The Instruction of Pestilence
Ebola, Denial, Fear and Panic
LONDON — Webster’s Dictionary defines plague as “anything that afflicts or troubles; calamity; scourge.” Further definitions include “any contagious epidemic disease that is deadly; esp., bubonic plague” and, from the Bible, “any of various calamities sent down as divine punishment.” The verb form means “to vex; harass; trouble; torment.”
In
Albert Camus’ novel, “The Plague,” written soon after the Nazi
occupation of France, the first sign of the epidemic is rats dying in
numbers: “They came up from basements and cubby-holes, cellars and
drains, in long swaying lines; they staggered in the light, collapsed
and died, right next to people. At night, in corridors and side-streets,
one could clearly hear the tiny squeaks as they expired. In the
morning, on the outskirts of town, you would find them stretched out in
the gutter with a little floret of blood on their pointed muzzles, some
blown up and rotting, other stiff, with their whiskers still standing
up.”
The
rats are messengers, but — human nature being what it is — their
message is not immediately heeded. Life must go on. There are errands to
run, money to be made. The novel is set in Oran, an Algerian coastal
town of commerce and lassitude, where the heat rises steadily to the
point that the sea changes color, deep blue turning to a “sheen of
silver or iron, making it painful to look at.” Even when people start to
die — their lymph nodes swollen, blackish patches spreading on their
skin, vomiting bile, gasping for breath — the authorities’ response is
hesitant. The word “plague” is almost unsayable. In exasperation, the
doctor-protagonist tells a hastily convened health commission: “I don’t
mind the form of words. Let’s just say that we should not act as though
half the town were not threatened with death, because then it would be.”
The
sequence of emotions feels familiar. Denial is followed by faint
anxiety, which is followed by concern, which is followed by fear, which
is followed by panic. The phobia is stoked by the sudden realization
that there are uncontrollable dark forces, lurking in the drains and the
sewers, just beneath life’s placid surface. The disease is a leveler,
suddenly everyone is vulnerable, and the moral strength of each
individual is tested. The plague is on everyone’s minds, when it’s not
in their bodies. Questions multiply: What is the chain of transmission?
How to isolate the victims?
Plague and epidemics are a thing of the past, of course they are. Physical contact has been cut to a minimum in developed societies. Devices and their digital messages direct our lives. It is not necessary to look into someone’s eyes let alone touch their skin in order to become, somehow, intimate. Food is hermetically sealed. Blood, secretions, saliva, pus, bodily fluids — these are things with which hospitals deal, not matters of daily concern.
A
virus contracted in West Africa, perhaps by a man hunting fruit bats in
a tropical forest to feed his family, and cutting the bat open, cannot
affect a nurse in Dallas, Texas, who has been wearing protective
clothing as she tended a patient who died. Except that it does.
“Pestilence is in fact very common,” Camus observes, “but we find it
hard to believe in a pestilence when it descends upon us.”
The
scary thing is that the bat that carries the virus is not sick. It is
simply capable of transmitting the virus in the right circumstances. In
other words, the virus is always lurking even if invisible. It is easily
ignored until it is too late.
Pestilence,
of course, is a metaphor as well as a physical fact. It is not just
blood oozing from gums and eyes, diarrhea and vomiting. A plague had
descended on Europe as Camus wrote. The calamity and slaughter were
spreading through the North Africa where he had passed his childhood.
This virus hopping today from Africa to Europe to the United States has
come in a time of beheadings and unease. People put the phenomena
together as denial turns to anxiety and panic. They sense the stirring
of uncontrollable forces. They want to be wrong but they are not sure
they are.
At
the end of the novel, the doctor contemplates a relieved throng that
has survived: “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, that it can remain dormant for dozens of years in
furniture or clothing, that it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars,
trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers, and that 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.”
The most surprising word there is the most important: The epidemic may also serve for the “instruction” of a blithe humanity.
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