Material Metaphors in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) Sina Schuhmaier Introduction: Pandemic literature and the microbial turn We find ourselves in the midst of a ‘microbial turn’. Public thinking is gradually shifting from a nineteenth century paradigm of germ warfare to a recognition of microbial biodiversity and mutual interdependencies. The recent (re-)discovery of the human microbiome and trending gut health are the most apparent illustrations of this shift. But even potentially harmful pathogens are undergoing a critical reassessment, despite the persistence of military metaphors and defence mechanisms in the recent Covid-19 pandemic, when politicians like the French president Emmanuel Macron declared war against the pathogen (BBC 2020) and national borders were closed. What the pandemic also demonstrated was the inextricable entanglement of human existence with microbial forms. In this vein, Jonathan Kennedy’s popular science book Pathogenesis (2023) calls for a reorientation in the category of the human and the writing of ‘human’ history. Kennedy suggests that germs chart a “history from deep below” which decentres not only ‘Great Men’ but human actors altogether (2023: 15 f.). The challenge to human exceptionalism that this soft version of non-anthropocen‐ trism articulates is matched by the material turn in the humanities. Critical posthumanism, new materialism, and material ecocriticism are all invested in a perspective that redefines and decentres the human, emphasising various material entanglements and nonhuman agencies instead. The ‘microbial turn’ has, in fact, been proposed by critical posthumanism in an attempt to recon‐ ceptualise “human and animal bodies as human-non-human-environmental ‘ecosystems’” (Herbrechter 2018: 360). This view of altered scales and microbial cohabitation can powerfully translate into a “postanthropocentric ‘multispecies’ ethics, politics and ecology” (356). While this paper reserves some scepticism as to the more radical anti-anthropocentrism that also derives from the microbial turn (362 f.), it takes its cue from the shift in perspective that a focus on the microbial engenders. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 1 The Royal Society, in fact, showed an interest in finding the plague pathogen by means of the microscope (Nicolson 1962: 164). Pandemic literature, in this view, emerges as perhaps uniquely suited to probe a perspective which has always been latent in human interactions with the microbial. Even texts that predate the age of germ discovery in the midand late-nineteenth century provide insights into the entanglement of human life with microbial forms which becomes especially apparent under pandemic conditions. This is not to say that the microbial perspective is historically unspecific. Situated medical and scientific knowledge gives specific contours to the literary imagination. The introduction of the first microscopes in the early modern age presented a dramatically altered scale of life. The view through the microscope, while instating the human as an omnipotent observer, came with the simultaneous potential of challenging a human-centred perspective. To Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who described microorganisms as ‘animalcules’, little animals, in the seventeenth century, the microscope put on display a “secret world” of hidden multitudes (qtd. in Nicolson 1962: 167). Concerned with the minute details of inanimate and organic matter, Robert Hooke’s preceding Micrographia (1665) provided visual illustrations of this previously invisible world in the same year as the Great Plague raged over London. 1 The 1665 bubonic plague is also the subject matter of Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year from 1722, a fictional work which yet bears the hallmark of facticity. Although unaware of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, Defoe’s text, as I will show, charts a distinct microbial perspective, one that not only sheds light on the material entanglements that undergird human interactions, but also on the textuality of microbial matter itself. My reading is oriented through approaches in new materialism and material ecocriticism that query dichotomies between the nonhuman and human, nature and culture, and, in particular, matter and text. Driven by the thinking of critics like Jane Bennett who have offered powerful reformulations of mate‐ rial and human agency, this paper employs the microbial perspective in an attempt to understand the Great Plague in Defoe’s text as an intertwinement of human and more-than-human forces in networks that ultimately question the clear-cut separation of these categories. The caveat to this reading is that Defoe’s pandemic text from 1722 is not only a textual artefact and so can only access material phenomena through language; it is also greatly concerned with language and storytelling. And yet, I argue, it is precisely through this concern with the plague as discursive-and-material that the text voices a challenge to the ontological distinction between matter and discourse. The plague, in DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 240 Sina Schuhmaier the text, is simultaneously a microbiological and a social, cultural, discursive event. Approached through a microbial perspective that takes due account of material-discursive entwinement, Defoe’s Journal shows that “matter and meaning cannot be dissociated” and that “[m]attering is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance” (Barad 2007: 3). Following Karen Barad’s concept of ‘intra-action’, the plague does not precede its textuality: “in contrast to the usual ‘interaction’, which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action” (33). What emerges from this take on Defoe’s text is not an entirely nonhuman perspective. Rather, I aim to show that the Journal can be understood to call into question the idea of a purely human perspective, as well as its ensuing anthropocentric implications. In the early 1720s, when Britain was facing the threat of a renewed plague outbreak by way of Marseilles, Defoe made the plague the central topic in two of his works. He published the Journal and the socio-medical manual Due Preparations for the Plague a month apart from each other in 1722. Although the Journal, which has received a disproportionally higher amount of critical attention, is generally understood to be the more literary work - narrated as an eye-witness account by the character “H. F.” - this text, besides famously including a number of statistics, also contains medical commentary. Embodying the scientific mind of a time when the theory of contagion - as opposed to humoral or miasmatic paradigms - had become more popular (Harris 2013: 15 f.), Defoe’s narrator is an astute observer of infection. In line with historical interpretations of the London plague, H. F. attributes the primary cause of the pandemic (like the Great Fire in the succeeding year) to divine providence, the “Hand of God” (Defoe 1992: 152). But he also, “like his contemporaries in the Royal Society, wants to understand the material world and discover causes” (Backscheider 1992: xi). The narrator leaves no doubt that “the Calamity was Spread by Infection, that is to say, by some certain Steams, or Fumes, […] by the Breath, or by the Sweat, or by the Stench of the Sores” (Defoe 1992: 64). The disease, thus, is “propagated by natural Means” through contagion: “in the ordinary Way of Infection from some Body, or the Cloaths, or touch, or Stench of some Body that was infected before” (153). Lacking later knowledge of the transmission of bubonic and septicemic plague by fleas, H. F. still formulates an accurate theory of (mostly airborne) contagion, carried by material vectors DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 Material Metaphors in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 241 2 For H. F.’s theory of contagion, see also Healy. Linking his medical theory with the political context of 1722, she argues that H. F.’s reflections on contagion “do seem to function to support many (though not all) of the provisions of the tottering Whig administration’s new Quarantine Act” (2003: 37). 3 H. F. also rejects germ theory, which he considers as too fantastic, “living Creatures [as] seen by a microscope of strange monstrous and frightful Shapes, such as Dragons, Snakes, Serpents, and Devils, horrible to behold: But this I very much question the Truth of ” (159). and passed from body to body. 2 Doing so, he rejects the prevalent theory of miasma, i.e., pestilent air, as the cause of infection itself, and emphasises the transcorporeal nature of disease transmission. 3 Human corporeality here becomes, in Stacy Alaimo’s words, a transcorporeality “in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world” (2010: 2). The plague, in Defoe’s text, functions as a striking example of the material interactions that human bodies are inevitably engaged in. If the Journal thus renders questionable the separation between the human and ‘inanimate’ matter, it also draws attention to the textual composition of materiality itself. H. F.’s choice of words in the above quotations is instructive. The plague is both “propagated” as an infectious pathogen and as an idea. Infection is received from “some Body”, a person, but simultaneously from another body (threatening, by implication, the entire body social). This oscillation between literal and figurative language is a key characteristic of the text. Language, in the Journal, is contagious. One of the many stories which H. F. self-reflexively relates of his fellow Londoners centres on a man called John Hayward and his wife. Hayward, in H. F.’s account, never used any Preservative against the Infection, other than holding Garlick and Rue in his mouth, and smoking Tobacco; this I also had from his own Mouth; and his Wife’s Remedy was washing her Head in vinegar […]; and if the smell of any of those she waitd on was more than ordinary Offensive, she snuft Vinegar up her nose, and sprinkled Vinegar upon her Head-Cloths, and held a Handkerchief wetted with Vinegar to her Mouth. (Defoe 1992: 75) The means of avoiding infection are specifically linked to the nose, human hands (used for smoking and to hold a handkerchief), and, especially, the mouth. At the same time, H. F. vouches for the veracity of the story by insisting that he heard it from the man’s “own mouth”, by direct word of mouth. The proverbial here is literal, and the literal makes for figurative meanings. One linguistic choice creates the other, and both are semantically linked by a disease that is presumed to rely on oral transmission in both senses. The language makes a case for material ecocriticism’s premise that “[a]ll matter […] is a ‘storied matter’. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 242 Sina Schuhmaier It is a material ‘mesh’ of meanings, properties, and processes, in which human and nonhuman players are interlocked in networks that produce undeniable signifying forces” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014: 1 f.). The Journal, I argue, shows the material and the discursive to be indissolubly intertwined. While previous scholarship has extensively commented on Defoe’s use of plague metaphors (e.g. Dückmann Gallagher 2021), this paper will further explore these tropes as material metaphors. Susan Sontag has famously argued against the use of metaphors in Illness as Metaphor (1977). She asserts a need to “de-mythicize” disease in order to do away with harmful projections surrounding diseases like cancer. Instead, she holds, disease should be treated as that: “just a disease” (1978: 7). Noelle Dückmann Gallagher’s reading of the Journal presents a challenge to Sontag in that it foregrounds the positive capacities of plague metaphors in Defoe’s text. While Dückmann Gallagher’s insights into the interplay of Defoe’s pandemic subject matter and literary form are valuable, this is not a debate that I want to enter into. Instead, I would contest the idea that metaphors can be removed from either language or the biological reality of disease, as Sontag suggests. In other words, there is no disease-as-such except in the intra-action, as Barad puts it, of material-discursive entwinement. Diseases like the plague are, from the point of view of material ecocriticism, culturally and physically existent, and any clear-cut separation between these planes proves futile. Scholarship, when it pays attention to corporeality in the Journal, tends to proceed by reading the body as an abstraction for social systems. The open or closed body in Kari Nixon’s work, for instance, becomes an emblem of international or isolationist trade. In this paper, I want to direct attention to bodily natures in Defoe’s text - all the while I argue that these do not exist independent of metaphor. Defoe’s material metaphors show abstract interactions to be corporeal and vice versa. By adopting a microbial perspective, I am not arguing for a wholesale privileging of nonhuman agencies over the human, or ecologically ‘utopian’ visions of human extinction through pandemic catastrophe. The human, in the microbial perspective afforded by the Journal, is not entirely abolished - but it is repositioned. Even this argument might appear counterintuitive given that Defoe’s text is firmly rooted in the human perspective of its narrator H. F. and follows the conventions of formal realism with its basis in an empiricist epistemology and premise that “truth can be discovered by the individual through his senses” (Watt 1974: 12). Defoe’s narrator champions a materialist philosophy, but he is certainly not a new materialist, and recent scholarship has DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 Material Metaphors in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 243 4 Loar, who attests Defoe’s writing an “ecological orientation” (2019: 329), is an exception to the positions taken by Yağcıoğlu and Ganguly. been sceptical of the novel’s ecological and postanthropocentric affordances. 4 Arguably, H. F. as narrator occupies a “transcendent position” that renders him immune from infection, apparently “autonomous” and “independent from […] non-human environments” (Loar 2019: 43). Hülya Yağcıoğlu maintains that “Defoe’s world is clearly an anthropocentric one in which human beings are at the ontological center of all other species” (2024: 207). Although Yağcıoğlu shares my premise that pandemics hold the potential to “renew our perception of other nonhuman life forms on the planet” and to “make us reconsider how we understand the entities and environments around us and become more attuned to the vitality of the nonhuman world” (204), her concise reading of the Journal denies the novel this potential. In a similar vein, Debjani Ganguly argues that the Journal remains incapable of charting a ‘planetary realism’ suitable to the Anthropocene age. In what follows, I suggest that Defoe’s formal realism is, in fact, co-authored by the nonhuman (which turns out not be categorically nonhuman, after all). The Journal, like other “[p]lague writings in the early 1720s” treats the “plague as a complex environmental phenomenon in which various agents - social, affective, spiritual, and material - mingle promiscuously” (Loar 2019: 42). In this vein, this paper foregrounds how Defoe’s text, alongside its anthropocentric reality effects, relates ‘stories of matter’ (Iovino and Oppermann 2014). Taking up a microbial perspective necessitates “modes of analysis that travel through the entangled territories of material and discursive, natural and cultural, bio‐ logical and textual” (Alaimo 2010: 3). Thus, I will discuss two of Defoe’s most prevalent material metaphors, both concerning primary organs of infection. The focus of the first section is on hands as polysemous material-metaphorical signifiers in the text. In the next section, I will take a closer look at Defoe’s use of the mouth. Both the human hand and mouth have served as powerful vehicles of human exceptionalism, denoting human agency and power. And yet, in the Journal, because they are sites of transcorporeal exchange, these organs also indicate the porosity of the human body and its fantasies of dominion. Hands and mouths in the Journal signal towards a posthumanist rendering of the body - as components of a human corporeality that is yet implicated in human and more-than-human material and social interrelations. As material metaphors, they also record the textual imprint of the microbial, ostensibly nonhuman Other, contributing distinct ‘stories of matter’ to H. F.’s human-authored text. H. F. repeatedly notes that the plague is contracted by DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 244 Sina Schuhmaier 5 “Die Hand ist nicht die handfeste Alternative zur Abstraktion, sondern die handgrei‐ fliche Bedingung ihrer Möglichkeit”. 6 See also Harris for the “constitutive role played by the body in shaping Western perceptions of the economic” - “eighteenth-century French Physiocrat theories of the touch and by conversing, and these material interactions provide the basis for a discursive web that involves interconnected sites of corporeality, commerce, divinity, communication, and contagion. Considering “matter both in texts and as a text” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014: 2), I will conclude by further probing the Journal’s voicing of a “close kinship between plague and textuality” (Boluk and Lenz 2010: 128) and reciprocally read the Journal as a plague text and the plague as text. (In)visible hands: Plague and commerce Hands, according to Jochen Hörisch, make for a foundational metaphor in Western culture, mediating between the abstract and the concrete. The hand, in his words, “is not the alternative to abstraction, but the tangible condition of its possibility” (2021: 18; my translation). 5 In Defoe’s Journal, which Hörisch briefly discusses (167 f.), it is first and foremost an abstraction that strikes the reader. To explain the plague outbreak, H. F. invokes God’s hand, the “Finger of God” that holds “omnipotent Power” (Defoe 1992: 190). But one characteristic of H. F.’s narration is its epistemological instability (Flynn 2005: 8). The enlightened narrator negotiates between the force of an omnipotent ‘supersubject’ (Hörisch 2021: 163) and human agency in the spread of the disease. When the plague abates, H. F. ascribes this change in circumstance to the “secret invisible Hand of him” (Defoe 1992: 191), and yet, the narrator is equally clear as to the human-made causes of the pandemic, the “Conduct of humane Causes and Effects” (153). H. F. even mocks the “manifest Ignorance and Enthusiasm” of those who “talk of […] an immediate Stroke from Heaven, without the Agency of Means” (64). The ‘stroke’ of agential hands, instead, is to be found in the more mundane realm of everyday interactions with bodies and objects. God’s hand has a material source. Of course, H. F.’s slowly secularising but thoroughly anthropocentric mindset attributes the course of the pandemic to human agency. What his text also exposes, however, are transcorporeal exchanges that form the basis of plague transmission and other forms of socially constructed transactions, in particular commercial trade. Through the figure of hands, Defoe links commerce and disease, two “inter‐ constitutive domains of discourse” in the early modern period (Harris 2013: 3). 6 Commercial relations, in the text, are grasped through the plague, and DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 Material Metaphors in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 245 blood-like circulation of wealth; the word ‘inflation’, which was originally a specialized medical term for ‘swelling’; the pathological connotations of ‘consumption’” and so on (2013: 1). the plague, in turn, is conceived in economic terms. Scholars like Dückmann Gallagher offer perceptive insights into Defoe’s alignment of the “spread of disease with the operations of modern commerce, with patterns of transmission running parallel to trade routes, and infections circulating like currency or goods in the marketplace” (2021: 149). In her discussion of a scene that revolves around the attempt to sterilise coins contained in an abandoned purse, Dückmann Gallagher notes how “disease might be literally spread by, as well as figuratively spread in a manner similar to, hard currency” (150). Her focus on Defoe’s metaphorical constructions, however, obstructs further insights into precisely this material basis of disease transmission. Similarly, Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz point out how in Defoe’s text, the “circulation of capital becomes the instrument of plague, as it spreads in the marketplace and trade routes” (2010: 131), but they understand this metaphor of an infectious trade to articulate broader anxieties concerning the rise of capitalism. Jonathan Gil Harris, in his study of early modern mercantilist discourse, argues that as contagion became a more dominant medical model in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the “notion of disease as an invasive entity” was made possible (2013: 15 f.), and that the arena where this notion was tested was that of economic discourse. According to Harris, the language of disease illuminated commercial exchanges, and commercial developments in a globalising age, in turn, illumi‐ nated understandings of disease. Harris presents a nuanced analysis of this discursive linkage, noting that “the early modern English ‘pathologization’ of commerce […] was by no means a straightforward demonization” (21). Still, his analysis remains limited to a largely metaphorical conception of the body which translates bodily nature into border transactions. These perspectives lose sight of the very tangible hands that recur throughout the text and which connect disease and commerce. To retain the material and the figurative dimension of the plague and to think them as intertwined thus remains an important project when it comes to analyses of Defoe’s text. The cross-fertilisation of disease and commerce has a material foundation: Hands function as a material-figurative vehicle for both tenors. Thus, both the plague and the economy are shown to have a ‘bodily nature’, and the body is shown to be a site of disease and commerce. H. F. quite rightly suspects the plague pathogen to survive in traded goods like textiles which, upon manual contact, turn contagious, “dangerous to touch” DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 246 Sina Schuhmaier 7 For metaphors of foreign infection through imported goods, see Dückmann Gallagher (2021: 148 f.). 8 Both vinegar and smoke were thought to sanitise disease environments. H. F. repeatedly gives account of fires lit to fumigate the air. (Defoe 1992: 167). 7 As plague transmission and commodity flows go ‘hand in hand’, consumption in the marketplace becomes a potentially fatal practice. It is the plague, too, that puts a stop to trade: “all Intercourse of Trade for Home Consumption of Manufactures, especially those which usually circulated thro’ the Londoners Hands, was stop’d” (174). Manufactured, literally hand-made, goods no longer circulate through the hands of Londoners, in turn a metaphor for the central marketplace that early modern London was. Defoe’s image of suspended commodity flows all the same shows the hand-based transactions - of goods and pathogens - that are at stake in the national and global marketplace. At several points in the text, the disease is also distinctly linked to money. Money represents abstract financial value but also physically passes through hands. Thus, Londoners become cautious of handling money: “when any one bought a Joint of Meat in the Market, they would not take it off the Butchers Hand, but take it off the Hooks themselves. On the other hand [what else? ], the Butcher would not touch the Money, but have it put into a Pot full of Vinegar” (67). Since money is an extension of the human hand, contact with it requires a purging ritual performed by the disinfectant. In another afore-mentioned scene, H. F. (who is a tradesman himself) encounters three men assembled at a distance around an abandoned purse lying in a yard. Although the men deliberate on how to proceed, “no Body would meddle with it” (87). In the end, one of the men “fetched a pail of Water, and set it down hard by the Purse; then went again, and fetch’d some Gun-powder” to set fire to the purse. 8 By means of a “pair of Tongues”, the man eventually takes hold of the purse and shakes the “Money out into the Pail of Water” (87). Added to the purifying effects of fire and water, direct touch is averted through a - arguably hand-like - prosthesis. To insist on the material nature of economic exchanges, made plain through semantic links with plague transmission, bears a risk of simplification. Neither Defoe in 1722 nor his narrator in 1665 were experiencing a marketplace governed by local craft, manual production, and direct exchange alone, and the text is keenly aware of this. Defoe witnessed an increasingly transnational economy and published his text just two years after the South Sea Bubble burst in 1720. His narrator earns a living by exporting saddles to American colonies (11). The Journal not only discusses both domestic and foreign trade (166); it also, through disease, inscribes a distinct ambivalence of visibility and DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 Material Metaphors in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 247 9 For Defoe’s argument for controlled but free trade, see Nixon (2020: 37-52). invisibility into processes of trade. The purse scene, read in this light, shows abstract signifying power to inhere in money: the response of the bystanders reduces the coins to their object status but also re-fetishises them as contagious matter. For one, the novel makes visible the material transactions that undergird economic and financial processes (something that in today’s globalised economy is often rendered invisible); for another, it illustrates economic abstraction and complexity through a disease whose transmission stays invisible. Another eighteenth century metaphor which was to gradually replace the omnipotent hand of God comes into play here: Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market, popularised in The Wealth of Nations in 1776 (Hörisch 2021: 180). 9 The plague in the Journal creates a distorted mirror image of flourishing trade: instead of the open operations of commercial exchange, streets and mar‐ ketplaces remain eerily empty; the city is filled with corpses that are removed and buried during night-time (Defoe 1992: 147), and illicit exports create a “clandestine Trade” (169). The microbial that inspired awe in Leeuwenhoek is also repulsive; it creates an uncanny other world imagined by H. F. when he rejects a method of plague detection whereby a plague sufferer’s breath “upon a piece of Glass” is dissected under the microscope to reveal “strange monstrous and frightful Shapes” (159). As dead carts and plague pits reshape the city and its living inhabitants begin to consider themselves as “all so many dead Corpses” (139), London’s cityscape becomes a ghost map of absent interactions (Löffler 2017: 201-204). Some aspects of economic organisation are thus rendered visible, if ex negativo. For instance, H. F. reflects on the labour of servants who, given their household tasks, are the most exposed to the risks of the marketplace (Defoe 1992: 63). At the same time, though, the text is concerned with what remains invisible. H. F. identifies transmission of the plague as an oftentimes unknowable, invisible process. The reason for this is that the disease is not only passed on by the visibly ill, i.e., those with symptoms, but also, more perfidiously and more threateningly, by “THE WELL” (150). These infected, who “breathed Death in every Place, and upon every Body […], their Hands would infect the Things they touch’d”, are “impossible to know” (151). Neither do they “perfectly know themselves” of their infection (151). As the incubation period turns a person into an unsuspecting “walking Destroyer” (159), the Journal suggests unknowable, invisible elements to reside in the disease-economy nexus. As the above section has stressed, it does so by simultaneously engaging both the material and the metaphorical dimension of disease as intra-acting forces in the event of the plague. The language of hands - as well as of mouths - shows H. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 248 Sina Schuhmaier F.’s ostensibly human perspective to be informed by material forces that have to be grasped in discursive terms and vice versa. “Fatal breath”: Speaking and breathing communicable disease As with hands, so with mouths: the mouth, in H. F.’s model of contagion, spreads or receives disease. Mouths convey a “fatal Breath” (63). John Hayward’s wife covers her mouth with a vinegar-soaked handkerchief to avoid infection, and H. F.’s friend Dr. Heath advises him to “hold in [his] Mouth” when going out (66). But the mouth also signals communication, and so acts of communication become risk encounters. People “openly conversing” with their neighbours run the risk of contracting the disease and hence further carrying it with them (118 f.). With a characteristic hint of classism and misogyny, H. F. (who wanders through town but stays solitary for the most part) notes that “the Plague is not to be avoided by those that converse promiscuously in a Town infected” (151). The plague is closely connected with social interactions (Dückmann Gallagher 2021: 145 f.). In turn, communication also becomes a way to understand the workings of a contagious disease. With its very first sentences, the Journal introduces the notion of contagious rumours. H. F. first hears about the plague returning in the Netherlands “in ordinary Discourse” and then tracks the passing on of information by “Word of Mouth”. The oral medium accounts for why “things did not spread instantly over the whole Nation”. Like a contagious disease in adverse environments, the rumour first “died off again” (Defoe 1992: 5). But when two men die of the plague in London, the family is unable to conceal their cause of death as the news “had gotten some Vent in the Discourse” (5). Here, “rhetoric itself operates by a model of contagion” and the medium of communication is both a “carrier of information as well as (potentially) plague itself ” (Boluk and Lenz 2010: 143 f.). (Mis)information spreads rapidly once it finds favourable hosts. Rumours, like and alongside pathogens, linger, spread, and go viral. Stories like those of murderous nurses travel and mutate (Defoe 1992: 71). As the disease spreads via the routes of trade, news of the London pandemic reach other ports and get blown up on the way: “the Report of these things lost nothing in the Carriage, the Plague it self was very terrible […]: But the Rumour was infinitely greater” (168). Rumours are “transmitters of the plague” and “themselves a kind of plague” (McDowell 2006: 100). The Journal relates several instances of false beliefs and superstitions that Londoners become susceptible to under the conditions of the pandemic. H. F. is quick to dismiss a rise in fortune-tellers and astrologers as based on irrational fears for which “there was no Remedy” (Defoe 1992: 27). He DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 Material Metaphors in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 249 10 Lay argues that in H. F.’s personal narration, the Journal creates a highly marketable form of subjectivity as an early “example for the systematic commercial exploitation of fictional subjectivity” (1999: 37). 11 On the text’s bias toward orality and its gendered basis, see McDowell. Women in the Journal tend to appear as a source of irrational beliefs and unreliable information. 12 On the therapeutic uses of H. F.’s storytelling, see Healy (2003: 39). makes it clear that this ‘disease’, like the thriving businesses of quack doctors, harms more than it heals (29 f.). In particular, H. F. shows their operations to be profit-driven above everything else. Instead of adhering to the Hippocratic oath, quack doctors behave like “every Shop-keeper with his Wares” (31). This analysis is offered in one of H. F.’s anecdotes by a woman who henceforth sets out to ruin the doctor’s reputation, giving him “ill Words” (31). ‘Ill words’ and bad-mouthed rumours circulate in a discursive and commercial economy. The mouth, of course, is also the organ of (inappropriate) consumption: H. F. refers to London’s poorest as starving, “useless Mouths” (156), and promiscuous communication equates with over-consumption. The plague itself, like the Great Fire of London, “consumes” (156), and bubonic swellings “digest” (70). The plague, in Defoe’s text, is a material-discursive occurrence, verbally manifesting itself in corporeal-and-figurative hands and mouths. The economy of plague communication, of course, is a sphere that H. F. partakes in - despite his biases against the wrong types of communication. 10 If the plague creates a “want of People conversing with one another” (131) and there is “no such Thing as Communication with one another, as before” (60), H. F. takes up the role of an archivist of stories, albeit in the safe medium of the written word. 11 The highly self-reflexive narrator, who continuously nods to his own digressions, redundancies, and very acts of storytelling, is ‘conversing’ plague information in the form of narratives. 12 Doing so, he is careful to authenticate his own stories as based on eye-witness observation or the direct relating of the story to him by trustworthy sources, “what I saw with my Eyes, and heard from other People that were Eye Witnesses” (83). H. F.’s empirical method of collecting verifiable stories, “which presented to the Eye, and the Ear; even in passing along the Streets” (99), directly involves his sensory perception of the city through the eye and ear. This variety of psychogeography (Löffler 2017: 190) translates the act of walking, as an activity that creates meaning through perception, into the act of writing. H. F.’s movements through the city - guided by senses, even if these stand in the service of an enlightenment epistemology - are coextensive with his writing. The materiality that is inscribed into H. F.’s text, of stories witnessed first-hand by the eye, passed from mouth-to-mouth, and handed on in written form, should not be neglected. H. F., in the typically DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 250 Sina Schuhmaier 13 Flynn, for example, reads the “speaking Sight” of the plague pit visited by H. F. as a prime example of interpretive uncertainty in the text (2005: 11 f.) didactic mode of his narration, reflects on the uses of his book for those “into whose Hands this may come” (63). It takes tangible hands for his writing to become ‘handy’ on a cognitive level, a handiness that then turns his stories ‘profitable’ for society (Defoe 1992: 52). The hand itself is also an instrument of writing. As this nexus of material-figurative hands and mouths shows, the plague can be seen as a material-discursive type of text that is written into the Journal and H. F.’s narration. ‘Stories of matter’: The 1665 plague as text Patients construct illness narratives, and diagnosis resembles close reading: Medicine, disease, and literary studies overlap in significant ways - something that has been recognised in the Medical Humanities. A number of studies of Defoe’s Journal have established the textuality of the plague in H. F.’s narrative (Boluk and Lenz: 2010; Cooke 2009; Flynn 2005). The 1665 plague is an event that invites hermeneutics, be it the divine, astrological, or empiricist interpretation of signs like the comets that were observed over the London sky prior to the pandemic (Defoe 1992: 20 f.). As H. F. is informed when he visits a plague pit, the plague is a “speaking Sight” - here calling for repentance - “and has a Voice with it”, possibly one, H. F. adds, that “no Tongue can express” (54). The disease is a practice in reading disorderly bodies (Flynn 2005), symptoms that are written onto bodies (Cooke 2009: 18 f.), polysemous ‘tokens’, and the city itself, with red crosses written on the doors of infected households and an altogether altered social organisation written by the plague (Löffler 2017: 205). Meaning has to be constructed anew from these signs (205), and because infection may precede knowledge of it, the plague also remains an indecipherable text. 13 As the ‘tokens’ that are regularly invoked by H. F. to denote bubonic swellings show, the plague text is one of interconnected corporeality, economic relations (tokens can be monetary; Boluk and Lenz 2010: 132; Dückmann Gallagher 2021: 151), and the sign system of language in general (a token is also a sign for something; Dückmann Gallagher 2021: 151). The plague ‘speaks’ with a ‘mouth’. The material metaphors that I have sketched so far not only make the plague legible; since the plague does not precede its textuality, they also co-constitute the plague as such in a web of signification that spans economy and communication. To study the form of Defoe’s text simply as a metaphorical extension of the plague experience where the diseased body becomes “material DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 Material Metaphors in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 251 for text” (Flynn 2005: 19) and the text “a body wherein symptoms of plague can also inscribe themselves” (Cooke 2009: 18) fails to give due account to the Journal’s attention to matter. But my reading is not a case of excavating the material alone: Rather, I argue that the ‘stories of matter’ that the Journal charts are neither purely material nor purely discursive. They make a case, in line with material ecocriticism, for considering “interrelations between discourse and matter” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014: 2). To read the plague as text, then, means to tease out these interrelations rather than to position text in opposition to matter. The Journal shows the plague to be disseminated in close resemblance to processes of signification. The disease spreads exponentially from house to house, creating a chain of infection that soon becomes impossible to keep track of, just as it lends new meaning to signs: The first Person that dies of the Plague was in Decemb. 20 th , or thereabouts 1664s, […] and then one more was buried out of the same House: Then it was hush’d […] till the 22d of April, when there was 2 more not out of the same House, but out of the same Street […] and then it broke out in several Streets and spread every way. Now the Question seems to lye thus, where lay the Seeds of the Infection all this while? (Defoe 1992: 160) It is less H. F.’s question of origins and more the process of (uncertain) propagation itself that I want to foreground here. Anticipating germ theory, early modern physicians like Girolamo Fracastoro or Paracelsus thought of disease as a “determinate semina or seed” spread from body to body (Harris 2013: 16). H. F. picks up the idea and emphasises the unknowable component of infection, “for none knows when, or where, or how they may have received the Infection, or from whom” (Defoe 1992: 152). Jacques Derrida’s dissemination, according to which meanings are relative to play in the chain of signifiers, thinks about language in much the same terms. Contagious disease entails material and semiotic dissemination. Signification in H. F.’s narrative emerges from his own movements through the city and from “the Relation of others” (83). H. F. here means the relating of information; however, the lexeme also signals the material and semantic relations he enacts. The Journal as plague text shows H. F.’s narration to be co-written by a material-discursive nexus of cross-pollinating hands and mouths which signal beyond the boundaries of the human. The plague writes itself as a corporeally mediated text. The text can be reliable or not: The diseased body is no stable signifier, and diagnostic reading does not necessarily generate a stable meaning. It is only fitting, then, that the eeriness of invisible infection and of the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 252 Sina Schuhmaier 14 Derrida’s thought, in fact, was also influenced by the language of biology. His concept of ‘autoimmunity’, taken from the medical sphere where it denotes “a living organism […] protecting itself against its self-protection by destroying its own immune system”, extends to “a sort of general logic of autoimmunization” (Derrida 2002: 80) of, for instance, the political sphere. 15 Loar, drawing on Latour, proposes a similar conception (2019: 32 f.). plague-ridden city call for other Derridean concepts. Filled with ‘traces’ of a now-lost sociability, commerce, and life, Defoe’s ghost map of London has a distinct hauntological appeal. 14 As H. F.’s empiricist perception, according to which seeing is knowing, crumbles (Flynn 2005: 36), the human, as a rationally superior figure of logocentrism, recedes in this perspective. So does language as a strictly metaphysical category. Instead, the human-as-bodily-nature is embedded in material-discursive networks of distributed agency. Conclusion: Material-discursive assemblages As opposed to other forms of ‘inanimate matter’, the agency of contagious disease seems undeniable: After all, disease holds control over human life and death. Pandemics have significantly shaped the course of history and impact upon every facet of human life. And yet, accounts like these retain a conceptual divide between the human and the animate or inanimate matter of bacteria and viruses. At best, they acknowledge contagious disease as Frankenstein’s monster, created and exacerbated by human forces such as war, poverty, or expansion, but now terribly out of control. Through Defoe’s networked material metaphors, this paper has argued for a different model of what Bennett terms ‘distributive agency’ (2010: 21). 15 Thus, the plague in Defoe’s Journal can be seen to emerge as an “agentic assemblage” (21) composed of interactions between, among other things, the plague bacterium, human and more-than-human corpo‐ reality, urban infrastructure, and communication circuits. None of these agentic forces alone - neither the pathogen, nor the human - determines the pandemic. With transcorporeal processes, any idea of straightforward intentionality is obsolete, as Alaimo stresses (2010: 2). What “was once the ostensibly bounded human subject” is now a “material self ” which “cannot be disentangled from networks that are simultaneously economic, political, cultural, scientific, and substantial” (20). Beyond this entanglement of the human, my reading of Defoe’s text has attempted to point out that material agency is prescribed by discursive forces (Iovino and Oppermann 2014: 4) which in turn are determined by material agency. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 Material Metaphors in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 253 The microbial perspective through which I have read Defoe’s Journal and which I argue to be implicit in it, then, does not so much introduce a more-than-human nature (or, perhaps, ‘human’ nature) to discussions of the text. Rather, it rethinks categories like the human and nature to make a case for human nature and for material discursivity. This is less about rendering the pandemic as an inscrutable ‘hyperobject’, as Timothy Morton has suggested in regard to Covid-19 (Yağcıoğlu 2024: 204), and more about showing the plague to be both-material-and-discursive, as emerging in various entanglements (even if these will not become visible/ legible). Some of these (textual) entanglements became apparent when government authorities started tracing routes of infec‐ tion in the recent Covid-pandemic, people began to cover their mouths and noses and to regularly disinfect their hands, commodity flows were impacted, communication technologies became indispensable, and conspiracy theories arose. This paper has probed the microbial perspective as a conceptual response to such pandemic assemblages. Defoe’s Journal does not suspend the human perspective, and yet, it does point away from anthropocentric realism and towards the ‘stories of matter’ that pen a pandemic. Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. 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