la peste (camus)

Camus’ novels were mandatory reading when I was a teenager. La Peste possessed a mythic resonance, a book which talked about a past our grandparents knew, one which we were so lucky not to have experienced. The received idea that this is a novel about the war, and that the plague is a metaphor. Clearly, today, the metaphorical elements fade as we contemplate how Camus’ vision of the plague compares to our own version. In so many ways, it feels incredibly accurate in its depiction of the various stages of an epidemic, as well as the way in which it charts the psychological cost of the experience. Two things perhaps stand out. One is the way in which the internet has altered the experience. In comparison to the absolute isolation and claustrophobia of Oran’s plague, the internet has permitted us to experience our plague as a testing ground for what some would call the metaverse. Our world shrunk, in so far as planes and boats stopped moving, but the internet permitted a semblance of normality to be maintained, or even a new normality to be constructed. The second is that La Peste offers a heavily masculine view of the world that renders it, today, feeling as though it’s only offering a partial story. I recall, as that teenager, consuming the novel avariciously. Re-reading it I found much of the story, the detail and the characters, had stayed with me. But on a second read, it feels perhaps more limited in scope. The existential quest for meaning, or rather a reason to get out of bed in the morning, remains, but Camus’ philosophising feels less urgent now than it did then. Perhaps this is because I was only at the beginning then, I was grateful to find a writer willing to engage with these issues, guiding me towards the relevance of the everyday. Now that I have inhabited so many everydays, the novel’s Sisyphean defence of the value of a constant engagement with the banal demands of the daily struggle feels less inspiring. Furthermore, this is now an account of a life we have all lived over the course of these past two years, and Camus’s veneration of the small heroes, whilst apposite, feels tired. We want to move on, we want to start dreaming again.