The Fable of the Staggering Rat

In Albert Camus’s La peste (1947) plague announces itself in not one but two passages of the book by way of rats coming out of their hiding places overground to perform a dance macabre, and die in front of the eyes of amazed humans. Camus in fact borrowed the figure of the “staggering rat” from French Catholic missionary narratives developed not in colonial Algeria, where the novel takes place, but in a land that the French wanted but failed to colonize: the Chinese province of Yunnan, in the 1870s. Historians have often taken these missionary narratives as evidence of epizootic plague in the region. Instead, in his article “The Figure of the Staggering Rat”, published in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Christos Lynteris, Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, warns against “virus hunting” approaches to such outbreak narratives. Instead, he argues, missionary stories about staggering rats need to be understood in their ethnographic reality, as fables about the end of the world and at the same time imperialist scripts for the need of conversion and colonization. Lynteris argues that if we are interested in understanding multispecies realities, it is crucial to be attentive to the more-than-medical and more-than-zoonotic aspects of stories of animals becoming sick and dying in the context of human epidemics. This is as much true for historical as for contemporary narratives, which should not be reduced to epidemiological data, but approached as complex, world-making processes.