I survive the Algerian plague with Albert Camus

The Plague *****
By Albert Camus

Every evening mothers wailed ... with distraught abstraction, as their eyes fell on those fatal stigmata on limbs and bellies; every evening hands gripped [Dr.] Rieux's arms, there was a rush of useless words, promises, and tears; every evening the nearing tocsin of the ambulance provoked scenes as vain as every form of grief. Rieux had nothing to look forward to but a long sequence of such scenes, renewed again and again. Yes, plague, like abstraction, was monotonous.

I confess I avoided this work for many years because I feared a thinly disguised treatise on abstract existentialism. And certainly this novel has been worked over on that score ad nauseam. But whatever it may be for philosophers, Camus' novel is an utter masterwork of literary style and concrete observations on people collectively and individually. 

The set-up: Oran, Algeria, is hit by the Black Death in modern times. People are sophisticated. Doctors understand the nature of disease. There are drugs to fight the illness. There are health departments and the police and any number of organizations designed to deal with emergencies. And yet Oran is eventually cut off by the rest of the world, medicine cannot arrive quickly enough to stave off a catastrophe, families are separated into quarantine centers, citizens must resort to mass graves and quick lime to handle the dead, the religious find their faith shaken into new paths, and everyone finds out new things about their own characters in the course of the illness.

As the novel opens, the signs of coming plague are clear; rats crawl out of their hiding places, writhe, bleed, and die before the citizens of Oran, who mostly walk around or over them, refusing to see the beginnings of apocalypse. As Camus chronicles the spread of the disease from rats to people and its advance throughout the city, he writes that they would similarly walk past the the noises of their sick neighbors: "... under the prolonged strain it seemed that hearts had toughened; people lived beside those groans or walked past them as though they had become the normal speech of men."

"The Plague" draws on records kept by several residents of Oran during the illness, and the shifting points of view offers a richness of observation. As described in the previous paragraph, Camus sometimes chronicles the collective behavior of the citizens. At other times, he focuses on a personal account. The old man in an apartment building who spits on cats is one such individual.

The old man's chief entertainment is to scatter bits of paper from his balcony down to the stone walls of his building to attract the local cats. The cats play happily with the bits of paper. And when they settle down on the warm stones for a rest, the old man leans over, takes aim, and spits on their heads. The cats don't seem to mind; at least, they show up every day. But as the rats went, so went the cats, and then the people. And the old man, bereft of his cat friends and chief entertainment, quarantines himself in the house in utter loneliness.

The novel also imagines the logistics of a quarantined city trying to transport the dead from hospitals to mass graves as the number of individual coffins dwindles:

At one moment, the stock of coffins in Rieux's hospital was reduced to five. Once filled, all five were loaded together in the ambulance. At the cemetery they were emptied out and the iron-gray corpses put on stretchers and deposited in a shed reserved for that purpose, to wait their turn. Meanwhile, the empty coffins, after being sprayed with antiseptic fluid, were rushed back to the hospital and the process was repeated as often as necessary.

Eventually, space for the mass graves runs out, and the bodies must be taken to the crematorium. Bodies are transported at night in open carts so as not to shock the residents and to offer the dead some seemly cover of darkness. Residents are warned to keep away from burial areas and the crematorium, but even at the height of the plague, a kind of primal respect for the dead shows itself:

And thought the cliffs were patrolled day and night, little groups of people contrived to thread their way unseen between the rocks and would toss flowers into the open trailers as the cars went by. And in the warm darkness of the summer nights the cars could be heard clanking on their way, laden with flowers and corpses.

At some points, the plague is personified, "a shrewd, unflagging adversary; a skilled organizer, doing his work thoroughly and well." The plague's "work," of course, is despair. As the death rate climbs, people deal with the plague more out of habit than from any sense that things will get better. They lose faith in institutions and devolve into a kind of hopeless superstition. Camus notes that residents are more likely to wear St. Roch medals as talismans than to actually go to Mass.

As the plague gradually burns itself out and sections of the city return to normality, hope returns again. The quarantine is lifted. And residents turn their attention to building "some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them ... and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise."

Are we to take the memorial at face value? Or as the kind of platitude people often cling to after surviving a cataclysm? Perhaps a bit of both? Toward the end of the novel, Camus offers a veiled warning about the plague and all catastrophes to come: 

... the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its tie in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.