Writing Plague: Transforming Narrative, Witnessing, and History

Jennifer Cooke

Plague left Western Europe in 1720, never to return again in epidemic proportions, yet its legacy has survived to be reworked and re-imagined in fiction. The intersections of two plague texts, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947), reveal a series of shared symptoms in the style and structure of plague writing; this in turn suggests a route for formulating how fiction can be in a unique position to address the trauma of enormous death counts and fear of infection resulting from epidemic outbreaks or other historical events of mass destruction and imperilment of human life. Defoe’s Journal is a fictional account of an historical occurrence, claiming, as it does, to be an eyewitness report of the happenings in London during 1665, the year of England’s last epidemic plague outbreak. The narrator, identifying himself only as H.F., describes his employment as “saddler” and, while his brother flees the infested capital, he, for a mixture of personal, business and religious reasons, decides to stay.1 The account is purportedly the result of his “Memorandums,” in which he had committed to paper his observations and opinions of London throughout the plague.2 Camus’ The Plague, in contrast, is told through the eyes of doctor Bernard Rieux during a fictional plague epidemic that Camus sets in the troubled decade of the 1940s, in the French African colony of Oran.3 This apparently greater remove from an historical plague outbreak, however, does not make the novel’s relationship to issues of witnessing any the less significant. Buboes are what make plague famous: the enlarged lymph glands, in those most intimate and sensuous of areas, the neck, the armpit, and the groin, are what distinguish the disease so gruesomely. Buboes force the victim into crooked, misshapen stances to relieve the pressure and lessen the pain: the legs are splayed, the arms uplifted, the head turned away to one side. Protruding unmistakably, they declare the disease of the sufferer to be written on the body, there for all to read. To look at and touch, the bubo is a hard knot which can vary in size from a nut to an orange, sometimes blackening, sometimes breaking and suppurating noxious pus. Buboes cannot be removed; they are an inflamed part of the body, but they can sometimes be lacerated, a common practice in 1665 because a broken bubo was thought to betoken a possible recovery. Here is Defoe’s description of the suffering caused by these diseased growths: the swellings which were generally in the Neck, or Groin, when they grew hard, and would not break, grew

so painful, that it was equal to the most exquisite Torture; and some not able to bear the Torment, threw themselves out at Windows, or shot themselves, or otherwise made themselves away, and I saw several dismal Objects of that Kind: Others unable to contain themselves, vented their Pain by incessant Roarings, and such loud and lamentable Cries…4

“Exquisite”: exact, precise, perfect at hitting the mark; pain, just as food, can have a certain delicacy and purity. The descriptions provided by H.F. have a noisy physicality which echoes through the excerpt above. Raymond Stephenson argues that portrayals such as this are employed by Defoe as part of a consciously developed literary technique for specifically stimulating the visual and aural imagination of his eighteenth-century readers rather than appealing to their intellect.5 Indeed, the London of H.F. resounds to “screeching and crying,”6 “the shriecks of Women and Children,”7 “grievous Cries and Lamentations,”8 and “People raving and distracted”9 on almost every page. This cacophony, Stephenson believes, coupled with the continual presentation of grotesque images is intended “to create a picture of physical mutilation and corruption which will horrify and disgust the reader with its references to partially decayed human flesh, pain, agony, and running sores.”10 Episode by grisly, clamorous episode, Defoe builds a London in which the sounds, the fetor and the symptoms of disease rise tangibly through his writing. Bubonic plague is not just characterised by buboes alone: the body’s attempt to flush out the bacteria which is gathering in the lymph glands naturally results in a high running fever. This medical fact is incorporated by both Defoe and Camus, the former referring often to the “Rage of the Distemper”11 which afflicted the London sufferers and the latter making the fight of two closely-followed deaths, those of Othon’s son and Jean Tarrou, centre upon their struggle against a rising temperature as opposed to the pain and disfigurement caused by the buboes themselves. These images, as Stephenson rightly says, are designed to horrify the reader. Of further note is how within both texts, if in differing ways, the very writing is infected by the symptoms of plague that it describes: the fever of Defoe’s characters, for instance, is apparent in the agitation and restlessness of the prose. In the following episode recounted by H.F., a typically nameless man has his whole story given in one long and breathless sentence, the high running fever literalised in his delirious, repetitive running amok and the rising tide-waters of the river Thames:

Writing Plague: Transforming Narrative, Witnessing and History 2 ___________________________________________________________________________________ I heard of one infected Creature, who running out of his Bed in his Shirt, in the anguish and agony of

his Swellings, of which he had three upon him, got his Shoes on and went to put on his Coat, but the Nurse resisting and snatching the Coat from him, he threw her down, run over her, run down Stairs and into the Street directly to the Thames in his Shirt, the Nurse running after him, and calling to the Watch to stop him; but the Watchmen frightened at the Man, and afraid to touch him, let him go on; upon which he ran down to the Still-yard Stairs, threw away his Shirt, and plung’d into the Thames, and, being a good swimmer, swam quite over the River; and the Tide being coming in, as they call it, that is running West-ward, he reached the Land not till he came about Falcon Stairs, where landing, and finding no People there, it being in the Night, he ran about the Streets there, Naked as he was, for a good while, when it being by that time High-water, he takes the River again, and swam back to the Still-yard, landed, ran up the Streets again to his own House, knocking at the Door, went up the Stairs, and into his Bed again; and that this terrible Experiment cur’d him of the Plague, that is to say, that the violent Motions of his Arms and Legs stretch’d the Parts where the Swellings he had upon him were, that is to say under his Arms and his Groin, and caused them to ripen and break; and that the cold of the Water abated the Fever in his Blood.12

This story-in-a-sentence is recounted by Defoe not because he believes in the curative function of this “extravagant Adventure,” since he admits “I do not think [it] very possible,” but “to confirm the many desperate Things which the distress’d People falling into, Deliriums…were frequently run upon.”13 The forcibly quickened breathing which the plethora of commas demands, the garrulous and excessive explanatory asides, the repetition of “run,” “ran” and “running”, and the extreme overall length of the sentence all reinforce a feeling of incoherence, of the frantic heightening fever and panic induced by plague symptoms. The writing “rises” with the fever it describes. Rising, in fact, characterises many plague symptoms and events: blistering buboes rise upon the smooth surface of the skin; temperatures and death tolls rise; the miasmas that many physicians in Defoe’s day believed were carrying plague arose from stagnant marshes and rotting rubbish heaps. The feelings of pain can be diverse, but the body’s reactions to it and the language used to represent it can sometimes partake of the repetitive and the mundane: universally, fever burns, exhausts, causes restlessness and thirst. This does not have to be limiting, however, since the lexicon of suffering and illness is at least general and shared. Thus, in Camus’ description of the final hours of Othon’s son, whose childish frame has been the disappointing testing-ground for a newly developed vaccine, the reactions of his little body are familiar, if exacerbated due to the nature of the disease and the approach of death:

When the burning tide struck him again for the third time and raised him up a little, the child, bent double and throwing back his blanket, fled to the end of the bed, wildly shaking his head from side to side, in terror of the flame that was burning him. Large tears rose beneath his swollen eyelids and began to flow down his pallid face; when the crisis was over, exhausted, tensing his bony legs and his arms from which in forty-eight hours the flesh had dropped away, the child assumed the grotesque pose of a crucified man in the ravaged bed.14

The fever is a “tide” that raises the body; afterwards the child assumes a Christ-like pose which intimates, falsely in this instance, that he may possibly rise again, saved, while at the same time underscoring his role as the sacrificial victim of medical science’s failure. The drawn-out death of this child, watched closely by nearly all the major characters in The Plague, plays a symptomatically central role in the novel: the fever that breaks his small body, also emotionally breaks Rieux, who loses his usual medical composure, and shatters the hopes of another doctor, Castel, whose vaccine has only prolonged the suffering. The moment marks a breaking point too for the stern Jesuit priest Father Paneloux as he reaches a personal and religious crisis which prompts Rieux to comment: “from the day when he had to watch for hours while that child died, he seemed changed.”15 As with Defoe, the relentlessness of the plague is written into the language and is apparent in the length of the sentences, the rising fever, the physical movements of the child, and the tears that rise to his eyes. A correspondence between disease symptoms and the very writing of disease are distinctive features of our two plague texts. Even more specifically, the buboes which push their way up onto the body of the plague victim have their corollary on the body of the text, where as a matter of inevitability there will be a variety of small, almost self-contained

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narrative outbreaks, describing victims whose appearance is necessarily brief and terminal. Character continuity is at risk of interruption, of erupting symptoms, at risk of death: plague distorts the entwined development of plot and character which would usually be expected from novels in a conventional narrative mode. Hence it is that Camus, whose central protagonists have fairly developed relationships with each other, still has to lose a number of them to plague. Even more symptomatic than the loss of major characters, however, are the smallest stories, almost fulfilling the description of “flash fiction” given by James Thomas in his editorial comment for a collection of very short stories.16 These “flash” tales are defined by Thomas as between roughly two-hundred and fifty to seven-hundred and fifty words, but in the context of plague, and especially in Defoe, these bubonic narratives can be even shorter, breaking out over the body of the text and erupting from the surface of the narrative in a way that could be considered “episodemic” in the light of their disease-context and sporadic dispersion. An inexhaustive and randomly assorted selection from The Plague would include the introduction and quick demise of the concierge; the pathetic death of Othon’s son; the story of the cat-spitter; and the fate of the Opera singer who dies on stage at the moment of his triumphant final song as Orpheus. These are plague effects: the symptoms of Camus’ plaguey text which introduces characters only for them to quickly die diseased. In Defoe, the episodemic nature of the writing is even more pronounced, the surface of the narrative rumpled by the bumpy observations of H.F., who during his walks around England’s capital collects stories and tales in an attempt to trace the sickness of London, as a doctor might gather the symptoms of a patient. These ‘episodemics’ can even be as swift as a paragraph: A Family, whose Story I have heard, was thus infected by the Father, and the Distemper began to

appear upon some of them, even before he found it upon himself; but searching more narrowly, it appear’d he had been infected some Time, and as soon as he found that his Family had been poison’d by himself he went distracted, and would have laid violent Hands upon himself, but was kept from that by those who look’d to him, and in a few Days died.17

The tragic brevity of this narrative, so common to the episodemics in both Defoe and Camus, is in keeping with the untimely interruption of life; the story, like the lives it describes, is almost incompletely rendered: it is cut off, cut short. This effect can be seen too in Mary Shelley’s plague novel The Last Man (1826), which has a great number of smaller stories that cluster around the edges of the main development of events.18 This episodemicity, then, is a direct effect of writing plague. Fragmentary, episodemic writing within a novel breaks up the continuity of the narrative and textually embodies the fragmentation of society, family, politics and health which a plague outbreak causes: as I have been arguing, the writing of plague partakes in a specific type of plague writing. In fact, the kinship between diseased health and unhealthy narratives has been highlighted by Steven Marcus in his reading of Sigmund Freud’s case study of Dora. He notes how a suspected hysteria patient was found by the famous psychoanalyst to actually be suffering from a treatable medical condition, which Freud had deduced from her ability to tell her story “perfectly clearly and connectedly.”19 Marcus is led to conclude that: “illness amounts at least in part to suffering from an incoherent story or an inadequate narrative account of oneself.”20 Although Marcus and Freud are identifying narrative fragmentation as indicative of mental illness specifically, the idea that incomplete, fragmentary or, in Marcus’ words, “inadequate” narratives are in some sense a symptom of disease is richly suggestive of how the presence of disease in the body may be seen to result in a diseased narrative, suffering in words what the body suffers in symptoms. This is not to assume, however, that fragmentation always necessarily implies a lack or a loss: Sophie Thomas, responding to the Sibylline fragments upon which Shelley’s The Last Man is purportedly written, points out that is can quite conversely, in the context of plague, be a form of plenitude: Reduction is, paradoxically, accomplished through multiplication, insofar as there is a potentially infinite

reproduction of the very condition that ostensibly ushers in closure. The plague, for example, brings on the destruction of man, his (shall we say) progressive diminishment, at the same time as it is a figure for the forces of proliferation. It manages this through its uncontainability, through its capacity to reproduce its destructive effects.21

The spread of plague, the effect it has upon people and institutions, and the lives it takes, actually causes a proliferation of what could be considered the symptoms of a plague text, the episodemic narratives. More deaths, more stories; plague disseminates its effects, but it is a strange plenitude indeed. While these are the stylistic and structural effects of plague writing, the other figure of significance within both Camus and Defoe is the witness, the one who survives the plague. Defoe eventually closes his Journal with the following

Writing Plague: Transforming Narrative, Witnessing and History 4 ___________________________________________________________________________________ short ditty: “A dreadful Plague in London was, / In the Year Sixty Five, / Which swept an Hundred Thousand Souls / Away; yet I alive!”22 It is the “I alive” which allows Defoe to posit H.F. as an eyewitness, and Camus to do the same with his narrator-survivor, Rieux. Mary Shelley, too, uses this narratorial device, with her witness believing himself to be the last survivor of the human race. These texts are, in effect, fictional testimonies, and attest to the centrality of the position of the witness in accounts of plague. While Defoe’s Journal is a first-person narrative from the opening line, The Plague employs a third-person narrative voice throughout. In the last few pages of Camus’ novel a confession is delivered, albeit still not in the first person: “This chronicle is drawing to a close. It is time for Dr Bernard Rieux to admit that he is its author.”23 Rieux has certainly been the character whom the narrative has followed most closely, but there was no obvious earlier evidence to anticipate his deliberate suppression of a first-person address to the reader. The reason he gives in his admission is that “he has tried to adopt the tone of an objective witness.”24 The text continues: “Being called upon to bear witness in the event of a sort of crime, he maintained a certain reserve, as a well-intentioned witness should.” The well-intentioned witness, this implies, is one who withholds their own emotional response and attempts to report only what he has seen or heard; and this is, a few lines on, exactly how Rieux defines it: “To bear faithful witness he had to report chiefly acts, documents and hearsay. What he personally had to say, his own waiting, his trials, he had to pass over in silence.”25 This desire for the sheen of factual authenticity explains why Camus chose to present The Plague in the third person, only embodying the narrative voice at this final moment: “Incontestably, he had to speak for all.”26 “I” cannot speak for all, the inference is, if I say “I”, although Rieux is happy with an intermittent use of “our” or “we.”27 Defoe’s H.F., on the other hand, opens the Journal with an “I” in the first sentence, and finishes it upon the already quoted, celebratory “I alive.” Yet, he too has reservations about the presentation of a merely personalised account, hinting, as Rieux does, of self-censorship: Such intervals as I had, I employed in reading Books, and in writing down my Memorandums of what

occurred to me every Day, and out of which, afterwards, I [took] most of this Work as it relates to my Observations without Doors: What I wrote of my private Meditations I reserve for private Use, and desire it may not be made publick on any Account whatever.28

A new reason now obtrudes to explain the higher rate of episodemic narratives in the Journal: without the disguise of a third-person narrative, and wishing to retain the authority of being an “eyewitness,” H.F. collects as many differing tales and incidents as possible to avoid presenting a record of “private Meditations.” Happy to give his opinion on issues of public health and trade relations, matters very much “without Doors,” when it comes to plague victims the stories are either claimed to be harvested from a third person who had seen the events, or presented as the personal eyewitness accounts of H.F.. If, as sometimes is the case, H.F. reports events that he believes are not reliable he highlights why the information might be suspect; his reticence to credit what he considered to be exaggerated accounts of murderous nurses and watchmen being an apt example.29 Both H.F. and Rieux, the former through his flaneur-style wanderings around plaguey London and the latter in his capacity as a doctor, make this claim for the factuality of their data, be it garnered from public acts, official documents or eye-witness observations. The witness, for these plague texts, is the crucial figure; the authority and the author. Yet, The Journal and The Plague are their authors’ fictions: Camus never experienced a plague epidemic, and Defoe would have been only five years old during the 1665 outbreak. Does a fictional testimony of plague, in that case, have any more significance than just an ordinary fictional narrative? Shoshana Felman, in her essay “Camus’ The Plague or a Monument to Witnessing,” argues that indeed it does.30 Felman’s discussion is particularly interested in the how Camus’ rendering of plague can be considered to be like the Holocaust: an event so horrific as to be beyond any sense of a comprehensive or complete “telling” or understanding. She begins by asking: Can contemporary narrative historically bear witness, not simply to the impact of the Holocaust but to

the way in which the impact of history as holocaust has modified, affected, shifted the very modes of the relationship between narrative and history?31

Camus, she feels, has produced in The Plague a text that, even though it does not openly declare itself to be about the Holocaust, almost because of this, exemplifies: the way in which traditional relationships of narrative to history have changed through the historical

necessity of involving literature in action, of creating a new form of narrative as testimony not merely

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to record, but to rethink and, in the act of its rethinking, in effect transform history by bearing literary witness to the Holocaust.32

Given the existence of Defoe’s Journal, however, this form of “narrative as testimony” is not at all new: it is not only much older than the Holocaust, which for Felman is the catalyst for Camus’ new practice; it is, in fact, older than the novel. Defoe, like the Camus that appears in Felman’s reading, is concerned that people do not forget; the Journal too is not merely a record but a rethinking of plague after the event, an intervention into history and its recording. Felman establishes that a clear series of allusions to the Holocaust can be traced in The Plague, supporting the oft-expressed belief that Camus had intended his text to be an allegory of the Resistance movement in the Second World War. Plague on a large scale, like the Jewish Holocaust, is almost unbelievable in its extent; Oran under quarantine resembles a concentration camp: a place of hopelessness where many are condemned, many die and all are trapped. In the health teams Felman sees a community of people committed to fighting plague, just as the French Resistance worked against the Nazis. Answering the question of why a plague epidemic is an appropriate allegory for the Holocaust, Felman replies by drawing an analogy between the initial reluctance of Oran’s citizens to accept the presence of a plague outbreak and the initial disbelief of the European Jews towards the rumours they heard about the extent of anti-Semitic Nazi intentions. Camus’ Carnets, the notebooks he kept while writing his novels, endorse this interpretation of the relationship between fighting plague and fighting Nazism: I want to express by means of the plague the suffocation from which we all suffered and the atmosphere

of threat and exile in which we all lived. At the same time, I want to extend this interpretation to the notion of existence in general. The plague will give the image of those whose share in this war has been that of reflection, silence - and moral suffering.33

If this were not proof enough, a letter from Camus to Roland Barthes confirms that this is at least one of the paths open to an understanding of the novel: “The Plague, which I wanted to be read on a number of levels, nevertheless has as its obvious content the struggle of the European resistance movements against Nazism.”34 Despite the support these documents provide for her point, however, Felman does not refer to them, presumably because it is important for her argument that Camus’ symbolic rendering of Nazi opposition should be available as a textually demonstrable as opposed to authorially intended reading. On the other hand, the elision of the open debate Camus had with Barthes about The Plague avoids tackling Camus’ very pointed attempt to direct readings of the novel towards its interpretation as an allegory of aspects of the Second World War. Once Camus had publicised this preferred route for understanding plague and its effects, then the next logical step is to ask why an allegory is necessary at all: if the plague is the encroaching dictatorship of the Nazis, and the death it brings is akin to the Holocaust, with the health teams representing the Resistance, then why not just write a novel which draws upon these historical moments and experiences directly? The answer for Felman lies in the imaginative capacity lent by plague to the almost unimaginable destruction of life wrought by the Nazis. In Camus’ novel this imaginative hiatus goes by the name of “abstraction,” a recurring topic amidst the ponderings of Rieux. “Yes, the plague, like abstraction, was monotonous” [“Oui, la peste, comme I’abstraction, était monotone”], the doctor decides.35 Abstraction, as Eugene Hollahan has highlighted in his essay “The Path of Sympathy: Abstraction and Imagination in Camus’ La Peste,”36 is a central concept to The Plague, noticeably discussed in several pages where Dr Rieux is accused by the journalist Rambert: “Vous parlez le langage de la raison, vous êtes dans l’abstraction.”37 The doctor considers this charge: “You are thinking in abstract terms.” Was it truly an abstraction, spending his days in the hospital

where plague was working overtime, bringing the number of victims up to five hundred on average per week? Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.

“Vous vivez dans l’abstraction.” Etait-ce vraiment l’abstraction que ces journées passées dans son hôpital où la peste mettait les bouchées doubles, portent à cinq cents le nombre moyen des victimes par semaine? Oui, il y avait dans le malheur une part l’abstraction et d’irréalité. Mais quand l’abstraction se met à vous tuer, il fait bein s’occuper de l’abstraction.38

The English translation, however good, cannot capture here the startling repetition of the full word “abstraction.” Abstraction is not, Rieux decides, just a matter of language as Rambert had suggested, but in fact a sort of parasitic state of

Writing Plague: Transforming Narrative, Witnessing and History 6 ___________________________________________________________________________________ mind which must be resisted and fought off, much as Rieux talks heroically about fighting plague. At the close of this section, Rieux concludes that “To struggle against abstraction, one must come to resemble it a little” [“Pour lutter contre l’abstraction, il faut un peu lui reseembler”].39 For Felman, it is precisely this creeping temptation of seeing plague from the position of abstraction, as a series of disembodied and detached statistics, which has its parallel in history’s reception of the Holocaust. In the same way as the Holocaust, “[w]hat the Plague, above all, means is a mass murder of such scope that it deprives the very loss of life of any impact, reducing death to an anonymous, depersonalized experience, to a statistical abstraction.”40 While this may be equally true of plague as of the Holocaust, to represent the latter under an allegory of the former is itself an act of abstraction. What abstraction comes down to fundamentally in Camus and Felman’s reading of him is a lack of imagination: an inability to give life to the statistics of the dead. This would perhaps account for why the Journal, despite including various statistical mortality charts and other factual tables, is overwhelmingly more interested in imaginatively bringing to life portraits of dying Londoners. H.F. also tracks a growing disinterestedness in the London community’s attitude towards death and each other that is on a par with the elaboration of abstraction in The Plague: “for towards the latter End [of the epidemic], Mens Hearts were hardened, and Death was so always before their Eyes, that they did not so much concern themselves for Loss of their Friends, expecting, that themselves should be summoned the next Hour.”41 In Felman’s opinion, it is because of an historical, as well as individual, inability to imagine a destruction of life on the scale of the Holocaust that literature’s role in being able rethink such events becomes key: It is precisely because history as holocaust proceeds from a failure to imagine, that it takes an

imaginative medium like the Plague to gain an insight into its historical reality, as well as into the attested historicity of its unimaginability.42

Literature, carrier of the imaginative medium, carrier of plague, can render the Holocaust more imaginable: and thus, for Felman, plague becomes an imaginative substitute in alignment with Defoe’s claim, used by Camus in his epigraph to the novel, that “It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.”43 This formulation is not entirely satisfactory, on several counts. Firstly, if Camus’ The Plague is to be accepted as an allegory or an imaginative substitute for the (unimaginability of the) Second War World and the Holocaust, what this manifestly fails to address, and where it becomes an abstraction, is in the implicit alignment of the events of the war with an inexplicable force of nature, plague. Such a move naturalises horror, removing the need for an historical, political, and social investigation of the causes and events of war: like Oran’s plague, the war would thus be a tragedy that arrived without warning, killed without reason, and ceased without explanation. This is clearly inadequate, if not irresponsible. Secondly, such a reading of The Plague replicates Camus’ public avowal of authorial intent and is a reductive and essentially controlling manoeuvre which closes other, perhaps equally productive and interesting, avenues for understanding and interpretation. Thirdly, Felman’s emphasis upon the allegorical nature of Camus’ text obscures what both The Plague and the Journal reveal: literature’s gift is not in being a substitute for failures to render history imaginable; it is in the complicated provision of a witness who, in Rieux’s words, can “speaks for all”. The problem for history is to reconcile and accommodate the facts and events of traumatic life-loss, be they caused by war or plague, with the testimony of the eye-witness. This is something that, in the wake of the Holocaust and other tragedies such as the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, is being addressed through the compilation of eye-witness archives which exist alongside, sometimes comfortably, sometimes less so, the official documentations which we more ordinarily associate with historical accounts.44 What literature can do is to step into the gap between the official account and the eye-witness, whose perspective is personal and therefore limited, and provide a narrative which gives the impression of having official and myriad eyewitness positions at its command. This witness which fiction can provide occupies a fantasy space; this would be one of the strongest arguments available for claiming Defoe’s Journal to be a part of literature, or at the very least to be of the order of fiction rather than history.45 The witness here is indeed the one who survives; he or she is also the person who chronicles, who is in a position to note, to see, to hear and to report. As Felman observes, Rieux at times withholds information, stating that he knows nothing, for example, about isolation camps other than the one Rambert visited, but given that his overall narrative still provides a comprehensive account of plague conditions in Oran, such omissions serve to actually accentuate the trust implicitly embodied in his narrative position, which although it suspends the “I,” inclusively indulges in more collective pronouns. Similarly, Defoe’s evaluation of the information he receives, his scepticism in the face of more extreme claims of carer cruelty, for instance, strengthen his reliability; he is the witness who, like the historian, measures and balances,

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sifts and collates, judges and dismisses, but all from the authoritative position of one who was there, and can say “I,” as the historian was not and cannot. Camus notes in the Carnets that “It must definitely be an account, a chronicle. But what a lot of problems this creates.”46 The problem was to provide a chronicle, an account, which also had the authenticity of a dependable witness; Camus solved this through the deceptive ruse of the third-person narrative voice. Felman is right in advancing that literature provides an imaginative capacity which history cannot, but the way it achieves this is not through the superior images which it can paint or the imaginative experiences it can stimulate; it is through the provision of these from a narrative position which an historical account is unable to provide. There is, of course, danger in this possibility insofar as it provides a fallacious perspective, one which never exists outside of fictional narrative as testimony. The role of the testimonial narrator legitimates episodemics in a way that history cannot, for the narrator is their guarantor of authenticity; episodemics are undersigned by the narrative “I saw” or “I heard”: the “I was there” which the historian, by nature of his or her position in relation to the past, is not able to articulate, only compile. In this respect, literature, by employing the fantasy witness who can speak for all, certainly does provide a medium through which traumatic events can be narrativized with imaginative impact, and where abstraction can be addressed and challenged. At the same time, we would do well to keep in mind the very fictional nature of such an enterprise; this awareness would temper Felman’s celebratory affirmation of literature’s ability to transform the history upon which it can draw. While the writing of history has been acknowledged to inevitably have narrative elements and to at times be infected by the use of fictional structures and devices, fiction’s infection by and of history, and even, as these plague texts have shown, by the diseases it can narrate, calls for equally careful scrutiny.

Notes

1 Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Louis Landa (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 8. 2 Ibid, 76. 3 Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Robin Buss (London, Penguin Books, 2001). When I give the French, it is taken from Albert Camus, La Peste (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). French page numbers are given directly after the English and prefaced with F. 4 Ibid, 76. 5 Raymond Stephenson, “‘Tis a speaking Sight’: Imagery as Narrative Technique in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year,” Dalhousie Review 62 (1982-3): 680-692. 6 Defoe, 56. 7 Ibid, 16. 8 Ibid, 153. 9 Ibid, 226. 10 Stephenson, 686. 11 Defoe, 81. 12 Ibid, 162. 13 Ibid, 162-3. 14 Camus, 166. 15 Ibid, 170. 16 James Thomas, “Introduction,” in Flash Fiction: Very Short Stories, eds. James Thomas, Denise Thomas and Tom Hazuka (London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1992) 11-14. 17 Defoe, 202. 18 Mary Shelley, The Last Man, ed. Hugh J. Luke, Jr. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). 19 Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of An Analysis of A Case of Hysteria,” in Case Histories I, PFL 8, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1990), 46. 20 Steven Marcus, Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis: Studies in the Transition from Victorian Humanism to Modernity (Boston: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 61. 21 Sophie Thomas, “The Ends of the Fragment, the Problem of the Preface: Proliferation and Finality in The Last Man,” in Mary Shelley’s Fictions: From Frankenstein to Faulkner, ed. Michael Eberle-Sinatra (London: Macmillan, 2000), 23. 22 Defoe, 248.

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23 Camus, 232. 24 Ibid, 232. 25 Ibid, 232. 26 Ibid, 232. As Felman notes, there is one character who Rieux decides he cannot speak for: Cottard, who has committed a crime before the epidemic and is relieved to find that during the outbreak the authorities drop the investigation into his case. Rieux quotes Tarrou, who had said of Cottard, “His only true crime is to have given approval in his heart to something that kills men, women and children.” Approval of mass extermination, this suggests, would require a different order of narrative testimony and witnessing. Camus, 233 and Felman, 118-9. Felman explores this is a further essay in the collection entitled “Camus’ The Fall, or the Betrayal of the Witness” in Testimony, 165-203. 27 Although the use of ‘our’ and ‘we’ is intermittent throughout, see the first few pages in particular: Camus, 14. 28 Defoe, 76-7. 29 Ibid, 83. 30 Shoshana Felman, “Camus’ The Plague, or a Monument to Witnessing,” in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). 31 Ibid, 95. 32 Ibid, 95. 33 Albert Camus, Carnets 1942-1951, trans. Philip Thody (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966), 35. 34 Albert Camus, Selected Essays and Notebooks, trans. and ed. Philip Thody (London: Penguin, 1979), 220. 35 Camus, The Plague, 69 / F73. 36 Eugene Hollahan, “The Path of Sympathy: Abstraction and Imagination in Camus’ La Peste,” Studies in the Novel 8 (1976): 337-393. 37 Camus, The Plague, F70. The English translation here loses the repetition of “abstraction,” rendering the French into the slightly different: ‘You are talking the language of reason, you are thinking in abstract terms.” (Need page refer) 38 Ibid, 69 / F72. 39 Ibid, 71 / F74. 40 Felman, 97-8. 41 Defoe, 16. 42 Felman, 105. 43 The quote is taken from Defoe’s third volume of the Robinson Crusoe trilogy. See: Daniel Defoe, Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick World (London, Constable & Company Ltd, MCMXXV), viii. 44 For an interesting example of how eye-witness accounts and historical fact can be uncomfortably different, and for a discussion which concludes that the eyewitness account has its place and validity despite this, see Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, 59-63. 45 Watson Nicholson, in a book which was extremely influential in the circles of Defoe scholarship when first published, argues that most of the events reported by Defoe were based upon fact and are verified by other accounts of the 1665 plague. Thus, Nicholson concludes, the Journal should be considered a history, not fiction. See: Watson Nicholson, The Historical Sources of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, (New York: Kennikat Press, 1966), 3. 46 Camus, Carnets, 32.

Bibliography Camus, Albert. The Plague. Trans. Robin Buss. London: Penguin Books, 2001. Selected Essays and Notebooks. Trans and ed, Philip Thody. London: Penguin, 1979. Carnets 1942-1951. Trans. Philip Thody. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966. La Peste. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. Defoe, Daniel. Journal of the Plague Year. Ed. Louis Landa. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.

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Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick World. London, Constable & Company Ltd, MCMXXV. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Freud, Sigmund. “Fragment of An Analysis of A Case of Hysteria.” Case Histories I, PFL 8. Trans. James Strachey. London: Penguin, 1990. Hollahan, Eugene. ‘The Path of Sympathy: Abstraction and Imagination in Camus’ La Peste.’ Studies in the Novel 8 (1976): 337-393. Marcus, Steven. Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis: Studies in the Transition from Victorian Humanism to Modernity. Boston: George Allen & Unwin, 1984. Nicholson, Watson. The Historical Sources of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. New York: Kennikat Press, 1966. Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. Ed. Hugh J. Luke, Jr. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Stephenson, Raymond, “‘Tis a speaking Sight’: Imagery as Narrative Technique in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.” Dalhousie Review 62 (1982-3): 680-692. Thomas, James. “Introduction.” Flash Fiction: Very Short Stories. Eds. James Thomas, Denise Thomas and Tom Hazuka. London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1992. Thomas, Sophie. “The Ends of the Fragment, the Problem of the Preface: Proliferation and Finality in The Last Man.” Mary Shelley’s Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner. Ed. Michael Eberle-Sinatra. London: Macmillan, 2000.