
Although pets are not considered a risk with the
novel coronavirus, draconian campaigns against “pests” have convulsed China
before.
The
world-weary but humane Doctor Rieux, who seems to stand in for the author,
urges his agitated neighbors to keep calm and carry on.
“There's one thing I must tell you: there's no question of heroism
in all this. It's a matter of common decency. That's an idea which may make
some people smile, but the only means of righting a plague is—common decency…I
don't know what it means for other people. But in my case I know that it
consists in doing my job."
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| "Heroes don't come falling from the sky, there are just the exertions of ordinary people" A wall in Hong Kong, February 2020 |
