Albert Camus has been having a good pandemic, sixty years after he died. Copies of The Plague have sold faster than publishers can print them in many languages across the world, an abundance of newspaper and magazine articles have extolled its lessons for our time, and the BBC have made it into a radio play.
But another work of existential plague fiction, written around the same time by his friend and rival Jean-Paul Sartre, has far more important things to say about our experience of coronavirus.
Typhus is the screenplay of a film that was never made. It is laid out on the page in two columns, one for what you can see, the other for what you can hear. The story unfolds in the British colony of Malaya, which is now part of Malaysia. It opens with a close-up of a dead Malay man, then pans out to reveal a large square and in the distance a European hotel with a bus outside.
The bus is for the city’s few remaining Europeans, who plan to seal themselves inside it, drive to the nearest port, and board a ship. They are essentially fleeing from the Malay people, who mostly live in densely populated areas conducive to the lice that carry the bacterium.
Already in the opening scene we are confronted with structural discrimination. The white population are less likely to be infected. Only they are able to leave. The disease, which itself does not discriminate, is racialized by the social and economic order.
From there, Sartre’s screenplay continually articulates its epidemic’s differential effects. One scene fades back and forth between singing at a Malay funeral and singing in the whites-only area of a segregated bar. One phase of the plot is driven by the Malay people’s suspicion of the injections administered by white doctors. Some particularly unscrupulous Europeans find a way to make money from this reticence to be vaccinated, almost derailing the immunization project entirely.
Camus also sets his story in a colonial city, Oran on the coast of Algeria. But he only tells us about its European inhabitants. He introduces one character early on as a journalist investigating the health and living conditions of the Arab population, but then never mentions Arabs again. He makes no mention at all of the Berber population.
In focusing exclusively on Oran’s white citizens, Camus has rendered the racialized contours of an epidemic invisible. He has done the same with gender. He leaves women out of his story too, except as occasional characters who are nursing dying men or are absent from Oran and longed for by the men trying to eradicate the disease.
Sartre’s central character, by contrast, is a woman who has been made destitute by her society’s sexism. Her partner was in possession of their money when he died of typhus. They were not married and he refused to leave her anything as he was dying, so the money was not returned to her.
Nellie had probably earned that money in the first place. She is a singer and had been working in a successful nightclub in the city they had fled. When she finds work singing in a bar in the port town, it turns out that she is expected to engage in prostitution. When she refuses, she is fired and her wages are withheld. She cannot pay her rent, so she loses her only place to live. She is continually at risk of being assaulted by men in her own community.
Our lives in 2020 are very different to life in colonial cities in the 1940s. Yet our pandemic has these same social dimensions. There has been an enormous increase in violence against women and girls during lockdowns. Western countries have recorded much higher death rates among ethnic minorities than among their white populations, and among manual workers than white collar workers. The Global South will suffer the most from this virus.
Camus famously closes his novel with the remark that ‘the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely’ but instead ‘waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers’ for the day when it may ‘rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city’. But a city does not feel well-contented to people living in the conditions most conducive to disease, nor to those citizens most vulnerable to coercion, exploitation, and violence.
One great strength of The Plague is its theme that statistics and even language cannot really capture the individual tragedies of loss and separation they describe. Another is its focus on the systematic, tenacious, unglamorous work crucial to saving people from deadly diseases. But its greatest weakness is this blindness to an epidemic’s social shape. Reading Camus gives us the impression that we just need to keep the infection rate down until we have all been vaccinated, then try to return to normal.
Reading Sartre challenges us to face the difficult political problems this year has raised. How should we address the social injustice of our pandemic? How should we change our society to protect against another one? Media headline figures mask the social shape of coronavirus, so help us ignore these questions. Forgetting the social shape of a disease is even easier if the stories that frame our experience quietly and soothingly ignore it.
It is not clear why Sartre’s screenplay was never made into a film. Pathé had initially wanted to make uplifting films to help the French people reflect and rebuild after the war. Even so, Sartre suggested a tale of love dawning between a destitute nightclub singer and an alcoholic failed doctor under colonialism during a typhus epidemic, and Pathé liked the idea enough to commission a full screenplay and provide technical advice in developing it.
So why did they later change their minds? Perhaps the result was too politically challenging for their purposes. Certainly, the only one of Sartre’s suggestions that did end up getting made, the fabulous existentialist romcom Les Jeux Sont Faits, is very light on social critique.
Pathé retained the rights to Typhus in case a future project might make use of it and a few years later Yves Allégret picked it up, dusted it down, took its two main characters and one iconic scene, and built his rather different film Les Orgueilleux around them. He advertised this as written by the famous Jean-Paul Sartre, who was then shortlisted for an Oscar for it.
Allégret’s film is set in Mexico during a meningitis outbreak. His version of Nellie is a French woman made destitute by a Mexican stealing her money. She is under threat of coercion and violence only from Mexican men. She spends two long scenes entirely in her underwear. Sartre’s screenplay confronted racism and sexism. Allégret’s film indulged them. It is hardly surprising that Sartre disowned it.
Sartre’s actual screenplay was lost for more than half a century, then resurfaced and is now available in French, English, and Spanish. The social shape of our pandemic makes this the existential plague fiction we need. Now would be the perfect time to bring this acute and insightful tale to the big screen at long last. It might even win an Oscar.
Jonathan Webber
Jonathan Webber is Head of Philosophy at Cardiff University, Wales, UK. His book Rethinking Existentialism is now available in paperback from Oxford University Press.
