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nytimes.com

Camus’s Inoculation Against Hate

Laura Marris
6-8 minutes

Essay

Credit...Joan Wong

Toward the end of January, I began to notice a strange echo between my work and
the news. A mysterious virus had appeared in the city of Wuhan, and though the
virus resembled previous diseases, there was something novel about it. But I’m not
a doctor, an epidemiologist or a public health expert; I’m a literary translator.
Usually my work moves more slowly than the events of the moment, since
translation involves lingering over the patterns of a sentence or the connotations of
a word. But this time the pace of my work and the pace of the virus were eerily
similar. That’s because I’m translating Albert Camus’s novel “The Plague.”

One morning, my task was to revise a scene in which the young doctor Rieux,
realizing that plague has broken out in the Algerian city of Oran, tries to persuade

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his bureaucratic colleagues that they should take the outbreak seriously. He knows
that if they don’t, half the city will die. The city’s leader doesn’t want to alarm
people. He would prefer to avoid calling this disease what it is. When someone says
“plague,” the politician looks at the door, making sure no rumor of this word has
escaped down the tidy administrative hallways. The dramatic irony is delicious —
like watching characters debate the word “bomb” when there’s one ticking under
the table. Dr. Rieux is impatient. “You’re looking at the problem wrong,” he says.
“It’s not a question of vocabulary, it’s a question of time.”

As I translated that sentence, I felt a fissure open between the page and the world,
like a curtain lifted from a two-way mirror. When I looked at the text, I saw the
world behind it — the ambulance sirens of Bergamo, the quarantine of Hubei
province, the odd disjunction between spring flowers at the market and hospital
ships in the news. It was — and is — very difficult to focus, to navigate between
each sentence and its real-time double, to find the fuzzy edges where these
reflections meet.

“The Plague” did not come easily to Camus. He wrote it in Oran, during World War
II, when he was living in an apartment borrowed from in-laws he disliked, and
then in wartime France, tubercular and alone, separated from his wife after
missing the last boat back to Algeria. Unlike the shorter, harsher sentences of “The
Stranger,” which Sartre quipped could have been titled “Translated From Silence,”
the sentences of “The Plague” bear witness to the tension and monotony of illness
and quarantine: They stretch their lengths to match the pull of anxious waiting. By
the time the book was published in 1947, writers were looking for a way to bear
witness as well to the Nazi occupation of France, and “The Plague” was
championed as the novel of the occupation and the Resistance. For Camus, illness
was both his lived experience and a metaphor for war, the creep of fascism, the
horror of Vichy France collaborating in mass murder.

But unlike many of his contemporaries, Camus took the long view. The heroism of
the Resistance was less important to him than how humanity could be restored
after the war. In his speech “The Human Crisis,” delivered at Columbia University
in 1946, he pushed for a postwar return to the human scale, calling hatred and
indifference “symptoms” of this crisis. He refused to let his country off the hook for
its role in spreading this illness: “And it’s too easy, on this point, simply to accuse
Hitler and say that the snake has been destroyed, the venom gone. Because we
know perfectly well that the venom is not gone, that each of us carries it in our own
hearts.”

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While he knew that people carried traces of hatred, he was also hoping those traces
could be disarmed as cultural antibodies. In this same speech, he called for
creating “communities of thought outside parties and governments to launch a
dialogue across national boundaries; the members of these communities will
affirm by their lives and their words that this world must cease to be the world of
police, soldiers and money, and become the world of men and women, of fruitful
work and thoughtful play.” In response to the symptoms of war, Camus saw shared
consciousness as a healing force, becoming particularly interested in how people
could develop a global collectivity that would protect them against nationalism and
fascism. Writing “The Plague” in the form of a historical “chronicle” was a hopeful
gesture, implying human continuity, a vessel to carry the memory of war as an
inoculation against future armed conflicts.

This view met with some pushback. In 1970 Sartre said in an interview, “When I
think of Camus claiming, years later, that the German invasion was like the plague
— coming for no reason, leaving for no reason — quel con, what a fool!”

But while Camus was writing for the moment, he was also writing for the future.
He was making art out of what happens between antibodies and germs, expanding
metaphors from the molecular level. Though many rightly interpret “The Plague”
as a novel about the collective spirit of resistance, there is also a deeper collectivity
at work: our shared antibodies, the immunity of the herd.

The truth is, as a metaphor, translation is uncomfortably close to transmission.

Translators move words across borders, we open gates between one language and
the next. But it matters what is being transmitted. Throughout “The Plague,” old
Dr. Castel is trying to develop a serum to share containing the antibodies of
patients who have survived.

I still hope that books from the past can be a kind of serum for the future, as
Camus intended his novel to be. He knew that his book would be needed again,
long after his death, in a context he couldn’t predict or imagine. Why else would he
have ended it this way: “Indeed, as he heard the cries of delight rising from the
city, Rieux remembered that this delight was always threatened. For he knew what
this joyous crowd did not, and what you can read in books — that the germ of the
plague never dies or disappears, that it can lie dormant for decades in furniture
and linens, that it waits patiently in rooms, in basements, in trunks, among
handkerchiefs and paperwork, and that perhaps the day would come when, for the
sorrow and education of men, the plague would revive its rats and dispatch them
to die in a happy city.”

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