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.
