Plagues in literature. 20.04.20
Welcome to The Plague Pit – issue number 8
This issue, I’m delighted to welcome another new contributor to the website. Mr Tom Quayle is an English and Div Don at Winchester College and has kindly provided the following account.
That the history of language and literature is crosshatched by the history of pandemic, disease and death is a truism that we have been viscerally reminded of over the last four months. I wonder if it is simultaneously too brutal and too myopic to think about how and whether literature will respond to this current situation. There are reassuring, life-affirming patterns we can turn to here: Modernism emerging from the shadow of the twin dislocations of the First World War and the Spanish Flu; Shakespeare holed up in 1606 writing the apocalyptic Lear or turning to the pleasures of and in the sonnet form when plague closed early modern theatres; the great vernacular flourishing of the 1350s and onwards – Langland’s dour Piers Plowman or the vibrant, bustling cast of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – via Boccaccio’s Decameron – all springing up from the destruction of the Black Death. (1)
I am struck, too, by the range of creative responses – of how writing bears the indelible impression of such diseases. From Nashe’s mournful (and not very good) Elizabethan ‘A Litany in Time of Plague’, each of its stanzas ending with the cheery refrain ‘I am sick, I must die’, to the more optimistic – and less socially-distanced Pepys, chronicling the outbreak of 1665:
It is true we have gone through great melancholy because of the great plague, but now the plague is abated almost to nothing, and I intending to get to London as fast as I can. I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much) as I have done this plague time, by my Lord Bruncker’s and Captain Cocke’s good company, and the acquaintance of Mrs. Knipp, Coleman and her husband, and Mr. Laneare, and great store of dancings we have had at my cost (which I was willing to indulge myself and wife) at my lodgings. (2)
When the dust has settled, art picks up plague as individual and collective metaphor: see Camus’s La Peste, or Raskolnikov’s disturbing dream in Crime and Punishment. For Shakespeare, such diseases are often both individual and symptomatic of a wider political ‘sickness’: Hamlet’s rebuke to his mother Gertrude (‘rank corruption mining all within,/ Infects unseen) works on those twin scales. What will our cure, our purgation be? Surveillance, mutual suspicion, herd immunity; compassion, community, a revaluation of what a ‘key’ worker looks like. Or perhaps it is reductive to frame these as mutually exclusive choices: Shakespeare acknowledges that the better and worse aspects and impulses of our nature coexist.
Within Lear, illness might be a catalyst for a reworking of a defunct and useless social order,
‘So distribution should undo excess, / And each man have enough,’ (4.1.70-71)
but in Troilus and Cressida dislocation isa chance to show us how that we need to be ordered and directed for our own protection:
‘Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark, what discord follows!’ (1.3)
At times literature can seem to be addicted to illness – the need to find something tragic, something worthy to write about, to work on the grand and global scale. Perhaps – more disturbingly – we might think of the French writer Celine’s wistful complaint that “antibiotics have taken a lot of the tragedy out of medicine” (3) and accordingly literature. At times, illness can conversely seem strangely absent from writing: as Woolf writes in her essay ‘On Being Ill’: “literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind…the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear.”(4)
But when confronted with destruction on a scale that is simultaneously personal and visceral and mind-blowing – the illness of a friend, the death of a loved one, the death of 11,000, the exponential infection of 1.9 million – what can metaphor do? How can it possibly be up to the job? Our language withers to a far more limited vocabulary of epidemiology: infected, susceptible, confirmed, recovered. It is in this context – the hollowing out of language – in which we might situate Freud’s bathetic response to the death of his daughter from complications arising from the Spanish Flu: “it was a bit much for one week”. (5)
As Susan Sontag pointed out in another context – about cancer, rather than epidemics – disease makes us tend to reach for simplicity in our controlling metaphors as a way of making order out of disorder. When confronted by death and disease we move to the military — we must declare ‘war’ on coronavirus, we must ‘battle’ against the pandemic (6) – and we see illness as rubric for simplistic moral condemnation: “[metaphor] is invariably an encouragement,” she writes, “to simplify what is complex and an invitation to self-righteousness, if not to fanaticism.” (7) These are the kinds of urges we should resist: it is an instructive paradox that the quest to model and map infection vectors with precision is teaching us about how disordered and unpredictable things are, that isolation is teaching us about how interconnected we are, how socially determined and contingent.
What is perhaps most terrifying to literature, then, about pandemic is this levelling aspect: it destroys at once our individuality and our mutuality. It thrives on the erasure of our nuances, our complexities and our difficulties; on the erasure of the specific; and on the winnowing out of language’s ability to capture our very messy humanness. (8)
For now, perhaps, literature’s role is that of companion and consolation. I have been reading Montaigne’s Essays (when else to tackle what runs to 1280 pages in the Penguin Classics edition). (9) Montaigne was no stranger to plague as both a social and personal phenomenon. He writes movingly about his grief at the loss of his best friend de La Boetie – to plague, in 1563 – in ‘On Friendship’:
‘I was already so used and accustomed to being, in everything, one of two, that I now feel I am no more than a half…There is no deed nor thought in which I do not miss him.’ (217/8)
He has much advice to offer: on preparing for solitude (‘We take our fetters with us; our freedom is not total; we still turn our gaze to the things we have left behind; our imagination is full of them’ [‘On solitude’, 269]), on our attitudes towards ourselves, on friendship, on reckoning with, and blunting the force of, death. He is generous, funny, patient, sceptical – and knows that above all we are resistant to change and bad at prediction; we are limited and fallible, and none more so than the author himself. ‘It is from my own experience’, he writes, ‘that I emphasize human ignorance which is, in my judgement, the most certain factor in the school of the world.’ (1221)
Montaigne’s Essays culminate in ‘On experience’, in which he recognizes that it is when we are reminded of life’s frailty, and our own fragility, that we do our best living –
‘Anyone who recalls the ills he has undergone…makes himself thereby ready for future mutations and the exploring of his condition…above all now, when I see my span so short, I want to give it more ballast; I want to arrest the swiftness of its passing by the swiftness of my capture, compensating for the speed with which it drains away by the intensity of my enjoyment.’
- that these opposites are what give life its warp and weft:
‘We must learn to suffer whatever we cannot avoid. Our life is compose like the harmony of the world, of discords as well as of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud…Without such blending our being cannot be: one category is no less necessary than the other.’
- that the life of the mind cannot be restricted, and that we are by our nature restless, even when physically restrained:
‘No powerful mind stops within itself: it is always stretching out and exceeding its capacities. It makes sorties which go beyond what it can achieve: it is only half-alive if it is not advancing, pressing forward, getting driven into a corner and coming to blows; its inquiries are shapeless and without limits; its nourishment consists in amazement, the hunt and uncertainty.’
And finally, that it is in our variegation and our similarity, in the dignity of our ordinariness, and in our loves and limitations that we find our shared humanity:
‘The most beautiful of our lives to my liking are those which conform to the common measure, human and ordinate, without miracles though, and without rapture.’
Tom Quayle
(1) For two excellent, readable summaries of the former and the latter, try: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/04/08/how-pandemics-seep-into-literature/ and https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n07/james-meek/in-1348. For a – far – more exhaustive summary, Rene Girard is good: “The Plague in Literature and Myth.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 15, no. 5, 1974, pp. 833–850., www.jstor.org/stable/40754299. Accessed 14 2020.
(2) https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/viral-news
(3) https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4502/the-art-of-fiction-no-33-louis-ferdinand-celine
(5) Quoted here in a fascinating article on ‘Psychoanalysis in Time of Plague’, by Jamieson Webster: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/04/01/psychoanalysis-in-time-of-plague/
(6) As in this otherwise excellent BBC news story –https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrfRs0WeShU
(7) https://nakulkrishna.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/susan-sontag-illness-as-metaphor-excerpt.pdf
(8) As Girard points out in his survey, this is the realisation Hamlet has in the graveyard: “The plague is universally presented as a process of undifferentiation, a destruction of specificities…all life, finally, is turned into death.” (Op. cit.)
(9) All text here is taken from the Penguin Classics edition of Montaigne’s Essays, ed. Screech