The Plague

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 …