Abstract
Ebola virus disease has a media presence and imaginative traction disproportionate to its statistical probability in most parts of the world. This chapter attributes that rhetorical power to a particular figurative structure, the “Ebola body,” which has the topology of an opaque receptacle subject to rupture. Reading Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone as an influential poetics of the Ebola body, metonymic across scales, from the geomorphic body of an infected patient through the anthropomorphic landscape of the Congo, Belling argues that the Ebola body is a topos locating what, after both Julia Kristeva’s account of the abject and Joseph Conrad’s account of the Congo, we can identify as horror—and that this horror may be endemic to the experience of human embodiment.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See Komesaroff and Kerridge (2014) for an insightful account of how situatedness inflects accounts of responding to the epidemic: “Critics of the Western response have claimed that the newfound concern about EVD, which has been present in Africa for nearly 40 years, reflects a longstanding disregard of the needs of people living in the region. … there has been little scientific research into methods for treating or preventing the disease … it has only been when Western interests, and Western citizens, have been threatened that the developed world has been prompted to act” (413); Komesaroff and Kerridge present this position, however, as one culturally situated reading of the ethics of the West’s response to Ebola, and point out that readings of the epidemic from within the outbreak’s primary territory in West Africa will be differently inflected, focusing for instance on local implications of changes in sociality, abandonment of traditional death rituals, and so on, and as a result coming to different conclusions about the ethics of managing the outbreak. My reading here, of rhetorical responses in the West to an anticipated US/European outbreak, recognizes the self-interest characterizing this discourse but is more interested in the discursive structures that make Ebola disproportionately anxiogenic and thus both easier to ignore and more likely to provoke panic than comparable diseases.
- 2.
See Wald, Schell, and Haynes.
- 3.
See Bashford and Hooker’s 2001 analysis of the “dream of hygienic containment” (Margrit Shildrick term) as a powerful but doomed response to contagion (pp. 2–3).
- 4.
Emphasis added. See also Heather Schell’s account, with its twentieth-century inflection: “Viral discourse raises the possibility of a type of global busing, bringing the foreign into our neighborhoods through infection” (p. 132).
- 5.
A man traveled to the USA from Liberia, developed symptoms, and, after first being turned away from a Dallas hospital emergency room, was admitted and isolated, the EVD diagnosis confirmed on September 30, 2015. He died 11 days later. Two of his nurses were infected; both recovered.
- 6.
This turns out to be a suitably liquid word itself: I have used the spelling I found in my sources, whether liquification, liquefaction, liquifying, liquefying, and so on.
- 7.
David Quammen’s reading of Preston for clinical veracity is helpful: he points out, for example, that when Preston describes a “meltdown” in a patient, that “meltdown was a metaphor, meaning dysfunction, not actual melting” (Ebola 46). But he immediately qualifies this: “Or maybe it wasn’t.” When Preston describes patients as “bleeding out,” Quammen notes that this “seemed to be so different from just ‘bleeding’” (p. 46). Quammen reassures the reader: “It’s my duty to advise you that you need not take these descriptions quite literally” (p. 46). He goes on to ask Pierre Rollin of the CDC about Preston’s book, and Rollin objects to its being called non-fiction: “if you say it’s a true story, you have to speak to the true story, and he didn’t. Because it was much more exciting to have blood everywhere and scaring everywhere” (p. 47). Quammen points out that the term “hemorrhagic fever” is a “misnomer, because more than half the patients don’t bleed at all” (p. 53). See Quammen (2014, p. 48 and following) for what he calls a “real world” list of EVD symptoms.
- 8.
See Belling ((2003), “Microbiography.”
- 9.
The physiological reason for this bleeding is a real disturbance in the body’s normal balance of solidity and fluidity: Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation means that blood clots up in some parts: vessels for fluids become blocked (leading to thromboses and hence cell death in the organs). As a result, clotting factors are overused in some places, which means that in others the blood does not coagulate, leaking out of the vessels instead, and thus being available to mix with other fluids, including vomit and feces. This imbalance of the blood’s solid and fluid components is of course extremely and often lethally dangerous; it is, however, a figurative rather than a literal—conceptual rather than physiological—liquefaction of the organs themselves. See Quammen (2014) for a more detailed account of DIC.
- 10.
Hot Zone, p. 15. Preston’s stress on the term “vomito negro or black vomit” is intriguing. The term is conventionally limited to the description of yellow fever, for which it was the Spanish name. One might speculate about Preston’s interest here in emphasizing the blackness—as opposed to the more expected (even if not necessarily more clinically accurate) redness—of the shocking substance that comes out of the Ebola body’s interior darkness.
- 11.
Preston, Hot Zone, 98. Emphasis added. The original: “And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect” (Conrad, 49). While Preston does not include the last sentence, this vengefulness is consistent with the final drive of Hot Zone: that emerging diseases are a kind of natural revenge (or planetary immune reaction) against human encroachment.
- 12.
See Haynes on the effect of Preston’s reference to Conrad. Haynes (writing around 2001) attributes the fascination with viral epidemics, Ebola in particular, directly to the perception of Africa as their source. Noting Preston’s quotation from Conrad, Haynes sees Preston’s reification of Africa as source of emerging disease as symptomatic of the recent “collapse of the bipolar world”—the end of the Cold War—and a new multi-sited global power structure (134). Haynes sees Monet as a Kurtz figure, with Preston as his Marlow (135), and sees The Hot Zone as playing on polarities between (white) hunter and (black/viral) game animal, and between Africa and the “wider world” (136). I think these discriminations are certainly at work in Preston’s text, but I think the implications of the Ebola body exceed these by threatening to collapse bipolarity itself: inside/outside, “Africa”/“the West,” and the act of cognitive distinction that makes human identity and self-recognition possible.
- 13.
Lacan, pp. 154–5, quoted in Brown (2000, p. 22).
References
Bashford, A., & Hooker, C. (Eds.) (2001). Contagion: Historical and cultural studies. London: Routledge.
Belling, C. (2003). Microbiography and resistance in the human culture medium. Literature and Medicine, 22(1), 84–101.
Brown, T. C. (2000). Cultural psychosis on the frontier: The work of the darkness in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of darkness. Studies in the Novel, 32(1), 14‑28.
Conrad, J. (1899). Heart of darkness. R. C. Murfin (Ed.). New York: Macmillan, 2010.
Crossley, L. (2014, April 2). A terrifying fight against the deadliest virus on Earth. Daily Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2594853/Medic-tells-horrific-scenes-fight-against-deadly-Ebola-outbreak-Guinea.html#ixzz3bdrV2C40. Accessed 26 Oct 2015.
Curry, C. (2014, August 1). Ebola patients coming to the US: How safe are we? Good Morning America. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/ebola-patients-coming-us-safe/story?id=24804000. Accessed 26 Oct 2015.
Deleuze, G. (1990). The logic of sense (M. Lester & C. Stivale, Trans.) C. V. Boundas (Ed.). New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980.
Doktor, Z. (2014, October 20). What stupid pointless Ebola freakouts are we having today? http://wonkette.com/563839/what-stupid-pointless-ebola-freakouts-are-we-having-today. Accessed 26 Oct 2015.
Forster, E. M. (1924). A passage to India. New York: Harvest Books, 1984.
Garza, M. (2014, December 22). Opinion: Ebola fighters inspire us to ask: Would we do the same? Sacramento Bee. http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/mariel-garza/article4837092.html. Accessed 26 Oct 2015.
Haynes, D. M. (2002). Still the Heart of darkness: The Ebola virus and the meta-narrative of disease in The hot zone. Journal of Medical Humanities, 28(2), 133–145.
Hillis Miller, J. (2012). Revisiting “Heart of darkness revisited” (in the company of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe). In N. Lawtoo (Ed.), Conrad’s Heart of darkness and contemporary thought: Revisiting the horror with Lacoue-Labarthe (pp. 17–37). London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Kakutani, M. (1994, September 30). A visit to the biohazard battleground (review of Richard Preston, The hot zone). New York Times.
Komesaroff, P., & Kerridge, I. (2014). Ebola, ethics, and the question of culture. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 11, 413–414.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror (L.S. Roudiez, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
Lederberg, J., Shope, R. E., & Oaks, S.C. Jr (Eds.). (1992). Emerging infections: Microbial threats to health in the United States (Institute of Medicine). Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Linkins, J. (2015). As Liberia earns “Ebola-free” designation, a look back on the lessons learned. Huffington Post (blog), 5/11/2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/11/ebola-outbreak-lessons_n_7234002.html. Accessed 26 Oct 2015.
Miller, J., Broad, W. J., & Engelberg, S. (2002). Germs: Biological weapons and America’s secret war. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Moran, M., & Hoffman, D. (2014, October 7). Introduction: Ebola in perspective. Fieldsights: Hot spots: Ebola in perspective. Cultural anthropology online. http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/585-ebola-in-perspective. Accessed 26 Oct 2015.
Otis, L. (1999). Membranes: Metaphors of invasion in nineteenth-century literature, science, and politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Preston, R. (1992, October 26). Crisis in The hot zone. New Yorker, p. 58ff.
Preston, R. (1994). The hot zone. New York: Random House.
Preston, R. (2014, July 30). News Desk: Takes: Richard Preston on Ebola. New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/takes-richard-preston-ebola. Accessed 5 May 2016.
Purcell, S. (2013, April 3). Ebola: Still the scariest virus out there? DiseaseDaily.
Quammen, D. (2014). Ebola: The natural and human history of a deadly virus. New York: W. W. Norton.
Schell, H. (1997). Outburst! A chilling true story about emerging-virus narratives and pandemic social change. Configurations, 5(1), 93–133
Thacker, E. (2011). In the dust of this planet (Horror of philosophy, vol. 1). Washington, DC: Zero Books.
Tudor, A. (1995). Unruly bodies, unquiet minds. Body and Society, 1(1), 25‑41.
Tuttle, I. (2014, October 29). Kaci Hickox, selfish hero. National Review. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/391415/kaci-hickox-selfish-hero-ian-tuttle. Accessed 26 Oct 2015.
Wilhelm, H. (2014, October 16). Government underreaction to Ebola is condescending and dangerous. Dallas Morning News. http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/latest-columns/20141016-heather-wilhelm-government-under-reaction-to-ebola-is-condescending-and-dangerous.ece. Accessed 26 Oct 2015.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Belling, C. (2016). Dark Zones: The Ebola Body as a Configuration of Horror. In: Nixon, K., Servitje, L. (eds) Endemic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52141-5_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52141-5_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-52140-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-52141-5
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)