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JOSH SHARFSTEIN: Welcome
to Public Health On Call,
a new podcast from the Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School
of Public Health.
Our focus is the
novel coronavirus.
I'm Josh Sharfstein, a faculty
member at Johns Hopkins
and also a former Secretary of
Maryland's Health Department.
Our goal with this podcast is
to bring evidence and experts
to help you understand
today's news about the novel
coronavirus and what
it means for tomorrow.
If you have questions,
you can email
them to
publichealthquestion@jhu.edu,
that's
publichealthquestion@jhu.edu,
for future podcast episodes.
Today, I speak with Professor
Mark Christian Thompson,
Chair of the English
department at Johns Hopkins.
Our topic is The Plague by
Albert Camus, a book that
is more than 50 years
old and yet immediately
relevant to our experience
with COVID-19 and much more.
In our discussion, I
asked Professor Thompson
about why this book
hit so hard even today.
I also ask him about
the role of literature
to make sense of what's
happening in these times.
Let's listen.
Professor Thompson, thank
you so much for joining me.
It's tremendous to have a
chance to talk to somebody
who really understands and has
taught The Plague by Albert
Camus.
This is a story about a
epidemic, a bubonic plague
in Iran, Algeria in the 1940s,
and it is so relevant to today
that the sales are
through the roof.
I think it was like 1,000%
plus increase in sales
online of the book.
And their reading it
makes so many things
about the coronavirus
pandemic makes sense to me.
And so it's just great to
talk to someone who knows it
so well, and I
just want to start
by asking is this unusual?
Has this book been
quiet for a long time,
or do people find relevance
in a lot of different things?
MARK CHRISTIAN THOMPSON: First,
thank you for having me on.
The book has had a
steady readership
since it's appearance in
1947, ebbing and flowing so
to speak with any
health outbreak.
And I don't think it's ever
seen such a spike in sales,
or a sudden spike in sales,
as it has now in response
to this unprecedented time
that we are living through.
It's always drawn
strong interest,
not just from the
literary community,
but from our general
readership, but that
has been primarily for a more
universal themes and some
of its direct
interactions and politics,
sociology and some
anthropological concerns
that it has as well
as the philosophy
of essentialism and absurdism.
JOSH SHARFSTEIN: So I
want to just jump in
to something that just brought
me right into the book.
Like at the beginning,
the rats start dying
and people kind of dismiss that.
And then people
start getting sick
and people don't think
it could be the plague.
And then increasingly more
and more people start dying,
but still people don't realize
the threat that they're under.
It takes quite a
while for people
to realize that things
have really changed.
One of the quotes is,
"The physician notes
that when a war breaks out,
people say it's too stupid,
it can't last long.
But the war may be too
stupid, that doesn't
prevent its lasting.
Stupidity has the knack
of getting its way,
as we should see if
we we're not always so
wrapped up in ourselves."
MARK CHRISTIAN
THOMPSON: I think one
of the code words that
Camus is using here
is stupidity standing
in for the irrational.
So in the case you
mentioned, the beginning
of the book, the
rats have appeared
and are dying streets is
a familiar sign of plague.
There are super early
deaths, but it's really
not until there's
an exponential leap
that the measures are
put in place that we
are seeing some of today.
The reason for this is a refusal
or a type of denial or refusal
to believe what's
going on because
of a sense of self-preservation
and an inability
to believe in what seems
like an unfathomable enemy
at the gates.
And this has to do with
the irrational quality
of human nature,
but it has nothing
to do with the
nature of the disease
itself, which is utterly
rational, utterly
logical and workmanlike in
the way it performs its one
task which is to kill it's host.
We meet this in the book with
a combination of rationality
and emotion that there
are two sides to this.
The first is for Camus
an absolute admiration
for the heroism that is
shown in the faces containing
one's emotions in
order to do one's duty.
From the other side, a
complete loss of control
and succumbing to the
irrational, which is, in a way,
if the disease wants anything,
precisely what it wants.
JOSH SHARFSTEIN: Interesting.
At one point early
on, the narrator says,
"The bear statement that
302 deaths had taken place
in the third week
of plague failed
to strike their imagination,"
meaning the public's
imagination, "for one thing,
all the 302 deaths might not
have been due to plague."
Sounds like that
could have been ripped
from the headlines in the United
States where people are saying,
well, maybe people aren't
really dying of coronavirus.
It's still that irrationality.
People are not seeing what
is plainly in front of us
sometimes.
MARK CHRISTIAN THOMPSON:
Right, and a number of theories
are floated in order
to try and account
for what seems
like to the reader
a patently obvious reason
for what's going on.
Any possible out will
be taken in order
to avoid facing
the stark reality.
Again, it's only when the
numbers jump exponentially
that it becomes undeniable
that no further excuse can
be given for what is
going on in the city.
The fear that drives this
type of blindness or denial
is understandable for Camus,
not just in this novel,
but in other works.
He is also an
accomplished philosopher.
But ultimately, one has to
do one's duty in one's part
in the face of an undeniable
horror which is where we end up
by the middle of the novel.
JOSH SHARFSTEIN: Yeah.
After this kind of
realization finally
that the plague
is there, there's
sort of like a haze
that sets in and part
of what he writes about
is how people kind of lose
their sense of self in a
way, that time is suspended,
that at one point he says
it's very hard for them
to figure out the probable
duration of their exile.
And the reason was this,
when the most pessimistic
had it fixed at say six months,
when they had drunken advance
the dregs of bitterness
of those six black months
and painfully screwed up the
courage at the sticking place,
straining all their remaining
energy to endure valiantly
the long ordeal of all those
weeks and days when they'd
done this, some friend they
met, an article, a newspaper,
a vague suspicion or
a flash of foresight
would suggest that
after all, there
was no reason why the
epidemic shouldn't
last more than six months.
Why not a year or even more?
And I find that now people
have a very hard time
with the concept that we're
not stuck in this place where
we are now forever, you know,
that things will change,
that we will learn
more scientifically,
we will develop new treatments.
People get so, not exactly
hopeless, but just sort of
stuck, and it seems like that
there is this period here.
And why do you think
he's writing about that?
And I wonder
whether it partly is
to create some room
for people to be
dealing with this
kind of suspended
state in different ways?
MARK CHRISTIAN THOMPSON: Right.
What we get is a
numbness that takes
hold through the
rote daily activities
of an altered lifestyle.
And the thing about
this lifestyle
is that it's not individual
at all, as you note.
That we lose the sense
of time because everyone
is doing more or less the same
set of activities each day,
day after day.
There are, for Camus
anyway in the novel, really
two categories of reaction
to this timeless numbness,
some internal numbness that
sets in that sort of says,
this could just go on and maybe
even should go on forever.
There is, of course, a
type of hunkering down
or a sense of duty that one
has to simply go on and do
one's part in a sense of
collectivity as opposed
to individuality.
The other is a doubling down on
one's individuality and attempt
to get back to a
sense of normalcy
when that's not possible,
which for Camus, leads
to a heightened irrationality.
And under conditions of
heightened irrationality
against such a
rational enemy, people
start to make
mistakes, which leads
to a further increase in the
potency of the disease being
traced.
JOSH SHARFSTEIN:
So quickly mention,
I was also struck
by how he talks
about the individualism
of death even being lost,
that there are
really no funerals,
the plague victim died
away from his family,
and the customary vigil beside
the dead body was forbidden.
But the result that a
person dying in the evening
spent the night
alone, and those who
died in the daytime
were promptly buried,
really resonates
with the coronavirus
and just the awful isolation
that people are in.
And also I think it reinforces
what you're talking about
that this is muted in
the way that we normally
think of ourselves.
This kind of starts
to slip away.
MARK CHRISTIAN
THOMPSON: Exactly.
The sense of
mourning that we lose
in such situations
which is clearly
lost in the novel and our own.
It signifies and celebrates
to a great extent
the individuality
of the lost soul.
This is something that
does the plague situation,
the emergency initiatives that
have to be put in place cannot
allow this sense of
individuality is precisely what
is lost in the type of lockdown
situation that Iran finds
itself in and that,
to some extent,
we find ourselves
in at the moment.
A funeral or any type
of acknowledgment
of the passing of a
specific individual
would break that spell that we
are under necessarily in order
to work together in order to
get through a common enemy,
on the attack of a common enemy.
JOSH SHARFSTEIN: So in
this space that's created,
some things are revealed.
And one of the clearer
points of the novel
is that there is a lot
of inequality in Iran,
and it becomes more obvious
as the plague continues.
That this is a quote
where he writes
that "The authorities had
another cause for anxiety
and the difficulty of
maintaining the food supply.
Profiteers were taking a hand
in purveying at enormous prices
essential foodstuffs not
available in the shops.
The result was that poor
families were in great straits
while the rich went short
of practically nothing, thus
were as plagued by its
impartial administration
should have promoted
equality among our townsfolk,
it now had the opposite effect.
And thanks to the habitual
conflict of cupidities,
exasperated the
sense of injustice
rankling in men's hearts."
MARK CHRISTIAN THOMPSON:
It's, of course,
interesting that
Camus writes there
that equality should have been
promoted because of course
equality breeds a sense of
collectivity and community,
and to some extent, a
loss of individuality.
One says, well, I am neither
more nor less than you are,
then we are the same.
We are equal.
Instead what you
see are profiteers
taking advantage and really
pushing their own individuality
and subjectivity.
But really what they're doing
is they're not necessarily
creating new avenues for
inequality and oppression,
they're revealing
what is already there
and then exacerbating
those conditions
by taking advantage of
this state of exception.
So what we see Camus
doing with these
with these types of scenes
where he points out specifically
the forms of inequality that
have taken hold of this city,
he's suggesting that the
plague situation shows
us unadorned, utterly naked
the levels and the types
of inequality that
we all suffer from.
But then he also
tries to suggest
why that is on a
philosophical level
that one is unable
under normal conditions
to see someone else as they
are, as a human being, as equal,
as themselves.
And so it is easy to then
dehumanize the other.
In this way, there are
multiple plagues going on
in this city, not just
the one that they're
facing with the bubonic plague.
JOSH SHARFSTEIN: Yeah.
I want to talk about that some.
I think certainly we
see with coronavirus,
the revealing of inequalities
that were already there
but now can't be
ignored, particularly
in the profound impact that
the is having on low income
minority communities
around the country,
and I think that's something
that people have tried
in many ways to
not stare right at
but can't avoid it when
the death statistics have
been coming in.
And then to your point,
Camus doesn't stop there,
because he talks about through
this character Tarrou, the idea
that there plagues that
aren't just the plague.
And I want to read a quote
from him talking about the fact
that in a sense there are many
of these profound problems
in society that we
typically ignore.
This is what he said,
"For many years,
I've been ashamed, mortally
ashamed, of having been even
with the best intentions, even
at many removes, a murderer
in my turn.
As time went on, I
really learned that even
those who are better than the
rest could not keep themselves
nowadays from killing
or letting others kill,
because such is the
logic by which they live.
Now, we can't stir a
finger in this world
without the risk of
bringing death to somebody.
Yes, I've been
ashamed ever since.
I realized that we
all have plague,
and I have lost my peace."
And I mean, I
think that as we've
been confronted with the
additional reality of police
violence and racism
and emphasized
by the homicide of George
Floyd and the protests,
that that's another
kind of plague.
And I think to me that
these words really
resonated that our
society is built
on many different plagues.
MARK CHRISTIAN THOMPSON:
Yes, the disease
itself, as Camus sees
its, strikes or is
indiscriminate in its nature.
However, in it's
unfolding, in its history,
it is highly discriminative,
because it exploits
these types of inequalities that
are present already in society
and that are exacerbated
by the state of exception.
Now that said, the
share that we all
have in each and every death
that occurs, be it from plague,
or from police violence,
or from some other related
form of social
inequality, this is
something that has to
be dealt with the way
it is dealt with in
The Plague situation,
and that is collectively.
The plague is coming for
each and every one of us,
and if one of us fails in
our duty to try and prevent
the plague, then we have failed
everyone, not just ourselves.
And so if someone
dies from our failure,
we are partially
to blame for that.
And I think what Camus wants is
for us to see social inequality
in the same way.
In a democratic society where we
too have the power of the vote,
if we use that power, that then
leads to further inequality,
further misery, further death,
then each and every one of us,
because we took on
that responsibility,
is in fact guilty.
This is part of what he
talks about in a later novel
from 1956 called The Fall, which
is off also well worth reading.
JOSH SHARFSTEIN: I will
definitely put that on my list.
I was just so struck by
this particular theme
at this point in time
where the character also
says all I maintain
is that on this earth
there are pestilences and there
are victims, and it's up to us
so far as possible not to join
forces with the pestilences.
MARK CHRISTIAN THOMPSON: Yes,
because when we joined forces
with the pestilences, we spread
inequality, irrationality,
and human misery
for personal gain.
But personal gain also includes,
at least at some point,
a type of shape that
will come to everyone
and not just those
people we probably
left behind as victims.
JOSH SHARFSTEIN: Towards the
end of the book, the worst
of the plague is over.
They open the gates to the
city, which has just been,
you know, it's been shut
away from every place
else in the world.
There's jubilation.
But you get the sense that
people kind of want to go back
and totally push this
experience out of their mind.
He writes that "the doctor knew
that those jubilant crowds did
not know but could
have learned from books
that the plague bacillus never
dies or disappears for good,
that it can lie dormant
for years and years
in furniture and
linen chest, that it
finds its time in
bedrooms cellars, trunks,
and bookshelves.
And perhaps the
day would come when
the being in the
enlightening of men, it
would rouse up its rats
again and send them
forth to die in a happy city."
So there's this
tension about people
wanting to forget, but the
plague, and the plagues,
as we've been
talking about, still
always being a
threat to all of us.
MARK CHRISTIAN
THOMPSON: Right, it's
at this moment at
the end of the novel
that Rio reveals that he has
been narrating the story.
The narrator, from the
literary critical perspective,
encompasses not as an
omniscient narrator, but as
a single point of view
through which the reader is
able to see almost
everything that's going on
as objectively as possible.
Through that narrator,
one has a sense
of collectivity and community.
At the end when everyone
wants to get back to normal,
the individuality
of the narrator
revealed he becomes a
character, a single person,
because this sense
of connectivity
is now gone as the
plague recedes.
However, he insists
that one continued
this sense of
chronicle, or chronic,
is the word that's used in
French in the novel, which
is to say that in order to
remember the lessons that have
been learned in the
plague situation,
those of empathy,
sacrifice, community, et
cetera, that one write about
them, communicate them.
One does this in literature
and personal letters.
This is what he means by
in bedrooms and on shelves,
but also in bookcases,
the personal letters that
are written all of the literary
outputs surrounding the plague,
including and most importantly
perhaps for Camus, the novel
itself, so that we have a living
record of what happened and can
refer to it whenever we find
ourselves in need once again
facing overwhelming
inequality and human misery.
JOSH SHARFSTEIN:
It's so important
that we think about and
remember what's happening now
in the right way so that we
can learn the right lessons
and come together rather
than just lapse back
to the way things were before.
MARK CHRISTIAN
THOMPSON: Exactly.
JOSH SHARFSTEIN: One
last question for you.
I can't thank you enough
for spending time with us.
This is just such a powerful
book so many years later.
How do you think about
the role of literature
to help process
this difficult time
that we're in or difficult
times in general?
MARK CHRISTIAN THOMPSON: Well,
in the sense we were just
suggesting, not only
does the novel provide us
with a type of record
of what has gone
on in the past in order so that
we can form sympathetic ties
to the past and to others
that we may not have access to
in isolation of so-called
plague situation,
a quarantine situation,
but what it also does
is it attempts to
shape that experience
so that we are not in a vacuum,
in a moral vacuum, as we face
together and alone
what is happening
all around us and inside of us.
It's that which is
going on inside of us
during the plague that we have
to grapple with perhaps most
immediately for those of us
who are not immediately ill.
And the novel helps with that in
sorting through these emotions
in helping us to come
to grips with our duty
and for helping us
to understand what
how our moral responsibility
is to ourselves,
our friends, and our neighbors.
JOSH SHARFSTEIN: Well,
thank you so much.
That is so well stated, and
I think this novel really
made me think that everyone
who is thinking and working
on these issues should
be not just following
the accounts of
the day but really
thinking in a much broader
sense and using literature
to help inform how we're able
to do what we need to do,
so thank you so much.
MARK CHRISTIAN
THOMPSON: Thank you.
JOSH SHARFSTEIN: Thank you
for listening to Public Health
On Call, a new podcast from the
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School
of Public Health.
Please send questions to be
covered in future podcasts
to publichealthquestion@jhu.edu.
This podcast is produced by
Josh Sharfstein, Lindsey Smith
Rogers, and Lymari Morales.
Audio production by Niall Owen
McCusker and Spencer Greer
with support from Chip Hickey.
Distribution by Nick Moran.
Thank you for listening.
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