posted on 04 Dec 2022

Preexisting Conditions: Recounting the Plague by Samuel Weber

Although we are still living with the very real problems of our own pandemic, Covid 19 isn’t, of course, the first or only ‘plague’ to have tested the social fabric of human societies. It’s important to see our own travails and our response to them in the light of our history and authors of fiction and non-fiction are now beginning to feel they have enough distance from the initial emergency created by the spread of Covid to begin the process of analysing its impact and trying to locate it in the wider historical context.

Eminent US philosopher, literary critic and cultural commentator, Samuel Weber has contributed to this debate with ‘Preexisting Conditions: Recounting the plague’ that uses the legacy of past plague-related literature as its analytical framework. He draws on texts as diverse as the Bible, Boccaccio, Defoe, Artaud and Camus to explore how we have narrated and understood past plagues and pandemics with a view to seeing what this tells us about the stories we will tell about Covid.

Weber is interested in the relationship between the ‘real’ event and the recreation of that event in fiction. Famously, Daniel Defoe’s ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’ is written as if the author himself witnessed the events that take place in the book but, given that the author would only have been 6 years old at the time, the work is clearly a fictional recreation based on a framework of reported ‘real’ events. This, Weber, argues should be considered ‘friction’ - the interface where fiction and reality rub up against each other.

One of the assumptions that we tend to make about a plague or pandemic is that the virus has no sense of social differentiation - all are affected equally whether you are a Duke or a dustman. But, Weber argues, this is not the case: social and individual circumstances, the ‘preexisting conditions’ of the book’s title, are the key to understanding the impact of the infection. Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2020, Weber articulates this idea concisely:

“….in regard to epidemics and pandemics, both of which are collective as well as individual phenomena, there is the well-worn assurance that bacteria and viruses do not recognize social differentiation. But of course they do and have always done so, although to varying degrees. All epidemics and pandemics are more contagious in areas where the population density is greater. And these areas often coincide with places inhabited by poorer persons, who cannot afford the spacious living areas reserved for the better to do.  But these obviously social conditions are easily obfuscated by a term such as “pre-morbidity,” designating previously existing medical conditions that make certain persons more vulnerable to contagion and to illness of whatever kind, including COVID-19, than those without such “pre-conditions.” Similarly, those who are socially and economically privileged can more easily avoid subjecting themselves to the risk of contagion, whether in the workplace or in their access to medical attention, including not just curative but also preventive measures, which are not simply medical but which generally — especially in the United States — require financial resources to acquire.”

For me, one of the most resonant chapters in the book deals with the way Albert Camus', The Plague, uses the notion of a plague outbreak and the forced lockdown of a population as a metaphor for a wider political ‘plague’ - that of Fascism and Nazi occupation. Weber considers whether the anthropomorphising of a virus constitutes a legitimate metaphor or not - is it possible to think of a plague as having a conscious intent? This raises interesting questions of social isolationism and imprisonment that come with the infection and what these mean, not just for the individual but for the whole social structure.

This book constitutes a densely but engagingly argued overview of the different ways society has told the tale of plague and pandemic and we can see clearly from these that there is no single story here. The idea that the virus is an impartial, unmediated medical threat to the individual is a view that over-simplifies an event as significant as a pandemic and we must see it as not just something that threatens life but also threatens social structure in the wider sense - a lesson the fictions of the past have tried to come to terms with, just as we will have to as we move out of the Covid shadows.

 

The book is available from Princeton University Press and can be ordered from your local independent bookstore or directly from PUP’s own website.

 

 

Terry Potter

December 2022