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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 December 2021
This essay discusses several books, ancient and recent, on plagues to ask the question: Can we face death without turning away from it through historical narration? Can we write about death, which only afflicts individuals, without stripping death of its individuality? After briefly addressing these questions, I discuss five books, one from the ancient period (Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War), one from the late medieval period (Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron), one from the early modern period (Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year), and two from the modern period (Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, and Frank Snowden’s Epidemics and Society). These books not only come from different eras but also reflect different written responses to death—ancient history, story/fable, reportage, futuristic novel, and contemporary history. The essay concludes by considering a counterargument to its focus on death, an argument developed by Baruch Spinoza which claims that humans should think nothing less than of death.
1 Susan Gonzalez, “Historian Frank Snowden: May We Be ‘Forever Changed’ by Coronavirus,” Yale News, 8 Apr. 2020.
2 There are many other plague narratives, by Sophocles, Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Procopius, Samuel Pepys, Thomas Mann, and Albert Camus, among others. See Girard, Rene, “The Plague in Literature and Myth,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 15, 5 (1974): 833–50Google ScholarPubMed.
3 Death is nothing because we are always already in the world of language and sociality from which we cannot possibly escape to know death as, say, the border between the world and the “outside” since we cannot even say that there is a border to an outside. See Kojève, Alexandre, Atheism, Jeff Love, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.
4 The sentence reads: “The nature (eidos) of the plague is a happening or event (genomenon) beyond (kreisson) language (logou),” II.50, p. 99.
5 II.47, p. 98; II.51; and II.52, p. 100. See Adam Parry, “The Language of Thucydides’ Description of the Plague,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 16 (1969): 106–18.
6 Pericles refers to the plague as a daimonion in II.64 (p. 105).
7 Loraux, Nicole, “Thucydides Is Not a Colleague,” in Marincola, John, ed., Greek and Roman Historiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 19–39 Google Scholar.
8 That the pursuit of glory is bound to fail constitutes the essence of Thucydides’s tragic narrative. But while Thucydides confronts the tragic failure of human action, he does not view it as pointless; if anything, he seems to admire Athenian grandeur even as he counsels Spartan moderation. As a contrast, consider Lucretius’s anti-imperial poem, which draws on Thucydides’s description of the plague to underscore the ultimate futility of empire in the face of death. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, W.H.D. Rouse, trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1924).
9 With ironic modesty, Boccaccio comments on his “lowly” use of Italian and prose on Day 4, introduction, p. 300.
10 Hegel, G.W.F., Phenomenology of Spirit, Miller, A. V., trans. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 117 Google Scholar.
11 That H. F. admits that he is not sharing his “private Meditations” strikes me as yet another moment in which he wishes to insist on the limits of language (p. 75).
12 Godwin, William, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 452–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Shelley’s opposition to the Platonic aim of establishing a perfectly rational society that her father embraced and brought to its logical conclusion by advocating the eradication of death comes down to her concern that the end goal of freedom from death is impossible and/or incoherent. Is the human still human without death? What kind of life would be preserved in the immortal state (see p. 339)? In other words, Shelley recognizes that the Platonic rejection of materialism is a rejection of the human and the world itself as comprised of material things that change, decay, and die.
14 The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, vol. I, Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 69–70.
15 Kenkō and Chōmei, Essays in Idleness and Hōjōki, Meredith McKinney, trans. (New York: Penguin, 2013).
16 “Absurd” is one way of translating the Hebrew word hevel from Ecclesiastes.
17 See “Ethics,” in Edwin Curley, ed. and trans., The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). George Eliot’s translation, which she completed in 1856, has finally been published as Spinoza’s Ethics, Clare Carlisle, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).
18 A brilliant account of scapegoating humans for a plague, as Snowden notes, is Alessandro Manzoni’s 1817 novel, The Betrothed (see chs. 31 and 32).