On Albert Camus’s The Plague: Part One.
Summer School, University of Cape Town, 2021.
Condensed version in English Studies in Africa 64:1-2 (2021).
Podcast with Bongani Kona, The Empty Chair, for SA PEN.
She taught me to read the book in a certain way, tilting it sideways as though to make invisible details fall out. — Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation.
for D.B. (1981-2020)
1.
In 1947, Albert Camus published La peste, the story of a town struck by bubonic plague. He judged the book a failure, but The Plague is probably his most successful and widely-read work.
In one sense it is a simple story. Rats come out of cellars and sewers, spitting blood, and begin to die in the streets. Then people begin to die. The town is sealed off and we follow the experiences of a small band of characters as they battle the epidemic. Like a classical tragedy, the book is divided into five acts. In parts one and two, the death toll is rising; in part three it is at its height: ‘the plague had covered everything’. In parts four and five, the disease slowly retreats, and the town is liberated again. Amid the celebrations, the narrator strikes a note of foreboding, and the famous ending reads as follows:
Indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy that rose above the town, Rieux recalled that this joy was always under threat. He knew that this happy crowd was unaware of something that one can read in books, which is that the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely; it can remain dormant for dozens of years in furniture or clothing; it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers, and perhaps the day will come when, for the instruction or misfortune of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city. (237-38)
If you type ‘camus the plague’ into an image search, the huge archive of different book covers gives an idea of how many times this 20th-century classic has been read, translated, reprinted and repackaged. The more literal approaches go for rats and scythes; the more abstract show empty seascapes or dotted geometric patterns that could be microbes or epidemiologists’ models.
There is the photogenic Camus himself, in a famous Henri Cartier-Bresson portrait with cigarette and turned up collar. On one cover he has the eerie, beak-shaped mask of the Plague Doctor graffitied over his face. Used by physicians in Italian cities where the mortality rates reached up to 60% (in 1656, some 150 000 died in Naples alone), these 17th-century respirators had glass discs in front of the eyes and two openings just below each nostril. The ‘beak’ was filled with dried flowers like roses and carnations, herbs like mint, spices, camphor, juniper and ambergris, laudanum, myrrh, straw, perhaps a sponge of vinegar – anything to ward of the ‘miasma’ or bad air (Italian: mal aria) that was thought to spread contagion prior to the germ theory of modern medicine. ‘The inhabitants accused the wind of carrying the seeds of infection’ (130), we hear at one point in The Plague, a residue of the superstition that warm southerlies like the sirocco wafted plague particles across the Mediterranean from the deserts of Egypt.
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