Viral Camus: Mapping cultural memory in the Covid era

Abstract

This article evaluates the place of The Plague in the emergent cultural memory of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when the novel was said to have “gone viral” in popular culture. I ask what it means to reread The Plague in the current moment, a time characterized not just by a pandemic but by widespread unrest and social movements on both ends of the political spectrum. While rereadings of Camus in light of COVID-19 seem predicated on a turn away from the novel’s allegorical dimension, The Plague has taken on new metaphorical meanings in its Covid-era reception. Examining the proliferation of “readings” of the pandemic, in which the virus has been understood as a figure for collective social ills, this article highlights the place of Camus’s novel in the cultural memory of the crisis and proposes that it can illuminate some of the complex entanglements of our present.