The Plague of Utopias: Pestilence and the Apocalyptic Body

Abstract

1. And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways and pour out the vials of the wrath of Cod upon the earth. 2. And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image. Revelation 16 In the secular visions that have proliferated wildly in the last 200 years, the world has been destroyed by nuclear wars, alien invasions, climatic changes, social upheavals, meteor strikes, and technological shutdowns. These baroque scenarios are shaped by the eroticism of disaster. The desire that finds satisfaction in elaborating fictions of the End is double-edged. On the one hand, its ultimate object is some version of the crystalline New Jerusalem, an image of purity so absolute that it denies the organic messiness of life. [1] On the other hand, fictions typically linger on pain and suffering. The end result of purification often seems of less importance than the narrative pleasure derived from the bizarre and opulent tribulations of the bodies being burnt by fire and brimstone, tormented by scorpion stings, trodden like grapes in the winepress. In this interplay between the incorporeal purity of the ends and the violent corporeality of the means the body is born. It is a body whose mortal sickness is a precondition of ultimate health, whose grotesque and excessive sexuality issues in angelic sexlessness, and whose torture underpins a painless--and lifeless--millennium. The body is perverse, points out Tina Pippin, unstable and mutating from maleness to femaleness and back again, purified by the sadomasochistic bloodletting on the cross, trembling in abject terror while awaiting an unearthly consummation (122). But most of all it is a suffering body, a text written in the script of stigmata, scars, wounds, and sores. Any apocalypse strikes the body politic like a disease, progressing from the first symptoms of a large-scale disaster through the crisis of the tribulation to the recovery of the millennium. But of all the Four Horsemen, the one whose ride begins most intimately, in the private travails of individual flesh, and ends in the devastation of the entire community, is the last one, Pestilence. The contagious body is the most characteristic modality of corporeality. At the same time, I will argue, it contains a counterapocalyptic potential, resisting the dangerous lure of Endism, the ideologically potent combination of apocalyptic terror, a nd millennial perfection (Quinby 2). This essay, a brief sketch of the poetics and politics of the contagious body, does not attempt a comprehensive overview of the historical development of the trope of pestilence. Nor does it limit itself to a particular disease, along the lines of Susan Sontag's classic delineation of the poetics of TB and many subsequent attempts to develop a poetics of AIDS. Rather, my focus is on the general narrativity of contagion and on the way the plague-stricken body is manipulated within the overall plot of millennialism, which is a powerful ideological current in twentieth-century political history, embracing such diverse manifestations as religious fundamentalism, Nazism, and other forms of radical desperation (Quinby 4--5). Thus, I consider both real and imaginary diseases, focusing on the narrative construction of the contagious body rather than on the precise epidemiology of the contagion. All and millenarian ideologies ultimately converge on the utopian transformation of the body (and the body politic) through suffering. But pestilence offers a uniquely ambivalent modality of corporeal apocalypse. On the one hand, it may be appropriated to the standard plot of purification as a singularly atrocious technique of separating the damned from the saved. …