Since Charlotte, another C has occupied my thoughts: Camus.

The book group read The Plague, or en francais, “La Peste” in April. It’s a novel of 1940-something (literally “194—”). A 1940-something set in an alt-reality without the war, but with the absurdity that war forces us to confront.

Set in coastal Oran, a town at the northwestern extremity of Algeria, the sea plays a key role in the highly allegorical novel. Oran faces away from the sea. It is turned in on itself. Ignoring the source of its own wealth and life.

Towards the end of La Peste, there is a scene in which Dr Rieux and Tarrou, at the height of the pandemic, decide to take the afternoon off and go swimming.  

The sea they swim in is the Mediterranean. Full of autumn’s cached warmth of the summer.

In den finsteren Zeiten
Wird da auch geschwommen werden?
Da wird auch geschwommen werden.
[In] den finsteren Zeiten

(Reworking of Brecht's epigraph to the Svendborger Gedichte, a collection of poems written in his Danish exile from 1933 to 1939)

À la Bertolt Brecht – “In the dark times, will there also be swimming/There will be swimming/[in] the dark times.”

It is a text that rhymes with Brecht’s contemporary writings on several levels. Another example is Rieux’s disavowal of heroic actions during the plague. This has strong echoes of Brecht’s “unglücklich das Land, das Helden nötig hat“ form Leben des Galilei (Life of Galileo), written at the end of his Danish exile on the outbreak of the Second World War.

Its sentiment is broadly that the necessity of exceptional individuals is a sign that things have gone badly wrong. If your system requires the emergence of such exceptional people or actions, then it has failed to function as a system of morality.

Camus’s Dr Rieux concludes that the answer is to stoically do one’s duty, and to find inherent value in healing the patient in front of him, regardless of its potential futility as an answer to the voracious and incomprehensible pestilence, which cannot be reasoned with at an individual level. It is a continuation and development of Camus’s philosophy of the absurd, present in all his works. Life and work must be given meaning, despite life presenting itself as meaningless and incoherent. We must give life coherence in the full consciousness of its fundamental insolubility.

The Brecht of the early 1930s would no doubt take issue with this stance. His intractable position was that the world could be changed and that human beings have the power to change it if they recognise its inherent mutability. Being a Marxist, he had less interest in a philosophy of daily life, less still one that recognised a fundamental unpredictability of events.

That probably remained his official view throughout the 1940s and into the early 50s. I like to think, though, that, if he ever read La Peste, he would have recognised some resonances with his thinking as shaped by the catastrophes of the death camps and the brutality of total war.

Coincidentally, a new adaptation has recently been released of Camus’s L’Etranger directed by Francois Ozon. In stylish black and white, it remains both faithful to the text and to the real historical setting of Algiers, which it captures in a wonderfully immersive fashion.

It is extremely French, with hundreds of cigarettes smoked over its two-hour runtime. At the same time, it captures the sense of worlds living in parallel; French and Arabic cultures side by side. We have grand colonial facades, vibrant postwar European cinema juxtaposed with minarets, calls to prayer and coffee habitually drunk from bowls.

One thing I liked about the film is how it captures Meursault’s domestic situation. His flat and its surrounding environs are rendered incredibly vividly. We watch and can indulge in the careful details of the protagonist’s domesticity. We see him washing, shaving, dressing, cooking eggs, doing the dishes and going out for groceries. These active silences foreground the mundane, giving them as much significance as the aberrations that open the film and conclude its second act.

The central event of both the novel and film has a subversive text-against-itself insertion in the adaptation. Of course, the existentialism and the philosophical crisis precipitated by the protagonist’s fatal shooting of an indigenous Algerian are still present. However, the film introduces a backstory for the victim and gives him a sister, who is intertwined in a subplot concerning Meursault’s “friend” and neighbour.

This does not dilute the philosophical aspect of the film; I would say it enhances it because the alternative, non-philosophical view is strengthened by being given a human face. It shows how it is not possible to fully abstract oneself from one’s own life. Every decision and response to the consequences of that decision is not simply the working out of philosophical principles in the real world, but choices that upend whole lives and whose effects cannot be conceived of.