Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (36 page)

Who could tell this story? We know that Sophocles did, and he elected to focus on the detection efforts of the king, giving us the voice and wishes of the people themselves only through the testimony of the Chorus. What might the actual testimony of the dying and the afraid-of-dying have sounded like?

Sophocles must have thought that his play dealt with issues of truth, prophecy, and fate, not with plague as such, which seems merely to be the setting for the plot. Yet, we are entided to reconceive these matters, so as to posit a more global pattern of logic and causality. That structural pattern tells us that the individual drama of Oedipus' ignorance concerning his most intimate relationships is startlingly replayed at the social and bacterial level: plague itself is a virulent language of connection, a lethal manifestation of ties between people, brought by infection and communicable disease. What interests me in this chapter is the amazing scope of what I want to call the
plague-text:
a story of epidemiological disease, a story of mysterious transmission, a story of community responses and resources, and—last but not least—an individualist story of initially concealed and finally exposed secrets, secrets of moral transgression and taboo.

This same dark logic that links hidden personal transgression to public plague informs a modern film such as Roman Polanski's film-noir classic
Chinatown,
in which the crucial but concealed incest between Noah Cross and his daughter (played unforgettably by John Huston and Faye Dunaway) is posited as the mysterious cause for the drought that threatens Los Angeles. And it will not do to regard this strange amalgam of private misdeed and public calamity as merely some form of symbolism. The plague-text is generically concerned with secrets, with bringing what is hidden (and censored, toxic, seminal, germinal) out into the open.

For these reasons we stand to learn more about plague and the actual

dimensionality of infectious diseases by consulting literature, rather than medical history. Needless to say, the writer is rarely possessed of the key scientific information that explains the transmission of disease. But, then, the human, epistemological, social, and ethical dimensions of plague stem from just this ignorance and blindness. Moreover, science rarely clears up these matters. Understanding the etiology of bubonic or pneumonic plague, comprehending the transmission of the disease via the fleas that got it from the rats, is fine as far as it goes, but it will not advance us in our understanding of society's reactions, nor in grasping the link between individual transgression and public disease. Even these formulations are far too tame. The plague-text intrigues because it broadcasts an entire web of congruences and patterns of causality that mystify our scientific logic, that seem to adumbrate a
networked
universe that, far from being chaotic, may actually be cogent beyond our capacity to explain, may be "rhymed and reasoned" in ways that beggar our rational thinking.

Writing about these matters in America after September 11, 2001, adds a grim factuality to such theories. Calamity strikes via the lightninglike destruction of two seemingly impregnable bastions of American power: the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Within moments, the plague logic of finding and then broadcasting a credible cause and origin is set into motion: Osama bin Laden's name is instantaneously all over the media, and names that are unpronounceable for most Americans are
on
everyone's lips, as the key to this horror. Could the key leaders be found, somehow the danger might be contained. Experts explain that there are countless small terrorist cells that are operational all over the globe, but the public is mesmerized by Osama bin Laden, by Mullah Omar, by Al Qaeda, obeying a logic that is closer to magic than to politics, whereby cleansing and protection might be achieved in one fell swoop, so that the nightmare could come to an end.

Right on the heels of the hijackings, the public is treated to mysterious, ominous, lethal outbreaks of anthrax infection. The mysteries abound. One of those mysteries is outright biological, since it will turn

out that scientists know next to nothing about how anthrax actually works, how virulent it actually is, how easily contractible it might be. But the other mysteries are such that even Sherlock Holmes could not solve them: what is the connection between the various anthrax-laced letters sent out? How do letters going to a media building, to a TV anchorman, to two senators, fit together? And then there is news of a woman dying of anthrax in New York, who had zero political image and zero known exposure to anthrax; and a second anthrax death of an old woman in Connecticut, she too a mystery, because she is entirely out of any conceivable contamination loop, unlinked to any terrorist or political plot imaginable. With these unexplained deaths, the postal service itself begins to look frightening (as well as frightened), inasmuch as the entire delivery system may have been poisoned, so that the most innocuous routines of the day—such as opening your mail—acquire an unwanted tinge of adventure and threat.

Then the newspapers and talk shows begin to speak of biowarfare, of the possibility of smallpox being spread by some terrorist event, of how easy it is to manufacture biological weapons, of how many people are known to be working on such projects, of how lax security is. A Homeland Security Office is established, in hopes the citizenry will exercise due diligence and caution as they go about their lives. But how can you be diligent about the air you breathe? The water you drink? Can any airplane flight be foolproof against terrorism? Overnight, an entire nation's sense of security is altered. Who has done this? Who might do more of it? Can they be found and, as the saying goes, "brought to justice"? What kind of coherence lies behind these deeds, this menace? Will peace of mind ever return?

Plague-texts are about more than bacterial transmission; they are about the deeper riddles of human connection and social fears. Moreover, the great plague-texts in literature explore the ramifications of physical, emotional, sexual, and political interactions. Plague's terror stems in part from the blindness that limits our individual view, the impossibility
of seeing infection.
More broadly still, plague and epidemic

threaten to erase difference or rank along social and political lines. Finally, the outbreak of plague exposes the deepest fears of the state, which then trigger the strategies of containment, the search for explanation and blame. Art that deals with plague is strong stuff, since it depicts the encounter with mass dying, the unpredictable responses and metamorphoses triggered by this encounter, leading ultimately to a new view of self and other.

The interest in AIDS today, the knowledge of old uneradicated diseases such as malaria and exotic new ones such as Ebola, the dawning awareness of bioterrorism as a geopolitical fact of life, tell us that these issues transcend art and literature. But art and literature make us see them differendy, give us a different measure of their reach. One of the richest issues that comes into focus has to do with transmission, itself a story that is profoundly social and imaginative in nature.

These matters can be figurative as well as literal. It would be possible to devote this entire chapter to the metaphor of
infection
as it is used to connote the reach of human interactions, the reality of "human transmission." Is it accidental that Shakespeare repeatedly images
lying
in terms of
poison in the ear?
With just a little fantasy, we could claim that all human language is an affair of poison in the ear. My words go into your ear, and if I have made them sufficiently toxic, well then, they work their noxious will on your system. The most famous example of literal ear-poisoning is doubtless the murder of the old King Hamlet by Claudius in exactly this fashion, stealing upon the sleeping king with his vial of hebona, "And in the porches of my ears did pour / The leperous distillment" (I.v.63-64).

But it is to Iago's conquest of Othello that we must turn if we are to gauge the reach of this metaphor. "I'll pour this pestilence into his ear," (
II.iii.346
) Iago confides to us, confident that it will turn Desdemona's "virtue into pitch," and the magnificent central scene in the play (III.iii) is devoted entirely to this exercise in poisonous infection. It begins with a still believing, still in-control Othello, and by scene's end—after Iago

has filled up the Moor with innuendo about Cassio, with dirt about Venetian girls, with insecurity about his own age and alienness ("for I am black / And have not those soft parts of conversation / That chamberers have; or for I am declined / Into the vale of years" [III.iii.260-263]), we have a raging Moor who seals a murder pact with his lieutenant. In all of Shakespeare I know of no richer illustration of how we poison each other with our words, of the quasi-chemical and neurological impact words and thoughts can actually produce.

After all, how would you go about measuring the impact that humans have upon one another? It seems like such a simple question, and yet we have no tools for gauging or even perceiving these lines of force. Language as infection seems scarcely metaphoric. You cough at me, and the bacilli are airborne into my lungs. You speak to (at) me, and the words are airborne into my brain and heart. And why limit these toxic transactions to speech? Why not consider the images we see, the music we hear, all of the cultural sights, notations, formulas, and assumptions that come our way via family and society? Don't all of them invade us, in some unseen, unseeable sort of way?

Or, to return to the more seemly: how would you characterize what is really happening when you read a book? You may recall one of my leading figures in the Introduction: each house has two shelves, a medicine shelf and a book shelf. And I compared works of art to the bodies of warriors eaten by cannibals in order to ingest the strength of rivals. All of these views turn on the notion that word and image have an indwelling power that is active and works its will inside us. Surely you are saying as much each time you claim that you have "benefited" from a book you read, or even "understood" a conversation that took place. It is just that we rarely characterize these exchanges in such charged, penetrative fashion. But I suspect that all writers and artists have, at some time or another, pondered this toxic view of their work, have hoped that their words would indeed enter into their readers or viewers, in order to release their power. The Swedish playwright Strindberg, languishing in

Austria at the home of his in-laws in 1894, speaks perhaps for all writers when he reflects on the possible impact that his play may be having, far away, on Parisian audiences:

This feeling of power, it's happiness to sit in a cottage by the Danube, among six women who think I'm a semi-idiot, and to know that in Paris, the headquarters of intelligence, 500 people are sitting dead quiet in an auditorium, and are foolish enough to expose their brains to my powers of suggestion. Some revolt, but many will go away with my spores in their grey matter; they will go home pregnant with the seed of my soul, and they will breed my brood. (1979,23)

To be sure, Strindberg's utterance is larded with occultist notions of hypnosis, telepathy, and the like that were in vogue at the end of the nineteenth century. But, on balance, I find his language quite persuasive and revealing, not about his own manias (of which he had an endless supply), but about the basic, but hidden operation of
exchange,
of how we interact with one another in the world (or how we cannot avoid interacting with one another in the world, which obsessed Strindberg).

I find myself holding forth on this topic to my students as I lecture to them, as I hear numbers of them coughing and wheezing (long winters up here in New England, lots of colds and flus), and I insinuate that my aim indeed is to infect them with my ideas. They usually look up in disbelief (still coughing). Then I say that every instructor in the place is trying to do this, and that we give exams to measure how well we've pulled it off, how much stuff has passed from me to them. We all get a good laugh out of it, but I genuinely believe that education and culture at large can be fairly assessed along these lines of infection, virulence, and toxicity. The truly toxic instruction stays with the student forever, undying, doing its work in the dark, doubdess in the company of other potent microbial/ideological agents carrying out their mission. Surely, the history of the world's misfortunes (as well as its successes) has something

to do with these early-stage, poisoning/infecting dramas that we call family, school, and culture.

As you can see, I am drawn to this topic, but issues become richer and deeper when we move from the individual transaction to the larger social container where it happens—because disease can be a matter of life or death for entire societies. Hence the crucial issue of
transmission
turns out to be a fact that is, yes, medical, but also a riddle that is social, ethical, perceptual, and epistemological. Can we perceive infection? What does it mean when A infects B? when A believes/suspects/fears that B might be infectious?

These are weighty matters, since they revolve around the central issue of human contact and therefore impact on the nature of sexual relations, family connections, neighborhood attitudes, and ultimately much else, including racial stereotypes, xenophobia, and scapegoating of all stripes. This welter of concerns is not easily amenable to scientific analysis. And that is why we turn to artistic testimony, because we find, in texts ranging from Sophocles to Defoe, Dickens, Camus, Bergman, and Kushner, a formidably rich depiction of collective illness—plague or epidemic—seen along precisely the lines I have noted: human relations, sexual codes, "othering." In fact, the plague-text is peculiarly eloquent about these moral and political matters, as if disease were the cathartic public experience that made visible, at last, the society's unacknowledged fears and value systems. And it does so because it flaunts
linkage and connection
everywhere, in licit and illicit situations, yielding something like a new map of relationship, an unsuspected network, making notions like individual integrity and hegemony seem more and more quaint.