Columbia Equestrienne

On writing amidst the plague.

By Marvin Cho

Illustration by Em Bennet

All institutions, assumptions, and habits of normalcy in Oran had succumbed to the march of the plague. The virus had maintained its choke on the Algerian city for months, reducing human lives into a death toll and wringing a tired resignation out of its citizens. Even as despair reigned in the community, Doctor Rieux continued to provide diagnoses, administer medicines, and enforce quarantine rules in an admirable refusal to surrender before his invincible enemy. But, with most of his colleagues engrossed in the fight against anarchy and death, Joseph Grand invests a far greater share of his attention into a more personal project: writing a novel.

I had mixed feelings about Grand when I first read Albert Camus’ novel The Plague. The novel itself was certainly a beautiful and respectable pursuit. However, it required him to spend many hours withdrawn into the intimacy of his own mind, all of which he could have used for something more helpful. By writing, Grand was betraying friends who were constantly working to save lives as volunteers in quarantine centers and hospital wards. Everyone else in the novel seemed to understand that the creative pursuits of their inner lives should be put aside for the external threat of the plague. Was Grand being selfish by refusing to let go of his novel?

Grand himself seems to suffer over this question when, at the height of the plague, he falls ill. Feverish and delirious, he begs Rieux to read out the contents of his manuscript. But as Rieux flips through the pages, he discovers that, rather than a novel, the manuscript only contains a first sentence, describing an equestrienne riding down the lanes of Paris on a fine May morning, revised over and over again with the smallest changes. In a moment of torturous embarrassment—perhaps in having shared his self-gratifying sentence with Rieux, the champion of Oran’s pragmatic resistance against the plague—Grand demands that his manuscript be burned. Rieux leaves him there, all but certain of the death of his friend.

…

This past spring, Columbia was deathly ill. The vitality of our research programs had been sapped of 400 million dollars worth of federal grants by the Trump administration. The University had further compromised our community’s academic sovereignty by promising tangible changes to academic policy, such as granting federal oversight of our Middle Eastern studies program, as ransom. ICE agents on campus presented a real suppressive threat that was made fearfully clear to us when they arrested Mahmoud Khalil in his University-owned apartment and detained him in a Louisiana jail on dubious legal grounds. Faced with urgent challenges, the community seemed in dire need of a practical miracle.

While it seemed like the moral concerns of our community multiplied every day, I was writing an article about undergraduate archaeology at Columbia and the immobilizing terror that comes with scraping through ancient dirt, which rang as dissonantly with its surroundings as Grand’s equestrienne. In classes, too, I felt an occasional pang of embarrassment both for myself and for my classmates: while the news depicted Columbia as an unresting ideological battleground, we spent our days translating Suetonius’ description of Augustus’ exercise routine or enthusiastically parsing Aristotle’s theory on the power of friendship. In these moments, I felt a little like we were all Grand during his private hours, suffering over which conjunctions and adjectives to use while others suffered from plague.

…

Was Grand right to have been embarrassed?

Rieux returns to Grand’s apartment in the morning and is astonished to find Grand almost completely recovered. Grand tells him smilingly:

“I was wrong. But I’ll start over. I remember everything, you’ll see.”

When I reread The Plague this summer after a tumultuous first year at Columbia, I noticed a connection that I had not seen before: Oran’s miraculous pushback against the plaque begins right after this sudden proclamation by Grand. People begin to survive where they should have died. The same serums that Rieux had once administered in vain begin to fight infections with new-found strength. Before long, Oranians find themselves rejoicing at the reopening of their city and the provisional resumption of daily life. Somehow, Grand’s affirmation of his sentence marked the beginning of the end for the plague.

In Camus’ broader corpus, self-affirmation constitutes the ultimate rebellion against a world that allows only self-hatred. The single path of  “triumph” against human mortality and the existential dread it inspires—which, for Camus, threatens to make one’s immediate life meaningless and absurd—is to arrive at a self-affirmation that is entirely aware of its tragic position, yet persists nonetheless. Camus famously imagines Sisyphus reclaiming his rock at the top of the hill as the epitome of absurd resistance because, at that moment, a helpless prisoner transforms into a rebel who embraces what his gods need him to hate. 

I like to imagine that, during his night of suffering, Grand came to the same conclusion as his author. The plague, like mortality, crushes its subjects psychologically long before it kills them by making them resent the seemingly useless pursuits of their useless lives. By this special circumstance, Grand’s self-aware affirmation becomes a real act of rebellion in which he stubbornly withstands the plague’s most devastating blow. As long as Grand can resist the urge to hate his sentence the plague will never be fully victorious over him.

Perhaps this kind of self-affirmation has been overlooked in our own fight for academic freedom. A key condition for the success of an attack on academic freedom is not simply a codified influence over our community, but our own loss of confidence in our passion for truth-seeking. This truth-seeking manifests not only in political and ideological reasoning, but also in academic pursuits. Under this rare circumstance, our useless curiosities about Aristotle or Archaeology become not an escape from the moral fray, but a rebellious refusal to loosen our grip on the very thing that today’s government wants us to abandon. 

When our administration entered a settlement in late July that officially cemented federal oversight over university policy and established a disastrous precedent for other institutions across the nation, they accepted a coerced deadlock that evaporated any rational hope for redemption in the near future. But a fight nevertheless persists over our own spirit of free inquiry, and the question of whether we capitulate out of embarrassment or despair does remain in our own hands. When Grand concluded that his manuscript must be burned for being useless, he was wrong. His novel was an escape only because he was using it as an escape. Only by holding it closer than ever—not despite but in defiance of the brief moments of embarrassment—did he stand up against the plague.