How We Write Plagues JAMES UDEN One advantage of writing about historical pandemics is that they have already occurred. From where I sit, as I listen to the loudspeaker on the council truck telling me to stay indoors, it is impossible to know what direction the covid-19 crisis will take. Certainly, aspects of the virus’s social impact have mirrored the trajectory of previous pandemics . Back in February, people in France began circulating the phrase Je ne suis pas un virus, protesting acts of violence against Asian communities and resisting the well-documented tendency for societies to target ethnic minorities as scapegoats for epidemic disease. The President’s labeling of covid-19 as the “Chinese virus” aroused similar protest in the United States.1 At an armed rally at the state house in Lansing, MI, armed protesters demanded the reopening of businesses despite public health advice to the contrary, an act that raised familiar questions about the freedom of the individual versus the health of the collective in times of health crisis. Here in Boston, anti-lockdown protesters assembled at the Massachusetts State House on May 4, chanting “no more dictatorship”—language congenial to Boston’s history of colonial rebellion, though not especially fitting to the crisis at hand. Just one day earlier, a banner had flown over the buildings of Manhattan with the words CAPITALISM IS THE PANDEMIC. Whether the virus will redistribute power and become, in Walter Scheidel’s words, a “great leveler,” remains to be seen.2 arion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 Hunter H. Gardner, Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. x + 303 pages. $90.00. Brian Walters, The Deaths of the Republic: Imagery of the Body Politic in Ciceronian Rome, 2020. xv + 158 pages. $80.00. 132 how we write plagues Given that we have frequently been reminded that we are facing a pandemic of historic proportions, it is natural that people have turned to history for perspective. Daniel Defoe’s journalistic account of plague in London in 1665, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), has catapulted to an unlikely relevance , promoted on the publisher’s website as the “surprise ‘must-read’ for people facing the covid-19 epidemic.” Thucydides ’ description of Athens’s experience of the plague in 430 bc has made news in The Economist, The Washington Post and The Guardian. Historical accounts of plagues are regularly being called upon to offer advice to the present. Yet not all plagues are alike. Historians have rightly protested about parallels being made between covid-19 and the aids crisis, since the current emergency response contrasts damningly with the Reagan government’s protracted silence and willful ignorance throughout the 1980s.3 One problem is the word “plague” itself, a term too suggestive of sin to represent the devastating impartiality of viral disease. “Plagues,” Susan Sontag wrote in aids and its Metaphors (1988), are “inflicted, not just endured.” She argued that the term imposed additional burdens on patients, who were portrayed as suffering some punishment, and could not simply be ill.4 To speak of “plagues” in the plural also suggests a common experience across time, a regular and shared event. Literary accounts of the plague do indeed share many common tropes. Yet there are important differences in the way communities have responded to outbreaks in different eras, and significant divergences in the meaning of disease. Accounts of plagues understandably arouse interest during a pandemic, but they are apt to mislead us, because the plagues so often look the same. One unshakable constant is the analogy between the body and the state, the “body politic.” As has long been recognized, the symbol surfaces across many, unrelated world cultures.5 In seeking to explain a unity composed of many parts, human beings have tended to look to the most immediate parallel— themselves. Although it has been invoked famously to justify James Uden 133 hierarchies within the state (Livy, Shakespeare, Hobbes), the image seems to resonate most intuitively when it conceptualizes danger, when the “health” of the state is threatened by “infection” or “disease.” In 2009, psychologists asked sixty -nine undergraduates at the University of Arizona to read a popular...
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May 5, 2020
Johnson Christdas + 1
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