When an allegory becomes a reality: lockdown and exile at home
Yoshi Ishikawa offers some philosophical reflection on life during the coronavirus pandemic.
I mean to speak of the experience of our time in a pandemic as a process of dislocation. This is a deeply unsettling time for our psychological and physical circumstances. Sudden departure and farewell to the days spent on my university campus seem already too distant to imagine it was only a month ago. Instead of active life, sentimentalism and boredom took over. Sirens became our morning wake-up alarm. Memes propagate what friends want to do after it is all over, and yet we recoil from an easy hope for the future.
The intensity of the experience progressively fades away as the state of emergency elongates, but the initial shock of realising the seriousness of pandemic is all too personal. On Friday 13th March, the university announced closure and I made up my mind overnight to travel back to Japan. By next Wednesday, my room was vacated. I was on board to fly back home. After 28 hours of travel, I found myself in my hometown, in an empty house where my grandmother used to live, and started two weeks of precautionary self-isolation.
Despite this overwhelming transition over a week, the psychological breakdown only happened in the subtlest possible way. When I was unbuttoning shirts from the wardrobe to pack them in my suitcase, tears started to flow down my cheeks. The sensation of normality being torn apart grew inside me with a powerful gravity, through the mere act of taking shirts off the hangers. It would cut the tie with my room.
The journey was tasteless, colourless. Compared to the scale of anxieties my breakdown brought about, it did not occur to me how much carbon dioxide the plane was emitting high up in the sky, a thought that used to haunt me back in normal days. No such thing as a journey indeed: everywhere seemed similar, hopelessly mundane, every TV reporting the same global issue.
“The first thing that the plague brought to our fellow-citizens was exile”, said Albert Camus in the infamous novel The Plague. Camus seems to have put a specific meaning to his usage of the word “exile”. In my understanding, it is a condition in which, having been deprived of the possibility for normality and hope, you find yourself in utterly foreign surroundings, still carrying the memory of what the world used to look like. Because of strict quarantine imposed on a plague-hit city of Oran, the residents found themselves in a situation where separation defined their days. The future was forcefully suspended. The past, full of memories that have little to do with the reality of plague, is the only luxury allowed for them in the form of recollection. They end up prisoners of the present at home; entrapped in all too mediocre surroundings with no promise of hope, the best one can do is to “live with the memory which is of no use to them”. “They drifted rather than lived,” notes Camus, in idle elongation of the days spent for nothing.
Reading Camus in the time of coronavirus, I had mixed feelings about how to understand this novel. The fame of The Plague was its allegorical testimony of French resistance against Nazism, blended with Camus’ signature philosophy of the absurd. But having had enough of the life under the global pandemic, the novel appeared too realistic to be an allegory. Perhaps it is the sign of intellectual laziness, but it resonated painfully in my mind.
Camus specifically bore in mind the circumstances of separation from the loved ones. It was a Christmas shop window full of toys that made Grand, an old civil servant, cry for the memory of his now-divorced wife Jeanne. An old story haunts Grand: looking into the Christmas shop window with her was the best of his engagement tale. Christmas does come around even in times of plague and marks Grand’s Proustian encounter with the time that is lost so long ago that he collapses under the heaviness of memory.
For Proust, Albertine was lost because she died, escaping from the pressure of her lover’s jealousy; under quarantine, one is only lost in the absence of social life, locked inside the rigorous architecture of a house that rejects the entrance of outside world, not knowing how this all came to be and how to go back to normality. This, I’d say, is where a massive tide of romanticism hits the shore. Never before have we been captivated by the reminiscence of what we used to have just for the sake of itself. Technology did not serve to create something fundamentally new: we mobilise it to compensate for the loss and imitate the standard of normality once again, even if it's a display on the Zoom screen of your well-pressed shirt on top of a pyjama trouser. We are still playing the game of mundane social life. But from a much different perspective and awareness.
Edward Said said he speaks of exiles “not as a privilege, but as an alternative to the mass institutions that dominate modern life” in his essay Reflections on Exile. You do not choose to be an exile as James Joyce has. It rather happens to you that, either in the political or social form of banishment, the world suddenly appears to be a foreign land, turning upside down. But the world that you lived before is no less real: life in exile is to live in two distinct environments that reject permanence and one’s habitual order. It is a life as a nomad in a seemingly stable world. No attempt to fetishising this attitude is valid because exile is necessarily an experience of embodying the dislocation. And we are, sadly, all on the same boat.
Coronavirus would demarcate the global reset for humanity which is comparable - practically and metaphorically - to the end of two world wars. When Arundhati Roy wrote that the pandemic is “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next”, she calls for our courage to travel across different experiences of life. To imagine the world anew, accept it and struggle. We know it’d be over - but we never know what awaits us next.