“Trapped by the climate”: Reading Albert Camus’sThe Plaguein Light of Anthropogenic Climate Change

The twenty-first century has seen the continued prominence of plague narrative, in both its medical and metaphorical guises. For René Girard, the philosopher and literary theorist, this is unsurprising: writing in 1974, but with sentiment of enduring application, he claims: “plague, as a literary theme, is still alive today, in a world less and less threatened by real epidemics…serving mostly as a disguise for an even more terrible threat that no science has been able to conquer” (845). The plague itself need not be actual: Girard notes that the “metaphor is endowed with an almost incredible vitality” (835). This vitality exists because the plague is “always with us, as fear or as reality,” making clear the subjective nature of its function. Plague is especially manifest in contemporary literary and genre fiction which, broadly speaking, engages with anthropogenic climate change in light of its increasing visibility in the twenty-first century; in this field there is an abundance of narratives pertaining to disease and infection, and to susceptibility and suggestion.1 Indeed, the phenomenon goes beyond the literary, as Peta Mitchell writes in Contagious Metaphor: “contagion today is everywhere – it is in the financial markets, on the streets and in our computers” (1). Narratives of contagion and plague link the real and the imaginary in a peculiar way, prompting attention across the “spheres of government, biomedicine and popular culture, as well as post-structuralist theory and history” (Bashford and Hooker 1). As we shall see, the plague—and narratives of contagion—is, however, particularly relevant to the current challenges of anthropogenic climate change. Both epidemic and climate change share common features and concerns: of invisible and uncontrollable actors, whether microbes or climatic systems; of uncertainty with regard to prevention or control; and, especially in the twenty-first century, with common questions around human culpability: the human-induced nature of climate changes shares a significant similarity to, for instance, narratives of antibiotic-resistant superbugs.