"Trapped by the climate" : reading Albert Camus's The Plague in light of anthropogenic climate change

This article turns back to one of the most prominent narratives of contagion, Albert Camus's 1947 novel, The Plague, so as to reflect upon the relationship between narratives of contagion and the planet's present-day climate challenges. It reads The Plague as describing catastrophic events possible in a climate-change-affected future, presenting Camus's novel as facilitating an epistemological shift whereby its reader can occupy the position of "enlightened doomsayer," French thinker (and Girard acolyte) Dupuy's concept for the epistemological conditions necessary for a response commensurate to the twenty-first century's changing climate.2 It focuses on the important role that the "natural world," especially the ocean and the skies"”and to a more general extent the nonhuman world"”play in Camus's novel.3 In doing so it adopts elements of the method of "meteorological reading" as proposed by Jennifer Mae Hamilton (11-30). Hamilton's method is especially well-suited to this task as it is a "historically situated interpretative practice" (21), and acknowledges that looking to the skies, whether physically or in the pages of a book, is a longstanding human practice; "the weather is a perennial site of bad sign reading, anxious prophesizing and, now, unstable scientific data" (30). "Anxious prophesizing" is a key phrase here, as it affirms how a novel such as The Plague draws together historical events and their fictional reimagining with the subjective focus of a psychoanalytically informed approach: looking to the skies is also, in the present day, looking, anxiously, within. Just as humans in the past looked to the sky for signs of an epidemic to come, as Girard affirms, so too do we now look to the skies and to the seas"”and to literature"”for a prophetic hint to the planet's future.4 This article, then, advocates for the dramatic action of The Plague"”a population under threat, experiencing quarantine, suddenly subject to the nonhuman world"”as an important work of art directly pertinent to the planet's possible future.