living through la peste
Whenever a new epidemic appears, people dust off their copies of La Peste by Albert Camus and compare life to art. These articles popped up like mushrooms overnight during the rise of Ebola, SARS and swine ‘flu and now we reach COVID-19. La Peste is not alone in recent popularity of pandemic fiction. There have been parallels drawn between Samuel Pepys’s and Daniel Defoe’s writing during the Plague of London in the 17th century, Randy Shilts and the AIDS pandemic or the marvellous prescience of Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. For me, there is no other; it must be La Peste. I’m not alone in revisiting the novel. Penguin struggled to keep up with demand for copies during the first UK lockdown which led to the predictable BBC radio adaptation.
I have worked in an intensive care unit through both waves and will probably stick around for the anticipated third. I have seen first-hand the quiet determination of frontline staff carrying on the face of catastrophe. When confronted by disaster we turn to literature to find relief. I see shades of Bernard Rieux in my colleagues every shift and I admire them all the more for it.
Camus’s 1947 novel is set during an outbreak of the plague in the Algerian town of Oran. This mirrors previous smaller epidemics of other diseases which Camus had been witness to. Though Camus would have been too young to remember the 1918 influenza epidemic, his own experiences of tuberculosis as a teenager may have coloured the novel.
In reading La Peste, we come to understand the differing perspectives of the townsfolk as they adjust to the horrific circumstances they find themselves in. The passages where Dr. Rieux beseeches the authorities to treat the early instances of disease with the gravity they warrant or those where sections where Camus laments the boredom of a quarantine will strike a chord to those of us in the 21st century who have lived through them. This is not so much a case of life imitating art as history repeating itself. When faced with a virus we struggle to treat, we must fall back on older methods designed to prevent its spread. Prevention is better than cure.
We mustn’t take all of this at face value. Camus was writing post-war, likely drawing an analogy for the occupation of France. He is not so much attempting to document life in a pandemic, rather the struggle any of us go through when we are cast over the brink into a vast and meaningless tragedy. The turmoil produces companionship, resilience and camaraderie; examples of humankind at its most noble. There are examples of this both with the Nazi Occupation and the COVID-19 pandemic. The comparison is apt. As stated by Camus’s daughter: ‘We are not responsible for coronavirus we can be responsible in the way we respond to it’.
In responding to the pandemic, both at work and in the media, we, too, were Rieux in the ICU; persuading the authorities to take the contagion seriously (as with the response of many Western governments, the Algerian health authority’s initial reaction is one of denial), splitting hairs over the nomenclature of the problem (Rieux is the first to use the word ‘plague’ to describe the fever in an attempt to convince the public of its dangers) and ultimately pressing on with the job, with or without adequate political support. The situation felt unreal, like a strange dream we were walking into together. As Rieux recognised the stigmata of the bubonic plague (accurately described by Camus), we recognised the possibility of a second wave seeing familiar presentations and shadows on chest x-ray films.
The similarities to our situation and La Peste begin after the initial signs of outbreak, two doctors, Rieux and Castel, confront the public health authorities in Oran. Rieux's first meeting with them is characterised by indecision. The handful of cases he and his fellow professionals have treated are likely to be the plague. The authorities advise to hold back any strict measures which might prevent spread (and thus save lives or fight off an epidemic altogether) taking refuge in some ambiguity about the appearance of the bacillus under microscopy. This decision is informed by the causative organism not quite fitting the plague label. As such, the cases of fever do not pass the threshold to declare a plague.
The label is not important where the disease has the capacity to wipe out half of the population in two months. The requested lockdown measures are serious, but that is not the question we need ask, the priority for Rieux and his colleagues is whether they are necessary - the effort is stifled during the discussion by nit-picking and bureaucracy.
The opposing points of view, that is, the reasons why the sanitary department are unwilling to enact a lockdown or take other measures, are not explored. We are left to draw our own conclusions. In our own experiences of COVID 19, we are aware that the economy is all important and thus 100,000 dead and rising is apparently an acceptable price as long as the line of a chart somewhere changes trajectory. Never mind that that same line bounced back faster in countries where lockdown was implemented quickly and more effectively.
As the story progresses, the poorer districts are hit first and hardest. Those whose work prevents them from isolating are the first to suffer; the first death recorded is a custodian, an older working class man employed in the service economy. Still, the authorities drag their heels, unwilling to cause a panic over what they perceive as a minor threat. Later on, we hear of the deaths of nurses and volunteers, their work sadly not paid in proportion to the risks they are taking. Hunger and poverty trumps the fear of infection. The poor must work and thus expose themselves. Much of this now seems familiar to us.
As the numbers rise, a lockdown is declared. The entire town of Oran is quarantined. Travel is prohibited and special wards are opened up to deal with the influx of the sick. The families who know they might not be seeing their loved ones again echo the phone calls I have made where I must tell a wife or son that their relative is dying. How hard it is for them to believe this when the last time they saw their loved one, they were short of breath in the back of an ambulance. Hospital staff work long hours. Rieux is unable to visit his wife in her last illness. She passes away and he is not there.
The leitmotifs are those of tedium and isolation, of distance between figures. Life in lockdown is one of imprisonment. Given that every day continues the same in isolation, there is a lack of future. Hope dies in such a vacuum. Regular updates and pleasantries become repetitive and stale. With no change on the horizon, the weeks blend together with little distinction drawn between one day and the next.
As well as strangling the future in terms of business (‘commerce, too, had died of the plague’) and leisure, the plague starves personal relationships. We need human warmth and connection to thrive. The quarantine prevents news travelling from outside of Oran. We hear little of the world beyond the town, it is distant to us. There is increased space between people. Families are divided by the cordon, left worrying of their loved ones in absentia, for those they cannot see or speak to. In the reality of our pandemic, relatives are left to fret between updates from the hospital. They are not allowed to visit. I cannot connect to my patients; the protective masks we wear reduce the healthcare providers to a uniform. I cannot smile. I am not a reassuring face, but a fogged set of goggles. Many will have died with this being the last that they saw. They go to sleep, they are ventilated, and they do not wake up. In the interim, I cannot communicate with them. If they are awake, they are delirious and I struggle to understand them. The stilted language and dialogue Camus uses to describe the conditions leaves such a void.
Hell is not, as it has been said, other people. It is the absence of others. This nostalgia for interpersonal connections felt by the characters leads to discovering the strength of such relationships. As he puts it ‘To simply say what we learn in the midst of plagues: there are more things to admire in men than to despise’. It is being confronted by oblivion, in having an awareness of our mortality which we did not previously contemplate, that we understand and appreciate the importance of human relationships in the face of meaningless collective adversity. The bonds forged in such a fire are tempered by this adversity, and we come to appreciate them as all the more valuable for it.
Most of us are not comfortable with dying and the idea of death. We do not experience death regularly and so we are able to live in denial of what is inevitable. The lack of consideration ensures that when we are accosted by mortality, ours or others, we are shocked. Even through the pandemic, most of us are fortunate to review the scenes within hospitals through a screen: a video call, a documentary or on the news. We are isolated from death and from those experiencing it, another form of loneliness felt by the dying. Their condition alienates them from us. In sense, they are already dead to us through this separation. There is a void presented by Camus here too; the lack of a response of Castel, Rieux’s colleague, to the pleas from relations of the sick: ‘give him life!’. He cannot treat the infection. There are no guarantees.
As the epidemic continues from April through to December, the handful of cases blossom to take over a repurposed football stadium, the specialised pavilions and the wards being filled. We are confronted by the silence here too from a mass of unspeaking convalescents. The entire stadium is packed with victims of the plague, though the grounds where football chants and cheers might have been heard in another time are without sound. They cannot tell us their stories. Not only is this dissonance eerie to us in this formerly loud space, we now have a scale to set the tragedy by. A thousand deaths per day is a statistic. Fathoming the tragedy of each individual behind the death is difficult. ‘A hundred million corpses scattered throughout history are only smoke in the imagination’. Like Rieux, an emotional weight hangs about my neck whenever I call a relative to update them on the progress their sick family member may or may not be making. After I’ve hung up the phone, I try to avoid taking a step back to see the forest for the trees. The whole ward of fifteen to thirty people have the same gloomy prospects. Multiplying the anguish I’ve heard down the other end of the line to those numbers, or the daily or even total casualties becomes unbearable.
In managing this, Rieux and his colleagues are pragmatic. In contrast to the navel-gazing of other characters, the hospital staff are gifted with quiet purpose. They do not lose themselves in the moment by meditating on each death. They have to harden their hearts so they must do what they can. You cannot help people if you are paralysed by the grandiose scale of misery compounded on misery. It is enough to do the best you can and move on.
There is hope, however. As the numbers of the sick begin to decrease through January, the townsfolk entertain a mix of emotions and restlessness, excitement tinged with longing for the clubs and cinemas to reopen, to breath easily outdoors and see other people. There is joy for the release of lockdown mixed with the sadness of mourning the victims of the plague. The plague will pass, we can look forward to the exuberance of a lockdown being released. We might enjoy the contrast of what we know is possible.
As the gates of the town open in February, Rieux emerges from the epidemic with a new sense of appreciation of human contact. He sees the joy of the citizens living in the freedom they have longed for because that freedom is so fragile. An unpredictable force majeure may threaten that liberty in situations cast by fate which we are powerless to contain.
Camus offers us the way out from the stifling effects of COVID and the lockdown, the grip it imposes on the lives of the survivors. In living in the shadow of oblivion, we must connect with our fellows and seek pleasure in joy of life. At the height of the epidemic, Rieux and his friend Tarrou go night swimming together in the sea. Whilst bathing, their bodies and their minds are washed clean from the pandemic. Both men find refuge from their struggles in their companionship. The activity is an escape, relieving us as a phone call from our friends or the grips of a good book.
La Peste is a portrait of humans struggling against inhuman, natural forces, the cross section of morals and methods of living one’s life and how they confront a disaster such as a an epidemic. Like the townsfolk of Oran, we continue to examine ourselves in the new light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We reflect with our new understanding of what it means to be. The pandemic painfully reminds us of the thoughtless ways fate fritters human lives away. Men die and are not happy: all of this we enjoy is impermanent and without value. If human life is inherently meaningless, we must create that meaning in the connections we form between our fellow creatures and the beautiful ordinary.
George is writer from Deptford. He has written for The Guardian, Litro and The British Journal of Psychiatry. You may find his work in print and online in places such as Storgy, Horla and The Crazy Oik among others.