It's the plaaaaaague!

[damned_colonial]

It's July 1st. Let the "Plagues and Pandemics" discussion begin!

I'll be posting some questions/prompts for discussion over the next month, at least one a week and hopefully a bit more than that. If anyone else has points for discussion, please feel free to post with them. I am responsible for making sure *some* discussion posts happen, but I'm happy to share!

For now I'd like to open up with something very general:

What have you noticed are the main similarities and differences between the various plague stories you've read?

What impressions did you get regarding the author's historical research? How do you think the author's understanding of the period in question affected the way the story was told?

Comments

[damned_colonial]

Well, I've read "Fever, 1793", "Doomsday Book", "Year of Wonders", and I'm ploughing through the "Journal of the Plague Year" audiobook intermittently. I also posted an excerpt from Patrick O'Brian about Yellow Fever.

Similarities: this is blindingly obvious, really, but all the protagonists are survivors. I was really moved by the medieval chronicler quoted in "Doomsday Book" who watched and documented everyone around him die, then died himself. I recognise the writerly difficulty of writing someone who dies at the end of the book, but there's a part of me that would've liked to read it. Perhaps I should go dig up that medieval account?

Differences: genre, mostly. I've got a factual-sounding account that's only faintly fictional (JotPY), a straight historical (YOW), a YA historical (F1793), and a time travel book with a modern protagonist experiencing the Black Death (DB). I have Hambly's "Fever Season" out from the library, and that's a mystery. I found that the genre conventions were what made the stories stand out most, even more than the historical era in which they were set (1340s, 1660s, 1790s).

Wrt historical research and the author's understanding of the plague/pandemic they're writing about... the main thing I've noticed is that modern authors, who understand the germ theory of infection, have a great deal of trouble avoiding showing their knowledge, even if just by pointing at the historical characters and smirking behind their hand. O'Brian was probably the most obnoxious about this, with all his stuff about Stephen avoiding "miasmas", and Willis was probably the least, in that her protagonist was modern and didn't have that problem. She did have the issue of translating her understanding to the medieval people she was staying with, in ways they'd understand, but I thought it was done fairly sensitively (both internally to the story, in eternally wrt how Willis wrote it for our consumption).

[starlady]

I noticed the dilemma of the author's knowledge playing itself out, too--in some ways I actually thought Fever, 1793 solved the problem most elegantly, since Andersen has the Benjamin Rush vs. the French doctors (with Rush being basically a medieval quack, and the French being modern) debate play out within the book, and actually have readily observable consequences for the protagonist and her family. I live right near Philadelphia, actually, and it was something of a shock to see Rush taken down those pegs, since he's still something of a favorite local son.

In general, living near Philadelphia, I thought Andersen did a great job of capturing it as it was at the time--which isn't surprising, since she lives in the PA suburbs of Philly.

[daegaer]

While I haven't been able to keep up with anything this summer since getting sick, I remember how very moved I was by Doomsday Book generally. Was the mediaeval chronicler referred to the Irish monk John Clyn? His note about putting by writing materials so that anyone who survived could continue the account he could no longer write is very sad:

"So that notable deeds should not perish with time, and be lost from the memory of future generations, I, seeing these many ills, and that the whole world encompassed by evil, waiting among the dead for death to come, have committed to writing what I have truly heard and examined; and so that the writing does not perish with the writer, or the work fail with the workman, I leave parchment for continuing the work, in case anyone should still be alive in the future and any son of Adam can escape this pestilence and continue the work thus begun."

[legionseagle]

Wrt to "survivors" thing I wonder whether my attitude to the expectation that the pov character will survive is coloured by the fact that the first book I read (that I can recall) in which plague was a theme was The Children of Green Knowe over the course of which the pov character gradually comes to realise that his invisible friends, the four children from the 17th century portrait over the mantelpiece, are children precisely because they died in the plague, and are therefore captured in time at that moment. The big reveal of Charlotte Sometimes is to similar effect. I wonder if there's a difference between children/YA treatment of plague as a theme, perhaps because plague means something different as a theme (which reminds me, I need to re-read Camus, because I've forgotten who dies there).

[al_zorra]

The element that first most stood out for me after having read several plague works is that the books, whether fiction or non-fiction, were almost all presented from an interior, isolated perspective, no matter how detailed the observation of the events and atmosphere external to the narrative voice.

This is an effect of a plague, historically, to divide people, to isolate them from one another, from fear of death and fear of violence and predation.

This is so for both Journal and for Fever Season, but in such very different ways, if only because one is fiction and the other is journalism on the spot.

Knowing New Orleans and its traditions very well, Hambley's Fever Season, which was her second Benjamin January-New Orleans work, her research is always declaring itself loudly. She hadn't lived with the place and the material long enough to have internalized the milieu, so it was flat reading. You saw her period map of the city open next to her keyboard.

However, in terms of Fever Season, that January could make an alliance with a white man in authority made some sense. However, in reality, it was the Americans in that era post the Louisiana Purchase, who instituted the strict and rigid and relentless separation of race, and the declaration that any one with 'one drop,' was a n*gger, no matter what. These matters were seen very differently by the Americans, who were protestants, than by the older, European tradition Catholic 'creole' population, whether white or colored, slave or free.

Love, C.

[damned_colonial]

Just a factual point... JotPY is *not* journalism on the spot, it's historical fiction masquerading as a journalistic account. Defoe was only a child at the time of the plague (b. 1659), but his account is from the POV of an adult. It was written in the 1720s, more than 50 years after the plague, so it's like a 60ish author now writing about WW2 -- perhaps some vague recollections from childhood, but no first-hand knowledge of adult experience of the war itself.

[al_zorra]

I knew that -- but even today we have many journalism works published post the time of occurance.

However, though Defoe didn't live in the period of the Great Plague, London experienced frequent epidemics of greater and lesser degree during his lifetime that carried off significant numbers of Londoners in a short period.

The highest total of deaths of an epidemic in London was in 1681, fatal smallpox. It returned with high fatalities in 1689 and 1691. Defor was 29 in 1689 and 30 in 1691. The Queen died in London of smallpox in 1694.

Here's a history of plagues and epidemics in London.

Love, C.

[epershand]

I read Doomsday Book, A Journal of the Plague Year, and The Great Influenza (nonfiction about 1918 inflenza pandemic). So I hit two influenzas, two plagues, and no cholera, etc.

A couple of things I noticed across books:
- The idea of a pandemic as an almost supernatural occurance, striking where, when and whom it chooses and completely out of human control.
- Related, the battle of humans and technology against disease.
- All three books layed down moral judgements, JotPY and DB against those fleeing the plague who brought it with them, and GI againt the public health officials who lied about the extent of the pandemic to tone down the panic.