Visiting La Peste
A wave of something like panic swept the town. There was a demand for drastic measures, the authorities were accused of slackness and people who had houses on the coast spoke of moving there, early in the year though it was.
Albert Camus once wrote an allegory about World War 2, he wrote in the form of a plague. The horror begins when Dr. Rieux comes across a dead rat, and another, and another… The epidemic then seizes Oran, a fictional prefecture in Algeria. Only after it becomes impossible to ignore, then the authorities applied strict sanitation measures, placing the whole city under quarantine. The people then react to the immediate confinement with intense longing for their absent loved ones.
Like the people in Oran before the occupation of the plague, we assume that our lives have been granted safety of any danger, and this ineptitude conceived a behavior of a joyless, hatred for others, and a lack sense of fellowship. One character gave suspicion of the reality of the plague, calling in the 1947 of the West, the Plague had vanished. In the time where a quarter of the citizens of Oran is dying, people still believe that the plague won’t get to them. The pestilence does not come in human dimensions, like wars, so people tell themselves it is unreal, that it will vanish just when one wants it to vanish.
For Camus, being alive is truly an “underlying condition”. To live is to have an emergency and constant awareness of all the things happening around us. In the end, when the plague is successfully contained, Dr. Rieux still believes that the plague will once again come crashing, and send another unprepared city to suffer. Camus holds up human’s absurd vulnerability, that no man can be immune from the plague that is life’s absurdity. When writing “La Peste”, Camus did not consider this to be a warning of the real plague marching into the world. 73 years later, it feels like he did.
First Published on Highlights! Magazine issue Pit-Stop 2021
