What Dies in the Street: Camus's La Peste and Infected Networks
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What Dies in the Street: Camus’s La Peste and Infected
Networks
Macs Smith
French Forum, Volume 41, Number 3, Winter 2016, pp. 193-208 (Article)
Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/frf.2016.0020
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/650651
[ Access provided at 19 Apr 2020 22:57 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]What Dies in the Street
Camus’s La Peste and Infected Networks
macs smith
Introduction
When Albert Camus documented the occupation of the Free Zone of
France by Nazi Germany in 1942 by writing, “11 novembre. Comme des
rats!” (Cahiers 52), he had already set in motion the controversy that was
to greet his novel, La Peste. The book, published in 1947, produced a fierce
disagreement among France’s intellectuals. For Roland Barthes, the novel
was simple: Nazism is transformed into bubonic plague and, in the face of
timid politicians and an uncooperative public, a small band of idealistic
resisters fight to beat back the scourge. While Barthes praised the call to
arms he saw in the novel, he could not help asking if the very act of using
metaphor to understand fascism represented a dangerous disengagement
from history: “Le romancier a-t-il le droit d’aliéner les faits de l’histoire?
Est-ce qu’une peste peut équivaloir, je ne dis pas à une occupation, mais à
l’occupation?” (Barthes, “La Peste” 8). Barthes’s skepticism about Camus’s
approach to his subject matter was transformed into outright derision in
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir wrote in La Force des
Choses that, “assimiler l’occupation à un fléau naturel, c’était encore fuir
l’histoire et les vrais problèmes” (Qtd. in Guérin 235–36). She felt that the
novel, by replacing the “human” evil of fascism with a “natural” bacterium,
exculpated Nazis and their collaborators for their acts.
The idea that Camus was wrong to naturalize fascism has endured. Giu-
liana Lund reiterated it as recently as 2011, writing that “the plague allegory
naturalizes evil and universalizes suffering while minimizing collaboration
in the interests of imagining a unified resistance” (134). This criticism,
however, depends on a definition of the natural that is in contradiction
with Camus’s usage of it in La Peste. Camus has Tarrou, a vacationer
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trapped in Oran by the quarantine, say of the plague, “Ce qui est naturel,
c’est le microbe. Le reste, la santé, l’intégrité, la pureté, si vous voulez, c’est
un effet de la volonté et d’une volonté qui ne doit jamais s’arrêter” (228).
Camus distinguishes the disease vector from health, a socially defined con-
cept. In this way Camus alludes to an important distinction between dis-
ease and epidemic, a difference Ed Cohen elucidates:
The rudimentary distinction between epidemics and epizootics—
that is between illness patterns that afflict humans as opposed to those
that afflict all other types of animals—assumes simultaneously that
the kind of life that humans incorporate essentially differs from all
other livings beings (the zoe in epizootics) and that what makes
human life special is the political character that qualifies it as
‘human’ in the first place (the demos in epidemic). (Cohen 16)
An epidemic is marked by its effect on political life. The plague might
originate in a bacterium, but its causes and effects are human. Tarrou’s
explanation of the disease’s origins can thus be directly followed by an
accusation: “personne, non, personne au monde n’est indemne” (La Peste
228). Camus’s deployment of the disease metaphor does not necessarily
imply a displacement of responsibility away from people. On the contrary,
as he tells Barthes: “Ce que ces combattants, dont j’ai traduit un peu l’expé-
rience, ont fait, ils l’ont fait justement contre des hommes” (Lettre 7).
Camus continues: “Ils le referont sans doute, devant toute terreur et
quel que soit son visage, car la terreur en a plusieurs, ce qui justifie encore
un peu que je n’en ai nommé précisément aucun” (7). While Camus
acknowledged that his novel was partly about the Nazi occupation, he
rebelled against the idea that he had written an allegory. Indeed, there are
numerous inconsistencies with such a reading. The rats of Oran, which
seem on the basis of Camus’s notebook to stand in for Nazi soldiers, do
not fulfill the role of the Germans. Most of them die of plague in the
novel’s first chapters and those that do not are gassed and sent to incinera-
tor factories in the outskirts of the city. It is easy to see how this imagery
evokes the conditions of the Second World War, but there is no one-to-
one correspondence between history and metaphor. Attempting to force
one, as Lund does, leads to unsettling interpretations (for instance, that
Camus bought into racist propaganda depicting Jews as vermin). Taking
Camus at his word, however, that the novel should be read “sur plusieurs
portées” (Lettre 7), allows the reader to take these historical inconsistencies
as part of an evocative structure of feeling and in so doing transforms
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the novel from an explication of a specific moment in history into an
interrogation of a much more general process. This is what Camus pleaded
for, somewhat futilely: “Sans doute est-ce là ce qu’on me reproche, que La
Peste puisse servir à toutes les résistances contre toutes les tyrannies” (Lettre
77).
Camus told Barthes that he did not believe in realism. Despite that, his
novel reveals a careful understanding of the way in which epidemic func-
tions. His attentiveness to past narratives of disease was such that his work
in some places even seems to anticipate future medical discoveries. Camus
was able to see epidemic in its sociopolitical dimension. As a result, his
novel sees beyond a single disease—whether it be plague or Nazism—to a
more fundamental kind of sickness. By putting aside the expectation of
allegory and assessing plague under the light of current epidemiological
research, one expands the work’s resonance beyond its original historical
context and complicates the simple moral lessons that the text often
inspires. Camus has been decried for presenting Evil as an invisible, fickle
disease. I would like to suggest that by presenting evil in this diffuse, pro-
tean way, La Peste, far from being an apology, acts as an accusation. Plague,
despite its association with rats, is a very human illness. By understanding
how it spreads, we can begin to understand who and what is responsible
for it, and what it means to fight back.
The Biology of Plague
Plague is a bacterium, Yersinia pestis, carried in the digestive system of
fleas. The disease has three forms: bubonic, pulmonary, and septicemic,
each with different symptoms. The bacterium was isolated in 1894 by Alex-
andre Yersin, who also demonstrated its primary means of communica-
tion. An infected flea suffers fits of bloody vomiting during feeding. When
these occur, disease-carrying blood can enter a second host’s body. This
mechanism explains the famous identification between the plague and the
rat, which is the primary vehicle for the insect and often the bacterium’s
first easily visible victim. The death of the rat obliges the flea to find a new
host: in a city that is likely to be a human. Plague is a cooperative illness:
the flea can jump from one animal to another; the rat can walk for miles.
Together they trace a network whose ins and outs determine the geography
and severity of an outbreak.
The importance of networks to plague, and disease generally, has in
recent years led to the application of network theory to epidemiology. This
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approach’s key concern is connectivity, which has two main components:
the number of connections between individuals and their strength. These
are often, though not always, inversely related. When an individual comes
in contact with many others, there is a greater pool of people susceptible
to infection from that person, but if the contacts do not last long enough
or are not of the right type for transmission to occur, then the disease will
not spread. Conversely, strong contact with only a few individuals might
guarantee transmission, but won’t affect many people. In between these
extremes is a complex middle range where humans reside, with individuals
varying in the number and strength of their contacts, a few dense nodes
connecting distant communities.
The way those two factors combine to produce an epidemic is compli-
cated. Yersinia pestis, for its part, seems particularly strange. One theory,
first proposed in 2008, is that plague might obey a percolation threshold
(Davis et al.). This would make it the first identified example of percolation
in disease. Percolation refers to the probability that a liquid, poured
through a porous medium, will make it all the way through. In epidemiol-
ogy it can be reformulated in the following way: if a disease enters a popu-
lation at one point, what is the probability that it will be able to reach the
entire population? Normally, the population at risk of contracting an ill-
ness increases incrementally as new people fall ill, but it has been hypothe-
sized that a disease could instead follow a model in which the susceptible
population would remain small despite a gradual increase in connectivity
until a percolation threshold was crossed, at which point the entire popula-
tion would suddenly become vulnerable. This has been shown to happen
in two recent studies of the Great Gerbil population in Kazakhstan (Davis
et al, Reijniers et al.). These gerbils occupy a city of underground tunnels.
Plague is always present in a small percentage of the population; however,
once one-third of the tunnels in the gerbil city are occupied, the disease
immediately spreads to the entire population.
If plague percolates, then it behaves like a liquid, like a wave washing
over a city or like a gust of air blowing through. This fluid metaphor seems
to have allowed Camus to stumble into an accurate model of plague
dynamics. I say stumble, because the warm breeze—“une brise déjà tiède”
(La Peste 26)—which brings the disease from the poor neighborhoods into
every corner of Oran almost certainly did not make it into Camus’s text as
a metaphor inspired by graph theory; it was likely inspired by one of
plague’s three avatars. Camus describes the mass death of rats at the start
of his novel by saying, “On eût dit que la terre même où était plantées nos
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maisons se purgeait de son chargement d’humeurs, qu’elle laissait monter
à la surface des furoncles et des sanies qui, jusqu’ici, la travaillaient intérieu-
rement” (La Peste 22). The rats become the suppurating buboes of an
infected city. They are not the plague’s victims but rather the symptoms of
a disease afflicting Oran itself. As they gradually disappear, the citizens
relax; or rather, “la ville respira” (La Peste 23). The word choice stands out:
bubonic plague becomes pulmonary when it reaches the lungs. Once it
does, it can be transmitted by breathing. The city expires, and this last
breath of an agonizing metropolis is the catalyst for the plague’s first
human infection. In the very next sentence Rieux sees his concierge shak-
ing with the disease’s first symptoms. Shortly thereafter the victims num-
ber in the thousands and the city is locked down. A threshold is
crossed—we shouldn’t ignore that the first rat is found on the stoop of
Rieux’s building—and everyone becomes susceptible.
Words are Sick
That first rat “n’était pas à sa place” (La Peste 15). How did it get there? If
the two predictive factors of epidemic are the number of contacts and their
strength, what is Oran like? In 1939, Camus wrote in his essay, Le Mino-
taure, that Oran was one of the last closed-off places in a world where “Il
n’y a plus de déserts. Il n’y a plus d’ı̂les” (13). Oran is a city “qui présente
le dos à la mer, qui s’est construite en tournant sur elle-même, à la façon
d’un escargot. Oran est un grand mur circulaire et jaune, recouvert d’un
ciel dur” (29). The citizens are themselves closed off: “Ils ont fermé la
fenêtre, ils se sont emmurés, ils ont exorcisé le paysage” (55). However, in
the epigraph of that same essay, Camus ironically praises Oran’s efforts to
remedy its imperfections, concluding that Oran “n’a plus besoin d’écri-
vains: elle attend des touristes” (11). That epigraph was written in 1954,
fifteen years after the essay itself. Together, the two evaluations bracket the
year of La Peste, given by the narrator at the beginning of the novel as
“194.” La Peste thus occupies a transitional time in the city’s history
(another threshold on which the first rat appears). And in La Peste the city
is much less closed than in Camus’s earlier text. It has become a vibrant
port city where the citizens “se réunissent à heure fixe dans les cafés, ils se
promènent sur le même boulevard ou bien ils se mettent à leurs balcons”
(La Peste 12). There is virtually no solitude. Dying, Camus writes, is the
only non-collective activity.
But contact is not the only precondition for plague. The contact must
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also be of the right type. Here Camus departs from medical literalism in
favor of a more pointed sociopolitical critique. He is not interested in the
hygienic habits of the citizens, but rather in the way they communicate.
Early in “Le Minotaure,” Camus mocks the youths of Oran who dress as
Hollywood stars with clumsy pomade in their hair and who loiter around
the cinemas. Fifteen years later, those teenagers have grown into business-
men and advertisers. La Peste presents a city where the seasons are com-
moditized and where people work constantly, “mais toujours pour
s’enrichir. Ils s’intéressent surtout au commerce et ils s’occupent d’abord,
selon leur expression, de faire des affaires” (12). Most damning for Camus
is the way this obsession with money attaches to language. Already in the
first section, Dr. Rieux shows his suspicion of the press’s financial motives
while speaking to the Parisian journalist, Rambert. The latter has come to
Oran to do an exposé on the living conditions of Arabs (a mise-en-abı̂me
of Camus’s own essay series on the subject). Rieux asks him if he will be
able to give a total condemnation of the government. Rambert demurs.
Rieux declares in return, “Je n’admets que les témoignages sans réserves”
(19). Rieux’s suspicions of the press are justified later when, despite a paper
shortage, newspapers continue to sell. The most prominent, The Courier of
the Epidemic, claims to inform citizens of the latest news from the ministry
of health, but in reality is filled with advertisements for fake products
claiming to prevent plague, all of which are bought eagerly by the desperate
public.
Language in Oran is corrupt. Plague demonstrates its failure. The quar-
antine of letters instituted by the government limits citizens to the tele-
gram, a medium whose enforced simplicity reveals the hollowness of the
messages Oranians wish to send:
Des êtres que liaient l’intelligence, le coeur et la chair, en furent
réduits à chercher les signes de cette communion ancienne dans les
majuscules d’une dépêche de dix mots. Et comme, en fait, les formu-
les qu’on peut utiliser dans un télégramme sont vite épuisées, de
longues vies communes ou des passions douloureuses se résumèrent
rapidement dans un échange périodique de formules toutes faites
comme: “vais bien. Pense à toi. Tendresse.” (68–69)
The indifference with which language is misused for financial gain
throughout the book eventually finds itself implicated directly in the
spread of the disease. When the plague becomes pulmonary, Tarrou
laments: “Il faut se surveiller sans arrêt pour ne pas être amené, dans une
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minute de distraction, à respirer dans la figure d’un autre et à lui coller
l’infection” (229). The air that allows the vocal cords to vibrate is diseased.
Tarrou adds, “J’ai compris que tout le malheur des hommes venait de ce
qu’ils ne tenaient pas un langage clair” (229).
In this light Sartre, despite his many arguments with Camus, seems to
have inadvertently offered an apt epigraph for La Peste when he wrote, “Si
les mots sont malades c’est à nous de les guérir” (Qu’est-ce que la littéra-
ture? 341).
Proper Speech
In the face of this infected language, Camus’s characters adopt different
tactics for self-preservation. The most obvious of these is silence. Silence
occupies a privileged place in Camus’s oeuvre. Key characters are fre-
quently mute: the Arab in L’Etranger, the interlocutor of La Chute, the
narrator’s mother for most of “Entre oui et non.” And yet, despite his
obsession with silence, Camus’s long writing career testifies to an ongoing
dissatisfaction with it. He could not shut up. Nor can the character who
gives the most beautiful ode to silence: the preacher Paneloux. During one
of his sermons, he says “Aujourd’hui encore, à travers ce cheminement de
mort, d’angoisses et de clameurs, [la lueur d’éternité] nous guide vers le
silence essentiel et vers le principe de toute vie” (94–95). This peroration
gives way to a “ciel mêlé d’eau et de soleil” (95) which for a moment seems
to revitalize the congregation. Slowly, though, the “bruits de voix,” the
“glissements de véhicules,” “tout le langage d’une ville” (95) begin to seep
into the church. At that moment Paneloux speaks again, adding a comic
number of apophatic codas to his sermon:
Le Père reprit cependant la parole et dit qu’après avoir montré l’ori-
gine divine de la peste et le caractère punitif de ce fléau, il en avait
terminé et qu’il ne ferait pas appel pour sa conclusion à une élo-
quence qui serait déplacée, touchant une matière si tragique. Il lui
semblait que tout devait être clair à tous. Il rappela seulement qu’à
l’occasion de la grande peste de Marseille . . . (95)
Like Camus, he can’t keep quiet. No matter—the congregation doesn’t
hear him over the noise of packing up their things.
Each of the other main characters has a specific relationship to lan-
guage: Rambert is a journalist, Grand a statistician with designs on a career
in literature, Tarrou writes a diary of the plague, and Rieux uses Tarrou’s
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notes to become the diegetic author of the testimony we are reading. It is
hard to say which of them is on the right track. Rambert shares a métier
with Camus, who was the director of the underground resistance newspa-
per, Combat. Rambert, like Camus, writes about the state of the Arab quar-
ter in Oran. The proximity of the diegetic journalist to the author is further
attested by the fact that when Camus resigned from Combat in 1947, he
gave a copy of the novel to every member of the newsroom. Jennifer Cooke
sees in this gift an object lesson “wherein a journalist, if unable to write,
finds that he can fight: he can condemn the plague and assist those who
are sick” (Cooke 35). Ironically, though, Rambert’s career prior to the
plague takes the opposite course: he becomes a journalist after fighting
on the losing Republican side of the Spanish Civil War. And despite the
resemblance between Rambert and Camus, Cooke ends up unconvinced
that journalism is an effective counter to plague. Echoing Shoshana Fel-
man, she writes:
The problem with the journalist is that he or she is not personally
implicated, contaminated or affected by the events witnessed in the
same way as one who cannot escape them. Additionally, the journal-
ist is unable to offer an unqualified condemnation of events, either
because of the editorial restraints under which they write or because
of an obligation to reflect both sides. (34)
Good journalism fails to distinguish itself from “infected” profiteering and
Rambert has no recourse but to quit.
Cooke, like Felman, prefers Rieux’s “testimonial” approach. Testimony,
she writes, provides “a narrative position which an historical account is
unable to provide. . . . [E]pisodemics are undersigned by the narrative ‘I
saw’ or ‘I heard’ ” (36–37). Rieux repeatedly uses the word, “témoignage”
and he deploys rhetorical techniques like the aposiopesis at the end of the
novel’s introduction: “Il se propose encore . . . Mais il est peut-être temps”
(La Peste 14). This gives the impression of an oral, first-person account.
For Felman and Cooke, Rieux’s direct implication in the events of the
epidemic means that he can both verify events and make them understand-
able in a visceral way. But Cooke also acknowledges the contradictions in
Rieux’s writing. Direct personal involvement is something Rieux strives to
distance himself from: the text is in an anonymous third-person, which
Rieux justifies by saying (still in that third-person), “[Rieux] était donc
bien placé pour rapporter ce qu’il avait vu et entendu. Mais il a voulu le
faire avec la retenue désirable” (273). And while he claims to have only
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written about things he had first-hand knowledge about, Rieux depends
on Tarrou’s notes for details, along with testimonies from the rest of his
team. Tarrou’s notes are not always accurate.
More problematic is the fact that Rieux does not only write on behalf
of his entourage but also for the rest of the town: “Décidément, il devait
parler pour tous” (274). Rieux’s decision to speak for everyone (or rather,
Camus’s decision to give him this responsibility) is the source of much
criticism of La Peste. By simultaneously promising to restrict himself to his
own point of view and to provide a definitive version of events, Rieux
effaces the perspectives of people he didn’t have direct contact with, spe-
cifically the Arabs. Rieux attempts to preempt this critique when he says,
“il n’y avait pas une de ses souffrances qui ne fût en même temps celle des
autres” (274), but his universalism remains problematic. One need only
look at the number of postcolonial critiques of La Peste to see that. As
Lund puts it, “Read figuratively, . . . as an allegory of the Nazi scourge,
Camus’s silence on the ‘Jewish question’ is striking. Read literally, as an
account of plague in Oran, the absence of Arab characters is likewise glar-
ing” (Lund 140). Through his failure to incorporate marginal voices into
his text, Rieux produces a speech most audible in its silences.
Rieux’s prominence as narrator seems to align Camus with Cooke and
Felman as an advocate for testimony, but in 1945, when Camus envisioned
a happy ending for La Peste brought about by the “Triomphe du langage
et du bien écrire” (Cahiers 127), he was not referring to Rieux but to Joseph
Grand. Grand is an aspiring novelist who only wants to write one good
sentence. A sentence so good the editor who reads it will stand up and say
to his staff, “Messieurs, chapeau bas!” (Peste 98). Over the course of the
book the sentence he rewrites only gets clumsier. Peter Dunwoodie has
given an excellent summary of Grand’s “method,” which often seems like
a joke (Grand buys an etymological dictionary to verify the Latin origins
of his words and somehow ends up with Arabic roots like alezane in his
next rewrite). And yet, Grand’s obsession with good writing gives reason
for optimism. Indeed, it might even inoculate him. Infected with the
plague in part four of the novel, he despairs and commands that all of his
papers be burned. He does not die, however. Grand makes a full recovery.
He ends up revitalized in his quest for the perfect sentence and rewrites
his notebook from memory. This makes Grand one of two major charac-
ters who fall ill but do not die of plague. The other is Paneloux, who does
die but not of plague. In between these two figures, parodic in some ways
and yet laudable in their earnestness, stands something like a vaccine.
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Somewhere between the perfect sentence and total silence. Neither Grand
nor Paneloux gives in to the commercialism of their society nor to the
centrifugal fear that drives other citizens to dream of life beyond the quar-
antine. They remain devoted to their words, fulfilling Tarrou’s prediction:
“L’honnête homme, celui qui n’infecte presque personne, c’est celui qui a
le moins de distraction possible” (228).
Being a Good Host
But are any of these strategies enough to cure the epidemic? Noticeably,
even the honest man can only aspire to infect “presque personne.” While
the majority of the protagonists survive the epidemic, their efforts have
little effect on the plague city-wide. If we return to our network schema,
we could say that the characters’ approach to speech addresses the type of
contact between individuals. The measures that the medical team enforces
on the residents of Oran complement these by targeting the links them-
selves. In cooperation with the city’s government, they attempt to harden
the border that separates Oran from the outside world, the shell described
by Camus in Été. Shipping routes close; doors are shut; Rambert and Rieux
even demand that members of the same family be permanently separated.
Rieux cuts himself off from his own wife. These strategies serve to reassert
boundaries—between the individual and other people, between the house
and the street, between the city and the rest of the world. The inevitable
side-effect of this is the breakdown of the very social body the measures
are intended to preserve, making it a pyrrhic strategy for preempting
plague’s third and deadliest form, septicemic—in which the walls of the
body are dissolved and the vital fluids mix chaotically—from befalling the
city.
If it is tempting to respond to plague by reasserting borders, that is
because it is in the nature of plague as a parasite to trouble them. A parasite
cannot exist without a host, and the interaction between these two agents
always occurs in a liminal space. Parasite, etymologically, derives from
para-, next to, and sitos, food. It exists alongside its host while simultane-
ously feeding off its life force. In so doing it both defines and undermines
the limits of that host. The flea rides in the coat of the rat and consumes
its blood. It alters our perception of the rat such that we cannot think of
the rat without thinking of the flea’s disease. But it always remains a sepa-
rate species. Similarly the rat defines the limit of a certain concept of the
city: it represents a vermin that is abjected from the city as a meeting place
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for humans, while linking itself inextricably with our imaginary of urban
life. The parasite thus gets at the very heart of what it means to be a host.
In one of his more famous etymologies, the French linguist, Emile Ben-
veniste, derives l’hôte (also the title of a short story by Camus) from the
Latin word, hospes. This, in turn, he derives from two roots: hostis, mean-
ing foreigner or stranger, and the Sanskrit word pet, meaning master,
spouse, or oneself. Combined, these two roots give us the notion of hospi-
tality, the act of a master welcoming the stranger into his or her home,
into his or her self. This act of incorporation of the Other is dangerous,
Benveniste writes, in a way that is engrained in the etymology of the word:
hostis “is not a stranger in general. In contrast to the peregrinus, who lived
outside the boundaries of the territory, hostis is ‘the stranger insofar as he
is recognized as enjoying equal rights to those of the Roman citizens.’ ”
(Benveniste 77). The hostis is an outsider who must be welcomed into the
home, who cannot be turned away, but who by virtue of being foreign still
represents a threat—hostis is also the root of hostility. The host thus is
forced into a delicate compact whereby his selfhood and power, his right
to a place, are confirmed by welcoming the guest, while at the same time
the need to open his door and make himself vulnerable to a potential
enemy undermines the same qualities and rights gained in the transaction.
This instability is further demonstrated by the fact that hôte means not
only “host” but “guest.”
Cohen demonstrates that in the epidemiological discourse surrounding
the parasite, the latter’s hostile qualities are continually emphasized over
its status as a guest. This is despite the fact that many parasites aid their
hosts in some way. Cohen suggests that humans’ reluctance to acknowl-
edge our dependence on microbes stems from a fear that to do so would
blur the line between the human and the animal, between the individual
and its environment. It would require us to accept that the body is neither
unitary nor distinct from nature. Cohen considers the term obligate para-
site, used to describe a parasite that cannot survive without a host. He
writes:
The idea that a parasite is obligated to its parasitism somewhat
undermines the premise of the parasite, since its very nature requires
it to be the bad guest. Indeed if it has no ‘life’ apart from the life that
it ‘manipulates’ through the host’s cellular processes, then it may not
be either a good or a bad guest at all but something more like a
symbiont. (Cohen 24)
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Cohen’s “symbiotic parasite” indirectly points us to Michel Serres’s
rethinking of parasitism in his book, Parasite. In French, parasite has three
meanings. The first of these is the biological parasite: a small organism
living in or on another and feeding off of it, like the flea. The second is the
social parasite: one that feeds off another’s work, like the rat or the huck-
sters of Oran. The third definition of parasite, oft-ignored, is the mediatic
parasite: static or noise that disrupts the signal on a television or radio.
This final type receives pride of place in Serres’s analysis, much as the
failure of communication does in Camus’s epidemiology. He uses it to
expand parasitism into an entire media theory, arguing that the parasitic
relation “is the atomic form of our relations” (Serres 8). Inverting the nor-
mal schema in which active communication depends on the absence of
noise on the channel, Serres argues that without the possibility of noise,
no channel can exist and therefore no communication can take place:
“There are channels, and thus there must be noise. No canal without
noise” (79). With that in mind, he attempts to reposition the parasite, not
as something external and invasive that must be excluded from systems to
ensure their efficient function, but as a necessary and integral part of sys-
tems that cannot otherwise be understood: “Maybe the radical origin of
things is really that difference, even though classical rationalism damned it
to hell. In the beginning was the noise” (13).
This line of thinking asks us to reconsider the plague—whether we
think of it biologically or as a linguistic/social/political phenomenon—as a
threat intrinsic to any networked system. In the Great Gerbil populations
of the Caucasus region, plague is constantly present, usually in a benign
state, and takes epizootic form only at irregular intervals. Managing it
requires constant attention, and not only at periods of outbreak. Camus’s
novel encourages us to think in the same terms for Oran. Tarrou believes
that everyone carries the plague—“chacun la porte en soi” (228) and Rieux
echoes this feeling in the last paragraph of the novel: “le bacille de la peste
ne meurt ni ne disparaı̂t jamais” (279). The plague and its carriers are
obligated to each other. It is something the residents of Oran have to learn
to live with. It is latent to the city’s social system even after the end of the
epidemic—which, crucially, happens suddenly and can be attributed to
no specific strategy of resistance. Rieux predicts that, pending preventive
measures, “le jour viendrait où, pour le malheur et l’enseignement des
hommes, la peste réveillerait ses rats et les enverrait mourir dans une cité
heureuse” (279).
Whether or not those precautions are taken in Oran is left ambiguous.
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As the state of emergency is lifted, much returns to normal: “les trains
commencèrent à fumer en gare pendant que, venus de mers lointaines, des
navires mettaient déjà le cap sur notre port, marquant à leur manière que
ce jour était, pour tous ceux qui gémissaient d’être séparés, celui de la
grande réunion” (265). The social connections that made the city a breed-
ing ground for communicable disease are restored. Rieux can hardly dis-
tinguish the new state of affairs from the old. But not everything goes back
to the way it was. Rambert finds himself irrevocably changed: “Il aurait
souhaité redevenir celui qui, au début de l’épidémie, voulait courir d’un
seul élan hors de la ville et s’élancer à la rencontre de celle qu’il aimait.
Mais il savait que cela n’était plus possible. Il avait changé, la peste avait
mis en lui une distraction” (266). Distraction is the same word Tarrou uses
to characterize his relationship to plague, except that where for Tarrou, the
distraction was a moment of inattentiveness during which one lost sight of
the plague, for Rambert it is a constant, inescapable attention to plague.
Awareness of the plague becomes a buzz in the back of his mind, an imped-
iment to direct contact with his lover, an interference in his communica-
tions, a noise. Biological plague completes its tranformation into mediatic
parasite. Serres writes:
Given, two stations and a channel. They exchange messages. If the
relation succeeds, if it is perfect, optimum, and immediate; it disap-
pears as a relation. If it is there, if it exists, that means that it failed.
It is only mediation. Relation is nonrelation. And that is what the
parasite is. (79)
The legacy of Oran’s plague is to institute a new relationship between the
protagonists of the novel and the channels that connect the city: a relation
of nonrelation in which they cannot help being aware of mediation, of the
danger lurking in communication.
Inoculation
Whereas Camus’s practical advice for dealing with plague is frustratingly
unclear, Serres is strident regarding how to deal with the parasite. He
begins his book with Boursault’s fable of the city rat who invites the coun-
try rat to feast on the homeowner’s leftovers. The two dine on scraps of
food on the floor of a tax-collector’s home. Their meal is interrupted when
the noise of their paws scratching on the floor awakens the man, who
comes storming out of his room. The noise of his feet alerts the two rats
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to danger and they scurry off before he can open the door. The host gains
the upper hand, Serres argues, when he begins to make noise. When, rather
than trying to keep parasites out, he employs parasitism to his own ends.
When he begins to operate from the outside, from the adjacent position
that is the domain of the para-site. The same tactic shows promise in La
Peste.
Both Camus’s novel and Serres’s text begin with rats invading the city,
appearing in someone’s home. It was perhaps during a feast like the one
in the fable that an infected flea jumped from the country rat to its brother
in Oran. It would have only been a few days later that Rieux stumbled
upon that same rat, dead on his stoop. “Out of place,” he calls it. And
when Rieux pushes it off the stoop with his foot, moving the rat back into
place, it appears he dislocates the events of the novel, which, according to
general opinion, “n’y étaient pas à leur place, sortant un peu de l’ordinaire”
(La Peste 11). Camus’s entire narrative is out of position, next to where it
should be. The text occupies the position of the parasite. It is thus Camus
himself who best adopts the strategy of Boursault’s tax collector. His text
continually defers narrative responsibility: from the author onto Rieux,
from Rieux onto his anonymous alter ego and from the anonymous voice
onto Tarrou’s notes. This continual displacement of the “I” is what frus-
trates Cooke and Felman’s attempts to read the text as testimony and it is
at the heart of the critique lobbed at Camus by Beauvoir. It gives the sense,
as Beauvoir says, that Camus is fleeing. As though he refuses to stand for
anything.
But, inspired by Serres, we might say instead that Camus stands next to
something. By adopting the tactics of the parasite, by welcoming the para-
site into his text and by acknowledging the inexorability of parasitism,
Camus in his own way looks evil in the face. It is clear that the plague’s
influence extends beyond both the time of the epidemic and the borders
of Oran. The ships coming in and out of the harbor, the international
exchange of commodities, the import and export of cultural artifacts are
all implicated in the plague, both as contributing factors and as victims of
the city’s lockdown. This gives a different emphasis to the passage pre-
viously quoted in which Tarrou tells Rieux: “personne, non, personne au
monde n’est indemne” (228). The entire world is involved in Oran’s dis-
ease. Far from exculpating some, Camus’s novel accuses all. And in so
doing it acknowledges that plague—whether we read it as disease or ideol-
ogy—is a danger inherent to all networked systems. Fascism can emerge
from the meeting of minds just as easily as hope. The larger and more
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complicated the social body, the greater the need for attentiveness, the
greater the need to stay distracted. In this way, Camus’s novel both is and
isn’t about the Nazi occupation, as he insisted in his letter to Barthes, for
it is also a novel about the roots of Nazism, or any other ideology that
thrives on the destructive carelessness that allows the infection always pres-
ent in language, always ready to go coursing through the veins of the body
politic, to spread.
Princeton University
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