Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (39 page)

Some critics have claimed that the London poor are the true heroes of Defoe's book, and it is undeniably true that they bear the brunt of the attack, since they (unlike the rich) have no resources available to them, such as money, extra provisions, and especially property in the country to which they could escape. Yet, I'd argue that Defoe's concern for the poor is less moral than sociological, inasmuch as he understands to perfection that plague sets the stage for social anarchy. His book shows what a crippled metropolis looks like, what it means when shops and markets close, when exchange has virtually ground to a halt, when there is virtually no money to be made. It is against this vision of economic disaster that we can best understand the remarkable efforts of the Lord Mayor and the city fathers to maintain some semblance of order and decorum. (Here, too, parallels with the New York catastrophe are not lacking.) Defoe lauds the Lord Mayor for his acts of charity, for distributing money and bread to the poor, but we sense that these measures are as political as they are ethical. And we begin to realize just what a powder keg plague can be: when the labor machine stops, when the circulation of goods is frozen, it is only a matter of time before murder and mayhem break loose, and full-scale rioting begins.

Most fascinating of all, we learn what cities must do in this kind of a crisis. Death stalks; how do you stop it? Defoe's book provides eight nonstop pages of Orders from the Lord Mayor, detailing the new kinds ofjobs that plague brings into being (Examiners, Watchmen, Searchers, Chirurgeons, Nursekeepers) and the new tasks at hand and the injunctions pertaining to them (Notice to be given of the sickness, Sequestration of the sick, Airing the stuff, Shutting up of the house, None to be removed out of infected houses, Burial of the dead, No infected stuff to be uttered, No person to be conveyed out of any infected house, Every visited house to be marked, Every visited house to be watched, Inmates,

Hackney coaches). Still further rules regard street cleaning, raking, laystalls, disposal of rotting food; and some unsurprising final restrictions concern "Beggers" and "Plays" and "Feasting Houses" and "Tippling Houses," all of which contribute nefariously to the risk factors threatening the polis, and must be curbed or shut down. Even though Michel Foucault never mentions Defoe in his groundbreaking
Discipline and Punish,
his grand theory of the surveillance and penitential arrangements of modern state apparatus that begin to take form in the eighteenth century, we are entitled to consider
A Journal of the Plague Year
as a banner text about the mechanisms for keeping order, about the actual reach of
policing
as the fundamental activity of government and subject formation. Plague brings all of this startlingly, unforgettably, out into the open.

It is all too easy to read Defoe's text as social documentary. The reason it demands inclusion in this book has to do with its visionary thrust. The narrator of the
Journal
prides himself on keeping his feet on the ground, but as you might suspect, plague generates fireworks. As it begins its assault, we see an entire assortment of plague specialists appear, hawking their wares to the threatened public: quacks with their special potions (time-tested, they claim, from other, earlier plagues), astrologers with their cosmic data (with the added windfall of two recorded comets having appeared over London several months earlier), and the usual mix of witch doctors and oracles shrieking disaster and doom for London.

And it is quite a show. Yet the explosions of quackery, prophecy, and lunacy that are annunciatory (look what's coming) pale in comparison to the outbursts that the actual plague produces. Initially, the surprises are of a confessional nature, as if the horror of immediate death were a kind of truth serum: "Many Consciences were awakened; many hard Hearts melted into tears; many a penitent Confession was made of Crimes long concealed . . . Many a Robbery, many a Murder, was then confest aloud, and no Body surviving to record the Accounts of it. People might be heard even into the Streets as we pass'd along, calling upon

God for Mercy, thro' Jesus Christ,
and saying,
I have been a Thief, I have been an Adulterer, I have been a Murderer" (34).

Yet, these self-indictments, dramatic as they are, are tame when contrasted with the actual behavior of plague victims, a kind of collective frenzy that knows no bounds. We read of tormented people raving on the streets, throwing themselves out of windows, shooting themselves. Other notations are hideously familial: mothers become mad, murdering their infants; and still others, dying of grief or turned into idiots, moving into lunacy. Yet, even these responses to imminent death have a "naturalness" to them, in comparison with other, still more grotesque scenes that the narrator H.F. encounters: mockers who taunt and jeer the dying, or crazed figures who see themselves as plague's "emissaries," pouncing on
men
and women in the street, spreading the disease.

The narrator's own journalistic, commonsensical account of lurid, maniacal events makes them all the more vivid to today's reader, and the upshot of such descriptions of "current events" is a vision of London utterly transmogrified. It is as if all the customary decorous forms went up in smoke, and we now see a carnival of raving, unhinged subjects. Defoe tracks them, follows the trail of those who steal away from the City only to die alone in the countryside, speaks of the dreadful situation for mothers in childbirth (dying in labor, killing their infants, shrieking for aid that does not come), and chronicles the elaborate strategies for survival, such as walking upwind from people who may be infected, speaking to no one, and handling all objects (money, purses, items of exchange) with infinite care (gloves, vinegar, poles, water: all enlisted to prevent skin contact). Paranoia reigns. No reader can escape the chilling thought that plague doesn't simply kill its victims: it upends all civilized behavior, turns people mad, installs a reign of terror. And no reader in the twenty-first century can feel secure that such antics are just a thing of the past.

Plague visits London, and the Lord Mayor calls for the classic community response: quarantine. The greatness of Defoe's book stems, I think, from his profound understanding of what quarantine produces. As we saw in the Orders imposed on London, all infected houses are

shut up, and guarded by Watchmen. The penalties are draconian. But the corruption (Watchmen are bribed, fooled, murdered) is widespread. Defoe's narrator is especially drawn to the penitential dramas produced by the severe quarantine laws, and he sees to perfection that the regulations designed to protect public health are little less than death sentences in the private sector, since the barricaded pestilential home betokens doom for those (still) uninfected who tend to their sick relations, who are stuck in this
huis clos.
Infection utterly overturns any fantasies about the safety of home, and the likelihood of lethal contamination poisons family bonds, introduces an element of terror into the enclosed family unit, makes "intimacy" into a deadly nightmare. We have scenes of mothers inspecting their hitherto well, now ailing daughters between the legs, discovering the telltale signs, watching death appear, dying themselves. We have scenes of fathers seeking to get provisions for their sick and dying kin, placing what they get on trays that the infected take in. We have scenes of families plotting their escape, the well tearfully abandoning the ill; still other stories of families being foiled (not by the authorities, but by the plague), united gruesomely in death.

Plague consists of people infecting each other, and this fearsome business wrecks all polite versions of relationship. The threat of infection produces a generic family drama with Poe-like accents of impending doom. And Defoe grapples with the great conundrum of infection: how do you know? when do you know? Yes, the well become the sick, but by the time this is visible and legible, it is too late. Countless Londoners thought themselves well, had (as of yet) no symptoms, but were actually infected to the core, and hence went about their lives infecting others, never knowing it. One might think that the worst of plague is the disease itself, the boils and fevers that take over and annihilate the body; but the truth is considerably darker, because the deeper horror is mental and conceptual, the forced entry into no-man's-land where disease rages everywhere, both around you and (just as likely) inside you, cashiering even the most basic indices of knowing, polluting every area of life. Consider the following passage devoted to the antics of the in-

fected: its sobriety, its depiction of human beings utterly routed by their own bodies, its rendition of death the stalker, its portrait of what bioter-rorism might produce, might actually look like on our city streets:

Now it was impossible to know these People, nor did they sometimes, as I have said, know themselves to be infected: These were the People that so often dropt down and fainted in the Streets; for oftentimes they would go about the Streets to the last, till on a sudden they would sweat, grow faint, sit down at a Door and die: It is true, finding themselves thus, they would struggle hard to get Home to their own Doors, or at other Times would be just able to go in to their Houses and die instantly; other Times they would go about till they had the very Tokens come out upon them, and yet not know it, and would die in an Hour or two after they came Home, but be well as long as they were Abroad: These were the dangerous People, these were the People of whom the well People ought to have been afraid; but then
on the other side
it was impossible to know them. (191)

It is a prodigious passage about what is visible and what is invisible; and the answer is it is almost all invisible, since what you
see
is delusory, because everything is happening
on the other side,
on the inside, in the dark. This is the stark reality of infection, and we see it as the single insuperable obstacle to either knowledge or prevention. Defoe is not known for psychological depths, and these staggering, expiring Londoners are stalwart, poignant in their efforts to retain decorum and sense.
They are trying to behave.
But I read this passage and see in it a very old taboo that has been breached: death has been let loose, death inhabits everything, and all our brave composure is for naught, a whimsy in the face of this devastation.

Defoe makes us see the horrid human side of the infection scheme. In discussing one victim who thought himself hale and hearty, Defoe wonderfully calls him a "walking Destroyer," commenting "how he had ruin'd those, that he would have hazarded his Life to save, and had been

breathing Death upon them, even perhaps in his tender Kissing and Embracings of his own Children" (202). This scene is disturbing because we measure the awful ignorance and blindness at hand, the even more awful
economy
which leads you unwittingly to murder those you love, to murder them by your love.

We see, in the course of this book, a gathering diagnosis of plague as paranoia. The well shun the sick, but then the well are simply the not-yet-sick. What does one do in such situations? We read of people locking themselves up, refusing to see or meet anyone. Since human life is inescapably social at some level, such draconian measures cannot be fully maintained, and hence we see the precautions: stay clear of people's breath, avoid their smell, talk to people at a distance, keep preservatives in your mouth (!) and in your clothes, so as to ward off infection and death.

I have called Defoe visionary, even though his narrator is eminently sane and reasonable, because his text shows us what the social ramifications of disease can be, measures just how the social fabric can be systematically
unraveled.
The depiction of plague's inroads and of the pitiful but manic responses of the (still) living returns, in its way, to the theme of quarantine, but now seen as the imprisoned and paranoid self, the self that has come to look upon the entire world as just so much toxic threat.

Defoe is visionary in still other ways also. Drawn invariably to the drama of little people confronting large situations, Defoe gives us, in his narrator H.F., a splendid instance of journalistic integrity and passion, of going fearlessly straight up to the horror in order to report on it and take its measure. At the book's beginning, the narrator and his older brother disagree about whether the right response to the London plague is to flee or to remain. The brother leaves, as do most of the well-heeled Londoners, including priests and doctors. H.F. stays, and even though he frequently chides himself for doing so, I think we can agree that his ultimate motivation is to
bear witness.
He calls this
curiosity,
and nowhere is it more on show than in his maniacal insistence on per-

serially visiting the mass graveyard, the Pit, at night, in order to see for himself, firsthand, what plague is. He is warned by the sexton that this is dangerous, but H.F. insists, claiming that it will be an "Instructing Sight" for him, to which the sexton replies, "t'will be a Sermon to you, it may be, the best that ever you heard in your Life. 'Tis a speaking Sight. . . and has a Voice with it, and a loud one" (61).

"A speaking Sight" is about as good a definition for the visionary as I can imagine. Not in the sense of "sermon" but rather in the sense of art that plumbs our phenomenal world with such intensity that it makes us see and hear it centuries later in textual form, makes us capture the vital life pulsating there, a life at once richer and more labyrinthine than docile notation usually renders. At the very beginning of his tale, H.F. speaks of the initially infected city as a London that is "altered": "Sorrow and Sadness sat upon every Face," as if the citizens sensed the horror that was to come, and it is that sense of things the narrator seeks to capture and to pass on: "I wish I could repeat the very Sound of those Groans, and of those Exclamations that I heard from some poor dying Creatures, when in the Hight of their Agonies and Distress; and that I could make him that read this hear, as I imagine I now hear them, for the Sound seems still to Ring in my Ears" (104). I want to say that Defoe's "sight" still "speaks," and those who read this text do hear the groans of long ago, just as H.F. continues to.
A Journal of the Plague Year
belongs on the short list of artistic texts that convey the actual feel of our history, of where we have been, and—more presciently—of where we might end up.