What Dies in the Street: Camus’s La Peste and Infected Networks

Introduction

When Albert Camus documented the occupation of the Free Zone of France by Nazi Germany in 1942 by writing, “11 novembre. Comme des rats!” (Cahiers 52), he had already set in motion the controversy that was to greet his novel, La Peste. The book, published in 1947, produced a fierce disagreement among France’s intellectuals. For Roland Barthes, the novel was simple: Nazism is transformed into bubonic plague and, in the face of timid politicians and an uncooperative public, a small band of idealistic resisters fight to beat back the scourge. While Barthes praised the call to arms he saw in the novel, he could not help asking if the very act of using metaphor to understand fascism represented a dangerous disengagement from history: “Le romancier a-t-il le droit d’aliéner les faits de l’histoire? Est-ce qu’une peste peut équivaloir, je ne dis pas à une occupation, mais à l’occupation?” (Barthes, “La Peste” 8). Barthes’s skepticism about Camus’s approach to his subject matter was transformed into outright derision in Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir wrote in La Force des Choses that, “assimiler l’occupation à un fléau naturel, c’était encore fuir l’histoire et les vrais problèmes” (Qtd. in Guérin 235–36). She felt that the novel, by replacing the “human” evil of fascism with a “natural” bacterium, exculpated Nazis and their collaborators for their acts.

The idea that Camus was wrong to naturalize fascism has endured. Giuliana Lund reiterated it as recently as 2011, writing that “the plague allegory naturalizes evil and universalizes suffering while minimizing collaboration in the interests of imagining a unified resistance” (134). This criticism, however, depends on a definition of the natural that is in contradiction with Camus’s usage of it in La Peste. Camus has Tarrou, a vacationer trapped in Oran by the quarantine, say of the plague, “Ce qui est naturel, c’est le microbe. Le reste, la santé, l’intégrité, la pureté, si vous voulez, c’est un effet de la volonté et d’une volonté qui ne doit jamais s’arrêter” (228). Camus distinguishes the disease vector from health, a socially defined concept. In this way Camus alludes to an important distinction between disease and epidemic, a difference Ed Cohen elucidates:

The rudimentary distinction between epidemics and epizootics—that is between illness patterns that afflict humans as opposed to those that afflict all other types of animals—assumes simultaneously that the kind of life that humans incorporate essentially differs from all other livings beings (the zoe in epizootics) and that what makes human life special is the political character that qualifies it as ‘human’ in the first place (the demos in epidemic).

(Cohen 16)

An epidemic is marked by its effect on political life. The plague might originate in a bacterium, but its causes and effects are human. Tarrou’s explanation of the disease’s origins can thus be directly followed by an accusation: “personne, non, personne au monde n’est indemne” (La Peste 228). Camus’s deployment of the disease metaphor does not necessarily imply a displacement of responsibility away from people. On the contrary, as he tells Barthes: “Ce que ces combattants, dont j’ai traduit un peu l’expérience, ont fait, ils l’ont fait justement contre des hommes” (Lettre 7).

Camus continues: “Ils le referont sans doute, devant toute terreur et quel que soit son visage, car la terreur en a plusieurs, ce qui justifie encore un peu que je n’en ai nommé précisément aucun” (7). While Camus acknowledged that his novel was partly about the Nazi occupation, he rebelled against the idea that he had written an allegory. Indeed, there are numerous inconsistencies with such a reading. The rats of Oran, which seem on the basis of Camus’s notebook to stand in for Nazi soldiers, do not fulfill the role of the Germans. Most of them die of plague in the novel’s first chapters and those that do not are gassed and...