Writing Plague: Defoe and Camus

Abstract

Ever since 1720, when Western Europe’s last plague epidemic died out, plague’s place has been in fiction, with authors reworking and reim-agining its outbreaks in their narratives and novels. Two of the most well known and, therefore, influential plague texts are Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published just two years after the 1720 outbreak in France, and Albert Camus’s novel The Plague, which appeared two years after the end of the Second World War. Clearly, both authors were responding to the calamity: Defoe and his contemporary readers, alarmed by the French epidemic, had no way of knowing that the disease would not shortly — or ever — repeat its devastating English outbreak of 1665; Camus, a member of the French resistance, was reacting to the horror of Nazi occupation and the staggering events and loss of lives Europe had suffered. Camus’s twentieth-century plague aligns, too, with other thinkers and writers of the 1930s and 1940s who used plague to criticise fascism and dictatorships. Camus admired Defoe: similarities between their texts go far beyond the fact that both feature plague. What plague pushes Camus and Defoe towards, the exigencies it creates for its writers, the surprising creativity it enables and the uniqueness of some of its textual effects are the focus here. It becomes evident that plague’s symptoms are not just written about in these narratives but are written into them.

Infection in the sentence breeds.

Emily Dickinson¹

By their symptoms you shall know them.

William Burroughs²