Saturday 21 March 2020

'What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves'

Camus | The Plague

‘Literature always anticipates life. It doesn’t copy it but moulds it to its purpose’, said Oscar Wilde.

All our delightful literatures that we drink deep of, from around the world, across genres and languages - how true they prove to this credo!

The current ‘Covid’ pandemic that’s proving lethal in many parts of the world, has forced many governments across the world, to come out with pro-people initiatives and strategies to safeguard its citizens.

Great novelists, poets and writers from across frontiers have also sprinkled on paper their very own figments of imagination and their artistic air of realities on the subject.  


Indeed, literatures in English from far and wide, have been witness to great creative spirits who have written extensively about plagues, pestilences, epidemics and pandemics – both fictitious, allegorical and real as well, in their books, across ages and climes!

True to this credo - since time immemorial - the pages of the past have had their own shares of plagues and pestilences from across the world; and writers, who have many a times proved mirrors to their milieu, have spontaneously given vent to the impact and the intensity of these contagious diseases, in their intensely original and highly creative musings.

One such intense reflection - albeit fictitious in its ambit - of an epidemic that sweeps through the town of Oran in Northern Algeria sounds quite premonitory and highly relevant to today’s scenario! 

It’s no wonder then, that this Albert Camus masterpiece titled The Plague, catapulted him to instant celebrity status, thanks to the intense air of reality that pervades the pages of this philosophical read, all through!

While reading through The Plague I was quite spontaneously reminded of the famous Oscar Wilde-an dictum – ‘Literature always anticipates life. It doesn’t copy it but moulds it to its purpose’.

How true Wilde proves!

Coming first to the epigraph to this Camus delight!

Well, the epigraph is from Defoe, and it goes thus -

‘It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not’.
- Daniel Defoe

Coincidentally, Defoe himself had literally lived through one of the greatest plagues of London, which had killed one thousand people in just a week’s time, back then in 1665! Defoe’s historical novel titled, A Journal of the Plague Year is an intense testament to this sordid event!

Coming back to Camus’s The Plague: how beautifully does Camus come out with such an intense and descriptive analysis of the human predicament during such a time of crisis – the outbreak of the plague - by carefully bringing out the reactions of the residents of the town during the course of the spread of this epidemic! 

Race, class and social hierarchies disintegrate quick and fall flat in the face of death that’s staring at everyone in town now!

People of the town did not even have the time and the thought to have a relaxed look at the beautiful sea that lay pretty close to them in this port town! They were so engrossed in their petty trifles and foibles that they did not have the time to heed to the still, solemn voice of nature, says Camus.

Now, people are in panic mode all along! 

Everyone is afraid of coming out of their homes for fear of contracting the dreaded plague. In addition to self-imposed barricading, a social curfew is also imposed on the town, by the imposition of a martial law. The situation is highly tense!

Dr. Rieux, who dons the role of the protagonist in the novel, gives a descriptive narration of the lives of many people in the town of Oran, that’s now infected by the plague.

The conflicting dualities in the thought processes of the main characters seem to have been so elegantly brought out by Camus. He deserves two Nobels just for this, and for this alone! ;-)

Rieux the protagonist, is also a profound and compassionate humanist. He does not believe in the trappings of conventional religion when it comes to combating the plague. To him, human solidarity in such times of crisis, is the best antidote to the epidemic, by all means!

However, there’s Paneloux the priest who believes that the plague is God’s punishment on the people of Oran, and hence only through divine mediations and meditations the plague could possibly be eradicated from off the town!

However, towards the end, both the characters resolve to bury the hatchet and their differences as well, and come together in one accord, to defeat the plague, albeit through scientific ways and means.

There’s such a nourishing plenty in store for the avid reader, particularly the Camus buff, in every word and every line of this profound Camus read!

The novel thereby proves such an intense contemplation on human solidarity and the responsibility of every individual as well, in combating the plague!

Added, the book abounds with such memorable, high-octane quotes and maxims, that are so delightful by all means! In fact, every page has a memorable line up for grabs! But me thought of giving just a sample from them all, as appetizers to the main course that’s in store for us all!

So here we go…

Perhaps the easiest way of making a town’s acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die. 

In our little town (is this, one wonders, an effect of the climate?) all three are done on much the same lines, with the same feverish yet casual air. 

The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits. Our citizens work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich. Their chief interest is in commerce, and their chief aim in life is, as they call it, ‘doing business’.

Certainly nothing is commoner nowadays than to see people working from morn till night and then proceeding to fritter away at card-tables, in cafes and in small-talk what time is left for living.

At Oran, as elsewhere, for lack of time and thinking, people have to love one another without knowing much about it.

And he knew, also, what the old man was thinking as his tears flowed, and he, Rieux, thought it too: that a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one’s work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.

‘It comes to this’, Tarrou said almost casually; ‘what interests me is learning how to become a saint’.
‘But you don’t believe in God’.
‘Exactly! Can one be a saint without God?—that’s the problem, in fact the only problem, I’m up against today’.

‘Another skirmish at the gates, I suppose’.
‘Well, it’s over now’, Rieux said.
Tarrou said in a low voice that it was never over, and there would be more victims, because that was in the order of things.
‘Perhaps’, the doctor answered. ‘But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don’t really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man’.
‘Yes, we’re both after the same thing, but I’m less ambitious’.

‘However, you think, like Paneloux, that the plague has its good side; it opens men’s eyes and forces them to take thought?’

The doctor tossed his head impatiently.

So does every ill that flesh is heir to. What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves. 

All the same, when you see the misery it brings, you’d need to be a madman, or a coward, or stone blind, to give in tamely to the plague.