This spring marks the four-year anniversary of a world-historical event.
I mean, of course, our spontaneous global reading group on Albert Camus’s The Plague.
I had read The Plague before as an allegory of the Nazi occupation of France. But like thousands who bought the novel in the wake of the pandemic, I could see, now, that The Plague was in fact an allegory of the plague. The spread of a lethal infectious disease could operate, it turned out, as a powerful symbol for the spread of a lethal infectious disease—as though our farm had been captured by talking animals and we turned to Orwell’s Animal Farm for insight, or read Melville’s “Bartleby” as a how-to for bosses dealing with uncooperative employees.
It is fitting, therefore, that Jacqueline Rose should name her book about the Covid-19 pandemic, which has a chapter on Camus, The Plague, as I have titled this post “The Plague”—reiterating the phrase in the perseverative mode of PTSD.
Rose’s themes are memory and injustice.
By far the worst pandemic of the twentieth century, with a death toll higher than the two world wars combined, the Spanish flu has been more or less erased from history.
I don’t think this will happen with Covid-19. But for some of us, it inhabits a liminal space between memory and dream, in which it comes as a shock—a kind of reality check—to remind ourselves this actually happened and is still happening. Do you remember when there were temporary morgues outside hospitals in New York City? When children couldn’t go to school for months on end? For the most part, I don’t think about it.
It was transparent at the time how differential wealth shaped our experience of the pandemic: social hierarchy became salient to those who had been oblivious. Rose writes:
Just for a moment, it felt as if the wool had been lifted from their eyes and a whole order of exploitation and inequality might just—or so we hoped—come to an end.
We are still hoping; but the glass gets darker.
That’s why I opened with irony: to preserve emotional distance. Others turn to poetry or literary fervor—as in Dayswork, a lapidary autofiction by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel about the pandemic experience of a bookish couple, in which the first-person-narrator wife becomes obsessed with Herman Melville. She gets the bug from the poet and essayist Mary Ruefle, March 2019, and relapses a year later:
It would appear, my husband once said, that Mary Ruefle is a Melville vector.
Melville’s troubled marriage—and so his darker side—looms large in a novel concerned with the difficult marriages of Melville’s admirers, including hints of difficulty in the narrator’s own. But the hypnotic fragments that make up the book are wry, and funny, as well as mournful. They picture, in a way I’ve rarely seen before, the consolation and eros of literary scholarship.
In one of my favourite moments, the narrator takes stock of Bartleby, the scrivener.
Melville, erstwhile citizen of what James Woods called a “city of words,” imprisoned Bartleby in a cramped linguistic cell.
I count, this morning, just two hundred and forty-three words of speech directly attributed to Bartleby, and just seventy-eight words in his lexicon:
… after which she lists them all, in order, separated by pipes ( | ). Her point is that Bartleby has few words, but if I’m honest, I was startled by how many. Like others, I remember him for his refrain—“I would prefer not to”—and had forgotten that he says much more: at | banister | change | definite | else…
A character defined by silence and the repetition of a five-word phrase turns out to have a real but limited loquacity, to know more words than we recall, to be fuller and more variegated and more human, to hold more possibility, more pain, more pity than our memories record.
Our forgetting feels like an allegory of something—though I can’t say what.
Thank you for this, Kieran. I liked how you captured that I-know-it-happened-but-did-it-really? sense I also have about COVID in 2020/21. It seems fitting that you mentioned PTSD—not that we have a collective case of it exactly but because of how trauma (and stress :) interact with and bend/distort/enhance memory.
I think the pandemic was an opening whereby we might have reflected on social inequality, injustice and our finitude. An opportunity that was lost as social distancing kicked in - made actually worse by technology.
Kieran, did you write about it and how major disruptions impinge on our notion of the good life?
Rose's book is really good! But Paradiso by her sister remains my favourite.