Literary Pests

In connection with a writing assignment, I have been reading a good deal of “plague literature.”  There is quite a lot of it, and it is attracting a good deal of current attention, some more and some less useful.  There is an excellent essay by Jill Lepore, beautifully written as always, in the latest issue of the New Yorker to arrive here.  This essay may even resuscitate Mary Wolstonecraft Shelley’s The Last Man, which (in my opinion) requires about the same dosage of galvanization as Dr. Frankenstein’s corpse to make it twitch into motion.

            Our great tragic tradition may be said to begin with the plague—that is, with the blindness of Oedipus in plague-ridden Thebes.  Its most brilliant appearance in medieval literature is not (again in my opinion) in Boccaccio’s Decameron but in Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale.”  Revisiting some of the Plague’s famous novelistic appearance, I found myself most impressed by those of Defoe (1722) and Camus (1947).

Camus’s The Plague (La Peste) is a gripping novel.  Its ostensible subject is an outbreak of the Plague in the North African city of Oran—Algeria still being under French colonial administration at the time—but it has invited deep metaphysical speculation.   I tried to read a little of the criticism.  Readers are inclined to find an allegory in the book, though it would seem to be a dark conceit indeed to judge from the lack of interpretive agreement.  Poking about among various confidently expressed explications, I was reminded of what a student had once said to me with great earnestness in a class discussion: “I know it is a Christ-image, but a Christ-image of what?”

But the real rediscovery was Daniel Defoe.  Most young boys of my generation probably read Robinson Crusoe.  I hope they still do, but I rather doubt it.  Only when I was in graduate school did I myself come to appreciate Defoe’s significance in English literary history.  Today he would be classed as a journalist and a middle-brow popularizer, looked down upon by the literary mandarins of the New York Review of Books as he was looked down upon by their equivalents in Queen Anne’s day.  He was something like the Tom Wolfe of the age, and even more prolific.  His literary career got off to a pretty bad start with an anonymous but best-selling pamphlet entitled “The Shortest Way with the Dissenters” (1702).  Defoe was a religious non-conformist (meaning not a member of the Church of England).  His pamphlet, written in the fictional voice of a bigoted Tory, suggested that the answer to the “problem” of Dissent was to deport all the Dissenters except for their preachers, who would be hanged.  The intended irony—later achieved by Swift in his even more extravagant “modest proposal” to eat Irish babies—misfired entirely.  The author’s identity was soon discovered, and Defoe was condemned to three hours in the pillory, a punishment always degrading and occasionally fatal if your tormentors decided to throw brickbats rather than dead cats at your head.  Fortunately, it was a rainy day, with few citizens out and about to hurl anything.

 

But he rebounded, and was already famous before his huge success with Robinson Crusoe (1719).  His annus mirabilis was 1722 when he published not only Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack but A Journal of the Plague Year.  All three are fiction, but the Journal, deeply researched and written in the first-person, does indeed read like an in-depth work of investigative journalism.  It is a terrifying account of the effects of the epidemic disease that ran its course through the English capital in the years 1665-1666.  While attempting a tone of historical objectivity suggested by its use of statistical charts and tables, it often veers into more or less sensational anecdotes and close-up glimpses of life, and more especially of death, in the beleaguered city.  It is equally compelling in its sober account of the efforts made by the civic authorities to control the disease and in its many and varied “human interest” anecdotes.  Though ignorant of much of the important medical knowledge of our own age, both the learned and the lay grasped the principle of contagion.  The fear of contagion led to draconian ordinances by the authorities and many acts of desperate, selfish inhumanity by individuals.  Any residence known to house a sick person became a prison for all who dwelt there, its door marked with a large red cross and its locked doors guarded by civic wardens.  Most municipal services collapsed including, eventually, the collection and decent burial of the dead.

England had already been through a lot in the seventeenth century, including the judicial murder of its king, a revolution, and a bloody civil war—all related in significant part to questions of religion, including some of fairly far-out radical millenarianism.  The Plague struck in 1665.  In 1666, even before it had fully run its whole course, the Great Fire destroyed the center of the city, rendering thousands homeless.  For those of a mystical or superstitious turn of mind, this could not be coincidental.  The year told it all: the sum of the millennium (1000) and the apocalyptic Number of the Beast (666).  I first became aware of this bizarre aspect of the episode when I was writing about the spiritual healer Valentine Greatrakes in my book The Dark Side of the Enlightenment.  Defoe, though a great believer in Providence—the sort of minimalism eighteenth-century version of God working in the human realm—indulges none of these extravagances directly.  The work as a whole, however, reverberates with apocalyptic suggestion.

In retrospect Camus’s imagined plague had been announced beforehand.  People began finding dead rats all about them, first by the dozens and then by the hundreds.  “People out at night would often feel underfoot the squelchy roundness of a still warm body.  It was as if the earth on which our houses stood were being purged of its secreted humours—thrusting up to the surface the abscesses and pus-clots that had been forming in its entrails.”  In eighteenth-century London, where the rotting remains of small dead animals constituted simply one genre of the offal that clogged the sewers, only a surfeit of human corpses as announced in the parish “death bills” could sound the alarm.  Our own epidemic is said to be still in its early days, but I daresay there are already dozens of novelists drafting the outlines of their next book.  Perhaps that in itself is a sign of difficulties ahead.