Abstract
This essay is a reflection on Albert Camus’s revival during the COVID-19 pandemic of the early 2020s. The popularity of Camus’s novel, The Plague, is considered alongside his other writing as something that speaks to many throughout their lives. Such appraisal is interspersed with personal reflections on family life during pandemic lockdowns and the ways that Camus’s thought resounds in our everyday selves. Written in two parts at different times – mainly in 2020 and with a 2023 afterthought – the essay critically acknowledges how Camus instructs us to live together with meaning and dignity in an age of catastrophe.
Keywords
Camus is back. The Plague (1947/2001) is everywhere. Its brave everyday characters resonate with our ideal selves, our care workers and our belief in a possible ending to the global pandemic. But his allegory also highlights how exclusionary politics is always an option. Our city selves are vulnerable – to plague, to authority – in spite of our desire not to be. Outbreaks remain possible. They can get out of control. Liberalism is not immune to tyranny.
Everyone is at home now. Thankfully. We live on a southern edge of the Kulin Nation, outside of a greater Melbourne experiencing lockdown deja vu. Like everyone, our extended families are spread around Australia and the world. Some work in health care, some reside in aged care, some have recovered from the virus. The restrictions here are less stringent than in the nearby city. Still, family, work and school are now all in one place. Strangely, the arrangement is in the direction of a social intimacy I aspire to: the five of us and our generous small-town neighbours. We’re close. And very fortunate.
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Over the last few years, I’ve often thought of writing a piece titled ‘Why not Camus?’ But like so many thought bubbles, it probably won’t happen. Life intervenes. Perhaps this piece is it.
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A few minutes of our mornings pass like this:
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I never quite understood why Camus fell out of favour as a social theorist. Times change, of course. French theory is a genealogy of eclipse. He always sat awkwardly – another colonial outsider – among the Parisian set, anyway. Now he speaks of another era, a mid-20th century blokey moment that arguably stifles thinking clearly about our current milieu. Nietzschean individualism often resounds. He didn’t really outline a programme, more a sensibility. Other criticisms are possible. But aspects of his thinking surely remain important. The themes certainly are – friendship, alienation, rebellion, justice, death; so too the range of ways he presented his thought – novels, plays, short stories, essays and exegeses.
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Camus became ‘old theory’. Something that went onto, and then off, school syllabi. (That hasn’t happened to Foucault just yet.) But Camus shouldn’t be reserved for serious adolescent seriousness, as valid as that feeling is. At 16, like many, I devoured a well-worn copy of The Outsider (1942/2014) among the suburban sand dunes of Perth, Western Australia. That’s Noongar country. There the light, air and ocean – Mediterranean, supposedly, but not really – offered an affiliation with the sites of Camus’s works. I rescued the book from a stack of school throw-outs. I’d heard, probably via The Cure, that it was important. The Plague soon accompanied me to the beach. Just another case of Antipodean cosmopolitan becoming.
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Camus’s pied-noir perspective paid little attention to the Arab-Berber experiences in Oran. He’s rightly criticised for this oversight. Black lives didn’t matter. But we know he knew they did. I’ve been wondering if perhaps this absence in The Plague was unconsciously intentional. That’s probably too generous. Perhaps it’s just another unintended lesson from the text. All societies pretended to ignore their Others until they need them as that. Like right now. Plague pronounces social exclusions.
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My daughter is learning to sew by making an advent calendar on the sewing machine. She is dreaming of Christmas. My youngest son loves making little stitched pockets. The machine is out on the dining table because my partner has been mastering the art of mask making. Our 17-year-old neighbour taught her. The room is filled with the sound of photosynthesis as my older son watches a video explaining the process. It’s narrated by a man speaking English with a French accent.
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The First Man (1995) is probably my favourite Camus. It’s an unfinished autobiographical novel about his childhood in Algiers. Reading such posthumous manuscripts always sits awkwardly with me. I bought it at a bookshop in Warsaw at the end of last century. I was cycling across Europe and read it when resting by the roadside. A few days later I ended up staying in a town to the east of the capital. I lodged there with an Irish teacher that I’d stumbled across. He’d been working and living in the secondary school for a few years by then. He’d done a Masters on Camus at University College Dublin. And he came from a town only a couple of hours walk from my father’s family village. It was a memorable few days of serendipitous friendship. He loved Bob Dylan. I’m sure he still does.
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My daughter has finished their set school work for the day. It’s not yet mid-morning. She sits on the couch reading Hergé’s Tintin adventure, King Ottokar’s Sceptre (1938/2015). Written at the end of the 1930s, it is an anti-Nazi satire of Hitler’s expansion into Czechoslovakia. When the Nazis arrived in Brussels, however, Hergé changed his tune to keep in step. He chose self-promotion in Le Soir; Camus ran the French Resistance’s Combat. My daughter doesn’t care. But she’s wearing a Mafalda t-shirt, a different comic-strip child, a resistor of the same adult tyranny as Tintin from a different but related context of unrest, 1960s Argentina. Her voice sings out: ‘Stop the world! I want to get off!’
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Camus and Francine Faure, a mathematician and pianist, had twins: a daughter and a son – Catherine et Jean. Did he write about his children in his works? Not that I recall. Someone else will know. Someone’s always read more of someone’s work than someone else. Social theory is a social theory.
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During the 20 years that I’ve taught in universities, mainly on short-term contracts it must be said, I’ve had numerous children in my classes – sometimes infants in prams, usually sweet primary-aged children who were remarkably attentive. Almost always they come with their mothers. Once, a father brought his daughter. This year my son appeared in an online tutorial wearing pyjamas. He dragged a basket of Lego across the floor of our spare room, waving as he exited.
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The First Man is Camus’s homage to his mother. It contains a visceral scene that always reminds me of his, and our, tenuous economic circumstances. His childhood home was far from bourgeois. His father died at the Marne shortly after Albert was born. Money was tight. Poverty struck. One day Jacques, Camus-the-boy, thought he’d keep for himself a two-franc piece he’d received as change when running an errand. He wanted the money to attend a football match. At home, he assured his stern working-class grandmother that the money had fallen into the toilet, which was ‘too exalted a term’ for the fetid hole in the ground. (Did they have enough toilet paper?) The grandmother reached into it, up to her elbow, to feel around for it. No avail, of course. Camus gave voice to his guilt from this episode in the book:
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My son is running through the house while I type, sitting in the living room. He stops next to me. Says nothing. Kisses me. And then leaps back across the room.
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Absurdism might seem apposite, but it’s inadequate.
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‘Kids, I’ve reached my limit. Everyone needs to go outside now for at least 20 minutes.’
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Ours is a crisis of care. Who’s caring for whom? Who’s not being cared for? Who doesn’t care? How is care assessed, arranged, acted? How is care perpetuated? How can care become the central organising principle of our time? Camus cared about care in The Plague. It was written during the war and appeared in 1947. His was the kind of thinking that made permissible the exceptionalism – however problematic – of post-war social democracies. Public service and public good were means of combatting and recovering from crises that affected everyone.
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‘Hey, Daddy, when will you be finished your work?’
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My kids and I play football with a stress ball in the living room. The front door is the goal. The furniture becomes deft team mates – Barstooli! Brooke Shelfy! Kit Shinbench! Camus was a reliable goalkeeper at Racing Universitaire Algérois (RUA). He stopped playing when he contracted the white plague – tuberculosis. In an interview before his unexpected death, in a car accident aged 46, he offered this now well-loved line: ‘After many years during which I saw many things, what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport and learned it in the RUA’ (Camus Society, 2017).
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As much as I’m suggesting his writings are still relevant, Camus is no longer enough. Perhaps he will always remain a starting point. Times have changed. Camus’s female characters were poorly developed, but elements of his thought are reconcilable with a feminist ethos. (He championed Simone Weil – who also deserves more attention.) As for ecological devastation, that wasn’t on his radar. These, among others, are the ‘struggles and wishes’ of our times. Our tradition of thinking, in which I gladly include Camus, offers many ideas to counter the strange combination of parsimony and avarice that is still being presented as our future. Another alternative – authoritarianism – is also a serious global contender. Others, like you, are working towards a better future – tangibly more kind, more just. This important work will continue to challenge uncaring forces. I am grateful and hopeful.
Afterthoughts
All of the above was written during the fog of the first COVID-19 winter. Now it’s summer in 2023 and Camus remains within me still. COVID-19 is here to stay too. Amazing work was done by so many to understand and combat its spread. This focus continues. As does the essential work of those usually overlooked and who help our society function. That became clear to all, if only momentarily.
Our family still thrives. The children are wiser. They continue to be joyful, playful, loveful. They’ve stayed resistant to malaise that has struck down many schoolgoers – students and teachers alike – after the quarantines and lockdowns. It’s this blight’s effects that worry me now.
Writing the piece above led me to re-read some of Camus’s work and some secondary literature on him from the last decade or so. The latter shows that a steady interest in Camus continues. This interest is heartening. And it is separate from the arcane pages of much, but not all, of today’s social theory. I imagine Camus would be pleased with this position: an outsider to the academy, yet respected in the world of letters. In that sense, he never fell out of favour, he just became subsumed by our textual superabundance.
Of the Camus writing that’s new to me, I explored those that appeal only to the devotee – the leftovers and keepsakes of a life valued by others. His essays, like those collected in English as Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (Camus, 1996), present his loathing and empathy for the European self at its mid-century crossroads. Read alongside Algerian Chronicles (Camus, 1958/2014), though poetic and sophisticated, his limits are reaffirmed: from pied-noir anguish to an abstract belief in an abstract justice. It’s understandable. And Fanon offers a counterbalance with his own tilt.
The more recent release of the correspondence between Camus and his long-time lover, María Casarès, discloses something quite different to his essays (Camus and Casarès, 2020). Dipping into them, I found Camus’s heart struggling – the wrestle of morality and responsibility in a man, a father, a husband, whose death is accelerating faster than anyone would like. The letters’ confidentialities disrupt the homely version of family life I presented for him and me. Indeed, that his daughter and literary executor, Catherine Camus, oversaw the publication of the billets-doux – to ensure Casarès was not forgotten – reminds us of the complexity of familial legacies.
Camus’s célébrité means that he stays both a heart-throb and a moral totem for those of a left-liberal persuasion. He chose his mother over ideology. He fought fascism and denied communism. He preferred meaning over nothingness. Even his lover fitted the script – a movie star and the daughter of Spain’s Republican Prime Minister. Camus is a forever young and handsome intellectual. There was complexity to his thought and life, but no apostasy or curmudgeonliness. All of this means that Camus’s 25 productive years of writing, as well as his intriguing personal life, can stay instructive to us. And with that he enters a canon alongside those that inspired him to live a meaningful life.
Historian Robert Zaretsky makes this point well in his book on Camus and the COVID-19 pandemic. He’s the author of a fine biography on Camus, A Life Worth Living (Zaretsky, 2013), and used this knowledge to reflect on his own volunteering experiences in a Texas nursing home during the pandemic. In Victories Never Last, Zaretsky (2022) considers the thinkers that inspired Camus to write The Plague while he experienced Nazi occupation – la peste brune. Thucydides, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne and Defoe motivated Camus (and then Zaretsky) when coming to terms with the all-too-human, if easily forgotten, experience of plague. Common ground in everyday life quickly becomes apparent at such times.
With all that in mind, Camus’s published works deserve intermittent revisitations. His oeuvre is a memento mori, a discomfort read, worth dusting off more regularly than we do. To do so in our heedlessly busy present demands effort. But not that much. His stellar 1957 Nobel prize lecture on political aesthetics has been recently packaged as a chapbook by Penguin with a ‘disruptive’ title – Create Dangerously (Camus, 2018). It should be read aloud with others. (Online you can hear him deliver it that December.)
At the Nobel Prize banquet Camus also gave another short speech. I want to end with it since these are his public words rather than private thoughts. He encouraged us to understand with vigilance those whose ‘excess of despair’ saw them embrace ‘the nihilism of the era’ (Camus, 1957). Today, for instance, France’s ‘replacement’ Camus – the unrelated Renaud – influences the new racist rhetoric in ways anathema to the bona fide Camus’s counsel. Our Camus understood how a younger generation, his generation, had inherited a post-1945 world that would be riddled with age-old complications, like plague, and new ones, like nuclear destruction. They will continue to arrive. Today’s world feels complicated once again, with the climate crisis rightfully returned to prominence among all these others. In the face of this, our younger voices are forging anew what Camus, during the Nobel dinner, called an ‘art of living in times of catastrophe’. Much of this work has to do with care for others – human and more-than-human alike. They, we, can take inspiration from his elaboration that night: Heir to a corrupt history, in which are mingled fallen revolutions, technology gone mad, dead gods, and worn-out ideologies, where mediocre powers can destroy all yet no longer know how to convince, where intelligence has debased itself to become the servant of hatred and oppression, this generation starting from its own negations has had to re-establish, both within and without, a little of that which constitutes the dignity of life and death. (Camus, 1957)
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.