La peste

Perhaps out of a sense of morbidity, I decided that now - in the midst of a pandemic which has exiled almost all of us to the confines of our homes - would be as good a time as any to return, and finally to finish, Camus' The Plague. I had started the book a couple of years ago, but alas the writing of my Masters' thesis tore me away, and from then other distractions thrust themselves upon me.

I absolutely adored it. The strange, occasionally detached style of narration makes the experience slightly rough going at the start, but as the narrative begins to unfurl and the characters involved in this story more fully develop, the narrator allows himself to talk somewhat more 'subjectively' about these experiences. I found myself in love with the richness of these characters - particularly Jean Tarrou, who becomes Rieux's closest friend and confidant in this book.

The parallels with France under Nazi occupation are clear, but we can nevertheless take much from it today. This is a bleak, tragic book but not without optimism or hope. The danger we face today, at a time when Fascism is returning to us again, is that we lose our 'sense' of the true cost of Fascism. Like the plague, it will always be with us as long as the will-to-fascism within us is not driven out. In a powerful and moving speech by Tarrou, he says that "Yes, indeed, Rieux, it is very tiring to be a plague victim. But it is still more tiring not to want to be one. This is why everyone appears tired, because nowadays everyone is a little infected. But this is why a few, who want to cease to be victims, experience an extreme form of tiredness from which nothing except death will deliver them."

Only eight years after Camus' untimely and tragic death, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst and activist Félix Guattari published [b: Anti-Oedipus|118317|Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia|Gilles Deleuze|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347698453l/118317.SY75.jpg|113899] (1968). In a now-famous preface to the book, their friend Michel Foucault wrote that their book should be understood as a 'guide to anti-fascist life', and that "the major enemy [of the book] is fascism. And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini—which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively—but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us."

This is the plague which Camus believes infects us and which, without constant struggle against it, will always risk re-emerging from the sewers of society. It is not enough merely to oppose Fascism in its historical form, we must oppose and root out those elements of fascism - the love of power, of violence, of superiority - in our own minds which give birth to it. "I know that we must constantly keep a watch on ourselves to avoid being distracted for a moment and find ourselves breathing in another person's face and infecting him." If not, then "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." This book speaks profoundly and beautifully to the universal desire for peace on this earth and what it might take to make it a reality.

"That is why this epidemic has taught me nothing except that it must be fought at your side. I have absolute knowledge of this - yes Rieux, I know everything about life, as you can see - that everyone has inside it himself, this plague, because no one in the world, no one, is immune. [...] All I can say is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims - and as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence."