A Discussion on Albert Camus’ The Plague (La Peste)

welcome bienvenue my name is beth notar i'm one of the co-directors of the trinity institute for interdisciplinary studies tis and uh we are co-hosting this with the leonard e greenberg center for religious life my co-host today will be professor mark silk before i turn it over to him to introduce the panel and panelists just wanted to welcome you and also send condolences to anyone who's lost family friends or colleagues during these times and um i thank you to all of you who've emailed questions in advance if you have questions during the panel you can use the question and answer function and then we'll try to get representative questions to our panelists at the end of the panel now i'll turn it over to professor silk thanks so much beth uh delighted to be here um uh as we uh by way of a little bit of introduction um beth and her colleagues at tis uh were looking around for things to do and among some of the board members and and uh i made the mistake of saying that i just been reading the plague which i'd never read before and uh and that i thought it might be good to have a discussion about that and they said you're nominated to organize a panel so i i signed up um this of course is a book that many of us have in present circumstances decided to read or re-read as the case may be some in french some in some other language um it is by the algerian french author albert camus one of the pillars of french literature in the middle of the 20th century an important figure in french and continental philosophy um and uh he wrote this book really thinking about about a french algerian town the town of iran that had experienced bubonic plague in the 19th century he began thinking of it as early as 1941 writing that he was working on a book about the redeeming plague uh the book was published in 1947 and almost immediately translated into english and published by canaaf in 1948 and um it uh it has been taken in various ways i won't say what they are we have a distinguished panel here uh to discuss various of them from their own perspectives i'm going to do brief introductions but uh in the spirit of zoom we're going to move quickly and if you want to look up their cvs at greater length you can do that afterwards or in real time whatever you choose but we're going to begin uh with jim trussell professor of anthropology uh and uh a specialist in particular in medical anthropology and in latin america uh we will proceed then with sarah kipper who is a chair of the language and culture studies department and an expert in 20th century french literature we will then proceed to shane wagon who is chair of the philosophy department and works on both ancient and modern continental philosophy and finally wrapping up um with tanzan jones who has done a stint as chair of the religious studies department works also on uh ancient uh theology that is patristics um and particularly on modern christian theology uh and the theology of suffering so a wonderful lineup and i'm going to turn things right over to jim thanks very much mark um so i guess i want to do two things one fairly quickly uh and another for the seven or eight minutes that i have this is an interdisciplinary panel obviously so i wanted to talk a teeny little bit about how a medical anthropologist pays attention to disease and then to deal with the issue of how a medical anthropologist takes a novel as the source of ethnographic information um like many of you i read this book when i was in college i wrote a 10 page paper on it which seemed at the time like it was a great treatise and now seems barely like an introduction but i did enjoy it when i read it never forgot it and did also reread it probably in march i want to leave you with three points in this talk and apparel um the points are basically that medical anthropologists feel that diseases are part of lived experience that's that's how we approach our topic it's a common part a necessary part of being human all bodies are fragile we break we suffer but how we break what we break how we get sick these things are always influenced by our behaviors and the social and political environment that surrounds us and we always interpret how we get sick and suffer through cultural filters it doesn't come to us from the sky we always create systems also to explain resolve or prevent our suffering that's all things that medical anthropologists do when we look at suffering cross-culturally second point diseases are opportunities to make meaning they're not just about suffering they're about making meaning out of suffering and certainly writing a novel or writing is one kind of cultural productive act that makes meaning out of that suffering so we're going to be talking about that i'll tell you a little bit about some of the ways that medical entropologists have done this a guy named robert murphy in a book called the body silent wrote about how important it was to teach through and from the experience of disability he wrote about progressive paralysis and taking up residence in his head in his book called the body silent about learning through suffering an anthropologist named julie livingston wrote a book about managing cancer in botswana the book was called improvising medicine and it's about how practitioners and patients work in systems that don't work and how when that pain of cancer terminal cancer is ever present people still make meanings out of their lives another anthropologist named shirley lindenbaum wrote a book about understanding disease causation in new guinea it's called kuru sorcery and it's about kind of an alternative way of thinking about epidemiology about the distribution and determinants of diseases it's about what is upon the people and when the foray don't share biomedical terminology or technology how is it that they make meaning and understand what has befallen them from this disease so sourcing another book that i commend to your attention is a different approach from medical anthropologists about this kind of topic third point diseases can be metaphors and are metaphors in addition to horrific biological neurological and chemical processes tuberculosis makes us as we say waste away stds are somehow dirty so of course i'm reminded of susan sontag's book illnesses metaphor where when she was suffering from cancer living with cancer at the time really concerned about the challenge and the dangers of presenting what she called real illness as a metaphor she began her essay in this way published in the new york review books in 1978 everyone who's born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick although we all prefer to use only the good passport sooner or later each of us is obliged at least for a spell to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place so i've studied disease for three decades and experiences of people with an array of both infectious and chronic diseases there's certainly a line in medical anthropology that takes diseases as texts to be interpreted but i actually tend to follow those who mix biology and culture to consider the burden and transmission and symptomatology as well as the meaning of disease but the peril here is that the ethnographic text that i'm asked to deal with and that you're asked to listen to and think about is a book of imagined experience based almost entirely on the use as metaphor of bubonic and mnemonic forms of plague i i need to say many anthropologists are quite comfortable between this kind of border crossing between what's real and what's imagined behavior anthropologist laura bohannon writing under the pseudonym eleanor smith bowen wrote an anthropological novel called return to laughter karen narayan another anthropologist wrote a lovely book of ways to think about writing and about anton chekhov's writing in particular called alive in the writing these kinds of authors and others like them would argue that an anthropologist and certainly a medical anthropologist have perfectly legitimate interests in considering a novel as a source of ethnographic data so what kind of ethnographic data does this novel contain i'm afraid kamu doesn't do so well as an ethnographic author he describes populations either in very broad sweeps things like quote our townsfolk apparently found it hard to grasp what was happening to them close quote or very detailed accounts and sermons and speeches and thoughts of primary characters like ryutarou grang penalu the old man the prefect so this is relatively weak ethnography there is one thing that i think kamu does ethnographically very well um and we see these things in our own news media portrayal of kovid thinking about how reactions of the populace to the disease itself change through time he divides the book into five sections an early session people are wrapped in themselves they disbelieved in pencil pestilences a second section the town is quarantined now the plague was the concern of all of us brothers exile people found it hard to grasp what was happening to them nobody as yet had really acknowledged what the disease connoted these are statistics that nobody ever troubles much about public lacked standards of comparison the disease then gets called or sorry uh ryu calls the town a necropolis distress was coming vast despondency though not resignation part four exhaustion but hope a serum is created part five the golden age of health was secretly awaited the disease seemed to be leaving unaccountably so um i'll close by saying that i think that camus does a fairly good job in thinking about the reactions of the populace to the disease whether it's metaphor or reality i think he accurately and sometimes startlingly well portrays the reactions and the changing reactions to the topics of the disease in ways that to us as modern readers seem um quite relevant and opposite and almost frighteningly uh familiar but i'll close just by saying that the main thing that camus is doing is writing a book of philosophy expressed in images as he said it himself so he's really much merched into values that people are expressing in combating the disease bearing witness against implacable inhuman affliction finding fellowship creating solidarity resisting alienation and solitude it's bound to be traces in people's hearts so i would say for me the major lessons of this book as the author intended it is that we have to each in each generation relearn relive and reteach the values that we are encountering in the face of this present epidemic so i would leave you with that note and turn to the next person thanks very much thanks very much jim and we'll uh with a five seconds of reflection turn now to sarah for uh for the next perspective thanks mark um so in the context of french literary studies the plague is of course one of the most studied and celebrated novels of the 20th century it was an instant bestseller when it was published in 1947 within the first three months that it came out in france it had sold nearly 100 000 copies and so of course world war ii was a very recent memory for the french at this time and it was clear to them just how much the novel was an allegory of their wartime experience and not just a world war ii generally but specifically of the resistance to the german occupation so in this allegorical reading the plague is this external threat of fascism it's the unjust murder of fellow citizens and you have characters in the novel who represent the choice that was facing many french people at the time whether you formed part of the resistance as camus did and as characters in the novel like the doctor or tahu or gran do or whether you collaborate with the german occupation and the best example of that in the novel is the character of kota who really benefits from the situation of the plague so one of the things that really struck me rereading the novel now is how much this allegorical reading kind of falls away and only once you're living through a pandemic do you realize contrary to what jim is saying the ethnographic date i have absolutely no idea but how many how astonishing is how many details kemu gets right about the lived experience of being through a plague and so you know the question that he talks about about how quickly authorities will or will not recognize the situation that is right before their eyes and at one point in the novel he talks about um how you'd think disease would be an equalizer that would affect everybody indiscriminately but if that in fact it does not um and that uh that it is something that you the points of vast inequities about who gets sick and who doesn't get sick um so the novel resonates now because it seems to point up uh um it seems to point out that excuse me the i'm having a problem with my screen so i can't actually scroll through my notes i apologize um so um what i want to talk about today is is is two things that i think really strike me about the novel um and that really kind of strike us from the vantage point of the present and one is the question of the representation of women and arabs and the question of who gets represented and who does not get represented in the novel and the question of journalism as well um so on the first point in terms of the representation of women and minorities so who who is the novel about and who is it not about um so some people have asked why the novel takes place in iran and of course camus was algerian he had spent a good time a good portion of his life living in iran um and he um he wrote the plague largely from living in iran he moved to paris at one point while he was writing it um and he had recently experienced the typhus epidemic in one of the neighboring towns to iran in a town called la la marnia where one of his friends that he knew had gotten sick and so he had this firsthand experience of seeing how a town deals with the epidemic and how it kind of tackling questions about um about quarantines um so he's thinking about um the role sorry here we go sorry now i have my notes um so he's thinking about um you know how you deal with with um how you deal with quarantine and medical practices as you remember there's an early point in the novel where the journalist the character named ron bear who comes from paris and who wants to interview the doctor about the living conditions of arabs in the city and rio tells him well the conditions aren't um very good but he'll only agree to the interview if he can be honest about um what's happening and romero says he cannot and so so can so the character of freya refuses to to have this interview and so interestingly this is the only time in the novel where the word arab is used which is striking because if you've read the novel the stranger also by kamu you know that it's also vague on this point it's about an arab who gets killed on the beach and who never gets named and this is something that kamu has been critiqued for and i'll just mention as a sidebar that there's a wonderful novel that came out a few years ago by an algerian journalist and novelist named kamel dawud who called the murso investigation that tries to really right camus wrong and gives a name to the arab that is killed but in the plague there's this very curious absence of representation of the arab and berber populations um so similarly for for for those of you who who've read the novel you know that it centers on about five main characters all of whom are men at the center of fighting this disease and some of them talk about women um but the women are virtually off scene and they barely they're barely kind of characters at all so you have the character who pines for this lost love and misses her but she's very much this absent presence in his life again the journalist homber who's eager to leave the city and join his girlfriend in paris but ultimately decides to stay and so he ends up choosing heroism over beauty because he lives uh with his you know he chooses to stay in a run and help fight the cause the doctor who sends his wife away just before the pandemic which is just coincidental she has tuberculosis it's not because of the pandemic but so she's basically gone from the novel until the end when you learn that she dies and very meaningfully rio seems far more distraught about the death of his good friend tahu who succumbs to the plague you know just at this moment when the plague is leaving the city than he does about his wife's death um and and the the way that the female characters are described in the book whether it's talking about his own mother ryu's mother who's also this kind of peripheral presence um or or or um or uh rio's wife himself is very much as self-effacing they're described as shadows um and tyron's and rio's friendship is really the closest connection you see in the novel there's this kind of profound male bonding experience that they have when taru discloses his past and this is something you feel very much in the final pages of the novel where there were it's sort of canoes moment to reflect on humankind and if you if you read i don't know how the english version in front of me but in the french version the word lesem men appears in almost every single sentence and it's sort of these um general kind of statements of men wherever they are the same or what you learn in a pandemic is what um it's you know what we learn in a pandemic is that men there's more to admire than to despise so this novel camus is telling us is very self-consciously a study of man's relationship to one another and to life and what what i want to encourage is that when we think about the plague as a reflection of the human condition we need to be thoughtful about who that does and doesn't include and i think we need to be especially thoughtful and conscious about it with this novel because it asks us to be thinking about the way that you chronicle history and at a time right now when we're thinking about how we want to write our own history this is something that the book is very much invested in so i want to be mindful of time and just say a couple of words about the representation of journalism in the novel and maybe we can return to it in the q a but camus was a journalist he had written for several different newspapers in france and in algeria and during the war he wrote largely for the underground communist paper called combat and the novel is riddled with references to journalism and the media and you can see this really crushing indictment of the press you know the example that i mentioned earlier with homber and whether he can talk fully about arabs and he says no that he he risks censorship or there's this wonderful newspaper that they launch which is called le courrier de lespidemi the newspaper about the epidemic that proclaims it's going to have the scrupulous objectivity about the disease but in the end it just becomes you know this this journal at the service of capitalism that's yet useful just for product placement and can you talk quite a bunch about how you have this human urge to consume news to get information to learn what you can but how much that information is often incomplete or biased um and camus in his own journalistic writings strived for honesty and transparency a month before the plague came out it came out in june 1947 he published an article in combat called contagion where he called racism a disease and he warned that the french in their actions and also in the way that their actions were being represented in the in the media were becoming dangerously close to fascism because of some of their um some of the ways they were talking about algeria and madagascar and so one of the things that i want to to talk about hopefully is how can you use as the novel as a platform for us to think through how we are using the news what needs it's fulfilling and maybe how it falls short and how we get information thank you thanks sarah um and uh we'll move right along now to philosophy shane hey everybody thanks for coming plague always comes in from the outside the word itself tells us as much it hails from the greek plague which means to strike a blow and indeed the language of striking is rampant throughout camus texts with the plague presented as the visitor who strikes the town with disease thrashing those trapped within the city walls the french pest for its part indicates infection a contaminating of one thing by something else namely something outside of it it is also arguably related to the latin pincere which means to ground or to smash as with a pestle so both plague and pest denote a striking a hitting that originates from the outside and moves in but who or what is the plague most obviously the plague is a bacterium you're sienna pestis but it is only this in a lab and under a microscope in the lived world described in camus book the plague is first and foremost rats who once the plague arrives or gassed in the sewers by the thousands after the rats it's the cats and the dogs who are outdoor animals animals on the outside who are a plague and whose deaths by makeshift firing squads are so numerous that nobody bothers to count them eventually it's the citizens themselves who are plagued each of whom becoming a stranger to every other as each becomes the potential harbinger of death to his or her neighbor even ryu the good doctor becomes a symbol of plague as he comes to apprehend the sick from their homes knocking their doors down and breaking the seal that keeps them from the outside and drawing them off to their deaths throughout the text the plague is presented as the uncanny and unannounced visitor the one coming in uninvited from the outside eventually the plague is shown to be not so much the agent that brings death such as a flea or a rat or the neighbor but death itself the ultimate uninvited visitor in justifying his palliative efforts to his friend tarou ryu suggests that he is quote fighting against creation as he found it that is he is attempting to correct and order the random misery of existence by submitting it to the orderings of human reason in other words ryu objects not just to the death in front of him but to the brute fact that people die and like many physicians he wants to put an end not just to this death but to all death to death as such parenthetically this desire is not only foolish as ryu himself comes to realize but is strictly speaking homicidal and so far as it seeks to eradicate what is perhaps the most essential characteristic of humanity namely our mortality indeed if camus book demonstrates anything it is that we forge and form meaning for ourselves through grappling with the reality of human death no death no meaning in any case ryu eventually realizes the ultimate fruitlessness of his attempts to fight the plague noting that his job is no longer to cure the sick if it ever was but merely to diagnose and condemn them carrying them off like death himself to their deaths one steve's acknowledgement of his own impotence in the face of the plague as his friend taru succumbs to it quote the human form his friends lacerated by the spear thrusts of the plague was foundering under his eyes in the dark flood of the pestilence and he could do nothing to avert the wreck he could only stand unavailing on the shore empty-handed and sick at heart unarmed and helpless yet again under the onset of calamity unarmed and helpless yet again um what is the scope of this yet again most immediately it refers to the other countless victims of the outbreak whom you could not save more generally however this yet again refers to the blanket calamity of human dying a blanket in which we are all swaddled the very moment that we were born the plague as multiple characters in the text suggests does nothing other than quote the same thing over and over and over again namely the endless monotonous and unaccountable suffering of existence with death as the governing limit of such suffering yet the plague is not simply this suffering rather plague is also the inclination the desire and perhaps the unavoidable hope that we can put an end to such suffering that we can rationally arrange a world that is out of order that we will someday discover a method to the madness of nature in other words the plague is not so much death or suffering as it is the absurdity that consists in the tension standing between meaningless suffering and our seemingly inelectable attempts to put an end to it through our planning contriving operating bargaining begging praying etcetera the plague is ryu's belief that he can save the sick from dying it is father pantaloo's faith in a god who will justify such suffering it is the citizenry's initial reluctance to believe in the plague and their stubborn habit of making plans for the future even while the world is burning around them phrased otherwise plague is the feverish realization that there is an outside of the human mind an outside that is unforeseeable and unreasonable unpredictable and uncontrollable plague is the next uh the necessity of our confrontation with contingency it is the quote blind human faith in the near future a kind of object optimism that wants to make plans for a future that is utterly unknowable and that will in any case end with death what then is the cure for plague it is certainly not the serum that ryu assiduously and vainly administers to those infected nor is it the many measures taken by the government of oron to control the spread of the outbreak these measures might stop this plague or at least slow it down but they will not stop plague they will not stop the capricious universe from intruding upon and disrupting our existential plans this point is emphasized through the figure of ryu's wife who is dying from an unspecified disease for the entirety of the book probably tuberculosis like sarah mentioned but it's never explicitly stated her death is no surprise to ryu when it finally comes and why should it be in response to her death we are told that he quote knew that this suffering was nothing new for many months and for the last two days it was the self-same suffering going on and on and on in other words even without the plague there would have been plague even without bubonic and pneumonic plague there would have been whatever it was that killed his wife there is no cure for death nor for the infuriating unknowability of contingency this point which i take to be the point of the text is emphasized near the end of the book by the old asthmatic who like sisyphus rolling his boulder up the mountain rolls his peas his little green boulders back and forth between two bowls in order to keep track of time this character who perhaps more than any other exemplifies the humility in the face of contingency that camus is recommending gives us a definitive answer to our question what is plague and i shall give him the last word here quote ah but there you are all those folks are saying it was plague we've had the plague here you'd almost think they expect to be given a medal for it but what does that even mean plague it's just life no more than that thank you thanks shane and uh batting cleanup uh now that we've started baseball again uh maybe maybe we're stopping it again uh tams and jones religion thanks and thanks mark and beth for organizing this so i i plan to talk uh about the christian theology of suffering which camus as we know was an atheist himself nonetheless presents uh in this novel through the voice primarily of father panelu a jesuit priest who gives two very different sermons to the town's inhabitants i think that if you take these two sermons together uh they provide an excellent introduction to a range of christian responses to the problem of suffering in the priest's original sermon he announces the well-worn most common biblical explanation for suffering namely it is a divine punishment as he in tones quote calamity has come upon you my brethren and my brethren you deserved it end quote uh it is a way of this kind of suffering as a way of humbling the prideful uh humbling those who rest on their own laurels and in this sense according to the priest the plague he understands the plague as a kind of critique of the modern illusion of self-sufficiency and ability to control one's fate uh as as my colleague uh in philosophy was just talking about so the priest will will will say um if you ignore if you ignore god uh god will choose to ignore you it's significant um that camus tells us that father panelu is a jesuit doing research on augustine and the african church um i'll set aside the the specificities of of the north african christianity maybe for for discussion um in interest of time but to talk about augustine here for a moment the fact that he's a scholar of augustine um augustine was influenced by neoplatonism and was very conscious of his stance against the manichaeans and other 4th century gnostic christians and for that reason augustine refuses to allow evil any positive reality evil and the suffering that comes from it is understood to be simply the absence of its opposite so the absence of the good the absence of the providence of divine grace as the priest as a sort of as a scholar of augustine the priest takes this on and explains to his parishioners i'm quoting again for a long while god gazed down on this town with eyes of compassion but he grew weary of waiting his eternal hope was too long deferred and now he has turned his face away from us and so god's light withdrawn we walk in darkness in the thick darkness of this plague end quote thus as a scholar of augustine father panelu makes clear his theological position his at least his initial theological position that this plague is the result of god's absence or withdrawal rather than an intentional act so so far we see an explanation for suffering that's pretty standard both within the biblical texts and in the history of christianity however by the time the second sermon father panulu shifts from what i would call this augustinian catholicism to what i would identify as a more protestant specifically more lutheran and even more specifically more kierkegaardian existentialist faith where you have there is no reason or rationality no logic to the suffering suffering is not a punishment or the plague is not a punishment uh it's simply absurd um and nonetheless one must believe continue to choose to believe in in god have faith in god in face of this absurdity so events occur in the novel to intervene in the priest's thinking which i'll discuss in a moment however we find a hint of uh this specific theological dilemma which causes this shift we find a hint of this already in the first sermon father panelu makes a telling mistake in his first sermon when he lumps together the evil actions of cain of the inhabitants of sodom and gomorrah the egyptian pharaoh he lumps all those together with uh also with job all all as having quote hardened their hearts against god this is telling uh because unlike the fratricide of abel by cain or the inhospitality of the inhabitants of sodom and gomorrah or the enslavement of the israelites by pharaoh unlike all those job was innocent indeed he is called a righteous man in the eyes of the lord and his suffering cannot be easily explained as divine punishment so it's a seed in the first sermon that that's a problem for uh father panillus uh uh his uh his logic for why this is happening to the town job then brings us to the problem father panulu himself comes to face and confront as he begins to directly witness the suffering of the town's inhabitants especially the suffering of innocent children that is the problem of theodicy problem of theodicy is how one is to explain and understand the justice of god in the face of an existentially obvious injustice of the distribution of suffering uh something that sarah mentioned um uh the the in the unequal uh distribution of suffering where wicked prosper and the good and righteous are brought low so when father panelu sees a child die horribly quote something seemed to change in him and he gives a second sermon and in the second sermon he implicitly rebuts his previous teaching about suffering as divine punishment there's no reason no logic no theodicy that could explain or justify this innocent child's suffering at the same time panel refuses to give easy assurances he doesn't he he refuses to sort of say oh don't worry now the child is up with god happy in heaven and you can be assured that there's some final reality that will that will make all of this okay instead as the narrator tells us the narrator who we find out at the end is is the dr ryu he tells us that father pat i'm quoting again he father panelu would keep faith with that great symbol of all suffering the tortured body on the cross he would stand fast his back to the wall and face honestly the terrible problem of a child's agony end quote so no answers no justification no explanation no comfort uh just uh holding steadfast or holding faithful in the face of an absurd meaningless unredeemed unredeemable suffering so here we have a kind of anti-theodicy and i was reminded of in the second sermon of another great existentialist literary character from dostoevsky ivan karamazov who also refuses any easy explanation that would justify the suffering of innocence again we're told that no eternal happiness can compensate for single moments human suffering however the difference between ivan karamazov and father panelu is ivan famously refuses his what he calls his ticket to heaven he he gives it back to god in protest for such an unjust god um unlike ivan in the second sermon the priest instead preaches a radical acceptance of this irrational and ultimately meaningless suffering he ascends with full human humility to not knowing and yet accepting that quote since it was god's will we too should will it um he chooses to believe that god was in control chooses to believe that it chooses to continue to believe in god and have faith faith even in the face of this painful absurdity so here rather than dostoyevsky's ivan karamazov i think the template for father panelu is abraham the biblical patriarch patriarch as he is reimagined as the knight of faith in kierkegaard's fear and trembling uh the one who was willing to sacrifice his beloved son simply because god commands it of him um just one quick side note so even though father panilu is um to sort of contemporize it a little bit even though he's preaching this radical acceptance of of of the disease and the suffering that comes with it he still very explicitly uh orders his parishioners to take precautions and follow civic orders that are quote wisely promulgated for the public wheel in the disorders of a pestilence end quote in other words the priest i think would be wearing his face mask and social distancing in our time and would not be spouting his divinely ordained freedom uh in walmart to infect himself and others he would not be doing that nonetheless when he himself does take sick does take sick from some ambiguous ailment not necessarily the plague he nonetheless refuses to send for the doctor and dies i want to end with uh so i think you between those two sermons you get a very good um range of different christian responses uh to suffering but i wanted to end with just talking about um the point in commonality between the the main protagonist of the novel um the the doctor ryu who's a an atheist and and the so he's the hero of the novel and in and and father panel is somewhat his foil where they very much disagree on a lot of their responses but on one point um they agree they share one thing in common namely the choice to uh serve that they they both think they have an obligation to be present to to bear witness to and to serve those that are sick and dying for one of them that's a human obligation for the other it's a religious obligation but both men recognize this obligation for service toward their fellow sufferers so what i think you get in the end throughout the whole novel but but also with the portrayal of by the jesuit priest is you get in the end a thwarting of the very human need and desire to explain or to rationalize suffering that's thwarted the suffering has no logic has no explanation has no meaning it just is the best you get as ryu tells us and as penalu in his own way enacts is the opportunity to serve so the famous quote that ryu gives us is the whole thing is not about heroism it's about decency it may seem a ridiculous idea but the only way to fight the plague is with decency so i think from both a theological and a non-theological perspective you get this agreement that no meaning simply an opportunity to be decent to one's fellow human beings thank you tamson thanks to all the panelists for wonderful presentations done in terrific uh brevity so that we can move right along i'm going to um uh exercise cheers privilege and pose one question and then we'll turn to some questions from the audience um i i think jim when you began talking about the issue of of illness and making meaning made me think about the different ways in which we've tried to make meaning out of this book and the way it makes its own meaning there's ethnography that you mentioned there's uh journalism um that makes meaning out of these things there's uh actually reference in in the plague to a diaries of of tarou there is um of course philosophy and theology there's the novel itself which is a fictional making of meaning about about all this the meaning that camille himself uh derives i think sarah you quote that you that almost you know final remark of of camus and the novel that you end up thinking that that there is more to admire in men and people perhaps than to despise and so i'm going to ask since i used to be a journalist a journalistic question of you all do you think that the plague that we're living through now has revealed that there's more to admire than to despise in humankind we can go and order if you like too i think i've just been called on um as an anthropologist i'm interested in variability and so my response needs to be a careful well it depends which is often an anthropological answer uh the it depends in this case is in part geographic i think we do find much to admire about humanity's ability to rally forces respond to onslaughts save human lives and learn in the process and so in some places the lessons are wonderful and wondrous in other places they're despicable they're beneath human dignity um they're devoid of human dignity and they're ugly and they are contemptible so my depends is a big yes one finds much to admire and much to despise in contemporary human responses to this disease i would only add that one of the ways that we tend to measure what is contemptible or what is virtuous is by our measure of the supreme leaders rather than the people and i think that if we pay more when we pay more attention to the people and a little less attention to the noise created by their leaders we often find more to admire than to despise in human conditions uh human responses to suffering you know what i like about the that line of the book is how it reveals camus and this seems kind of paradoxical but it reveals his optimism about humanity and i think there's some sense that he um that he's constantly grappling with despite the sort of terrible sort of suffering that many of the panelists talked about that's really at the core of the book is there's a belief that we can get through it and that there is something to kind of um praise in the ability to deal with suffering um and so i don't know if i can say whether right now in terms of kind of looking at the world is there more to admire than despise but i think that i could adhere to that optimism in kamu that sense of even in despite of this of difficulty there is this sort of radical attempt to to make good it's human decency by a nose okay i like that i i would just say i i read that stuff sorry go ahead i read that statement as um i mean it's not exactly a compliment i'll just say that right i mean it's pointing to the wretchedness of humanity uh just as much as to its potential for decency so i'll just say that tamsen i i would echo what all of my colleagues have said i agree with them i would just add one thing um in the myth of sisyphus at the end of the myth of suspicious camus has this wonderful line where he says um you must we we must or one must i can't remember it's we or one but or what it is in the french but one must imagine sisyphus happy not hopeful without hope right condemned to a futile absurd existence but one must still imagine him happy and i see read that in the same way as it's maybe by the nose happier just a little bit but there's a defiance to it right that that is part of camus great attraction that's a nice note from you all uh personally i'm waiting for the evidence to come in we're still not over but we'll see i hope you're all right beth you have a question there's a lot of great questions that are coming in in the q a and also questions that i received in email um there's a question that's related to jim's point about disease as metaphor and sarah is about this kind of male bonding of taru and the doctor here as well as a great question that's related um to europe after the holocaust and um they're in the kind of male bonding scene with taru and mir on the terrace um uh let me see if i got this right um teru says um let me begin by saying i had the plague already long before i came to this town which is tantamount to saying i'm like everybody else and so there's a question what is the plague there is it fascism is it evil is it racism is it anti-semitism someone has raised a question um what how do we think about death and meaning after auschwitz after post-holocaust um so let me just interrupt for a second here because of the interest of trying to take a number of questions um unless somebody's dying to follow up we'll let one person answer the question uh and then move on but you know obviously we can have more but i but this is not you should not feel obligated everyone to uh to weigh in on these things we'll we'll try to move through quickly so i can take the first part of the question um what is the plague to which taru is referring with which he was infected is that correct yeah as i understand it and uh someone else please correct me if i'm wrong um he's really referring to so he is striving to be uh maybe not a uh um maybe not a pacifist but he's striving to avoid killing avoid killing others avoid uh being complicit in the deaths of others but he finds himself in a social situation uh where that is impossible where one is already complicit always already complicit in the suffering and the death of others and so this situation for him is utterly absurd utterly intolerable despite his best efforts to live cleanly purely kindly he himself is a murderer and you know we don't have to think too deeply to see the various ways that this is true for all of us um i don't i don't have a cogent i think response to the the second part i'd have to think more about um how we can talk about death and meaning after auswitch um in in light of this novel but that's what i can say for the first part of the question thank you um there are a lot of that's a huge question there are a lot of questions coming in about uh eccentric characters in the novel like and then and um great um the names like real means to laugh and wrong means big or tall why is gronk stuck on writing this sentence over and over again and then burns his manuscript what about the man who is spitting on the cats that taru has an affection for um anybody want to take take that on why does why does kamu have these characters i mean i can say something all right go ahead yeah i'll say something about the grand character who's this this really lovely sort of um trying to write and not being able to write and sort of trying to get things perfect you know he never felt happy with this novel or with any novel that he wrote he always felt that it could be better that it wasn't written perfectly and i think there's something of that that desire to get it right that didn't call um but his eccentric characters i mean those traverse his novels you know he's really kind of keen on that sort of um sort of the detail about various um you know eccentric people and sort of like giving like a bird's eye and one of the things that i really kind of admire about his writing is how he can sort of give you this very ironic um glance at a particular character while also making these sort of general commentaries about human nature and i think he can kind of hone in and zoom out in a very effective way yeah you don't feel that he's just you know sort of writing a philosophical novel about of ideas that he he loves people uh there's some other questions really interesting questions coming in a series of questions about what are the lessons of the plague for our current moment of coved i mean i think sarah's point about journalism is one and source news sources and um information the distribution of information is is one of the things that and the and the uh being a little bit um uh wanting to be careful about sources of information being accurate um i i i think the more fundamental one is is the one about decency uh it's back to the point we were talking about earlier um decency and also the how what um shane was talking about with the inner and outer who's in who's out it's it's always an opportunity to pay uh very close attention to who we're um border border patrols and border crossings i i've i've done i've moved from one country to another in the last month temporarily and quarantined myself and just the feel myself now as as someone coming from a hot spot to coming to a relatively cold spot in the global pandemic just how how much hostility there is right and and sort of figuring out um constantly having to tell people we've been quarantined you know we're safe um so i think another um a pandemic is always an opportunity to critically evaluate the ways in which we um other people and and and and say who's in who's out and what that means in a different way uh is really fascinating um it's especially fascinating from the american perspective and and then the final thing i would say is uh that the novel brings up that is pertinent for now is the way in which um who's affected the in the inequity of how the suffering is distributed um where it hits who it hits um and who who's relatively immune from it as well thanks you know i would add and i i think your point sarah about how the allegory has dropped away how it seemed to people after world war ii to be about world war ii but that in the midst of this pandemic what i found so striking of reading the novel again you know in march and and um was really how how good it is on play i mean on on exp going through this experience and in that sense i mean um you really had the feeling that camus wanted to get it right even if his ethnography isn't perfect um that that that there's a and you know that this is not about a story about uh you know the governors of the town about the the political authorities it's really an effort to sort of see how this thing plays out from a medical stamp from a doctor's standpoint i mean that's the that's where he grounds this and um in that sense i mean i think i think people should read the book as in really i mean and i think that our experience of it is it's it's so much about an actual disease event at least that was my sense all right i think we have time for one more question and then um you know we'll uh we'll wrap this sucker up i guess uh the there's still a lot of questions but someone asked a question about um love in um uh the role of love in the novel and um maybe that camus has been kind of uh derided as too sentimental of an existentialist uh does anyone want to want to take that on i'm not going to take the point on about sentimentality i i think that this message is about um um and the importance of collegiality the importance of building bridges to other people of making links across to other humans it's not about individual freedom it's about the group it's about the ability of the individual to see the humanity of the rest of the group and to support that and join with it that's how we overcome the implacable external evil and that for me is what public health is all about we unfortunately live in a country in which we haven't done that very well where it's the health of the individual that holds sway rather than the health of the group and the dramatic inequities and the distribution of this present disease is just the latest narration of the dramatic inequities that have come in every disease that's come into this country in the last 150 years so the message for me isn't kind of mere sentimentality at all it's um a powerful message about our role as fellow humans trying to make things better and trying to draw connections across these chasms that separate us in the face of so many obstacles and yet going on and going on and going on and trying and trying and trying that seems like on which to end thank you jim thanks again to the panelists and i'll toss the ball back to beth for the last word thank you all so much uh if you um have more questions you could feel free to email them to me and i can post them to our panelists who may or may not have a chance to answer but this uh well has also been recorded so if you know someone who missed today you can let them know that they can still watch it thank you all so much for joining us and for your excellent questions

Channel: trinitycollegect

Views: 5,296

Rating: 4.9534883 out of 5

Keywords: NESCAC, Trinity, College, Hartford, Connecticut, Bantams, CT, Conn., University, United, States, U.S.A., educational, learning, culture, beautiful, campus, architecture

Id: Ath8D6w0qMw

Length: 58min 49sec (3529 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 06 2020