The Plague by Albert CamusMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
All crises produce reactionary literature, art, and music. That is the coping mechanism of humans against adversity. There would be no Catch-22 without World War II, no Love in the Time of Cholera, no Woodstock, no Guide, no गोदान Godan . Sometimes, prescient humans can predict the future in an uncomfortably accurate fashion – Soderbegh’s The Contagion.
In the present pandemic, Bansky’s inimitable graffiti pays tribute to Nurses. Stay-at-home art is restricted to painting masks on Raja Ravi Verma’s saree-clad damsels and Mona Lisa. All genres of electronic music – Progressive, Techno, Trance, House – have been produced at home for live streaming. However, most of the angst against the fear and uncertainty, rebellion against lockdowns is reflected in memes on social media platforms.
Suffering takes humans to sublime levels – take e.g., the deaf Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Glaucoma, epileptic seizures and a touch of psychosis resulted in van Gogh’s Starry Night. Picasso painted Guernica in response to the bombing of Guernica by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy at the request of the Spanish Nationalists. It portrays the suffering of people and animals wrought by violence and chaos. Prominent in the composition are a gored horse, a bull, screaming women, dismemberment, and flames.
The Plague was recommended by Nirupama Subramanian in an editorial of The Indian Express as the allegory… has to be read literally for the amazing exactness with which it describes the world at this time, while the underlying story about human conduct in war-time France holds up to us a mirror about the moral diseases of our own times.
Here are some extracts from the book and their equivalent present states. This is mother Nature rebelling against pollution and climate change:
was as though the very soil on which our houses were built was purging itself of an excess of bile, that it was letting boils and abscesses rise to the surface, which up to then had been devouring it inside.
Call it Wuhan virus, Novel corona virus or SARS-CoV-2, it is a killer:
Therefore it doesn’t matter whether you call it plague or growing pains.
Here is forced quarantine or isolation:
Impatient with the present, hostile to the past and deprived of a future, we really did then resemble those whom justice or human hatred has forced to live behind bars.
The middle class indifferent to the woes of the migrants and other economically challenged:
No one yet had really accepted the idea of the disease. Most were chiefly affected by whatever upset their habits or touched on their interests. They were annoyed or irritated by them, and these are not feelings with which to fight the plague.
The fear and uncertainty of the extent of COVID-19 and its long-term economic consequences:
But this rotten bastard of a disease! Even those who don’t have it, carry it in their hearts.
Coronavirus is the great leveler, even heads of stat are not immune to it:
From the higher point of view adopted by the plague, everyone, from the prison governor to the least of the inmates, was condemned, and perhaps for the first time absolute justice reigned inside the jail.
Eventually ennui and banality set in:
But it seemed that the plague had settled comfortably into its peak and was carrying out its daily murders with the precision and regularity of a good civil servant.
The oft quoted ominous conclusive sentence:
the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely, that it can remain dormant for dozens of years in furniture or clothing, that it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers, and that 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.
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