Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year

Daniel Defoe (c.1659-1731)
A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)

I very much enjoyed reading A Journal of the Plague Year for exams, mostly because of its expansiveness. This is an odd word that we sometimes use to describe the experience of the later, well-developed historical novel—War and Peace, say (we might also say it of Antony and Cleopatra, but I think for different and precisely non-novelistic reasons: there it is usually an issue of what the story demands of the dramatic production). But it is not entirely inappropriate here, I think: what we have is a thorough, if not well-ordered, wide ranging historical account, which achieves something in its scope.

I say that it is not well ordered, because, well, it isn’t: the book follows the general course of the plague through the year (though, while the beginnings are somewhat looked into, there is virtually no account of 1666—it is very much about the plague year, 1665), but is studded with various anticipations and retrospections which make it really a mix of individual little scenes, generally attempted to be juxtaposed (that’s probably the best way to put it) in chronological order. This isn’t very annoying to me, as it is for other scholars, from what I saw of the criticism. This is because I don’t really take the novel to be narrator-driven, as many others try to do. H.F., the saddler who gives us his account—made up out of his private journal from that year as well as historical material that he has in front of him—doesn’t really hold the story together, but merely acts as a sort of point of view or frame for the story.

To elaborate: H.F. has three narrator-functions. The first is to generally relay already-known information, to assemble already-processed information on the plague, such as the mortality bills of each parish, or government decrees (more on this in a bit). The second function is to testify to the stories related about the plague, to act as an eyewitness (again more on this, for it isn’t your typical eyewitness, but a cynical realist). The third is to situate the telling of the story on a particular level that will give you a very definite, but also very specific, view of the plague. None of these really hold the story together as a really tight act of narration, however: the narrative functions remain functions, and aren’t synthesized (or synthesized in the same way) as they are in, say, Robinson Crusoe.

Let’s see how. First, there is relaying or relation of things like the Orders of the Lord Mayor at the beginning of the novel:

Watchmen.
That to every infected house there be appointed two watchmen, one for every day, and the other for the night; and that these watchmen have a special care that no person go in or out of such infected houses whereof they have the charge, upon pain of severe punishment. And the said watchmen to do such further offices as the sick house shall need and require: and if the watchman be sent upon any business, to lock up the house and take the key with him; and the watchman by day to attend until ten of the clock at night, and the watchman by night until six in the morning (p.45 of the Signet Classic Edition, 1960).

This goes on for several pages. The interesting thing about this, though, is that the orders are not there to produce verisimilitude: as would be the case in a later work of realism, perhaps, the suspension of the tale to include such a document does not give us any reality effect: we are just left more informed. This is to say that, here, at least, Defoe isn’t engaging in any realism. I have my doubts about applying this term to Defoe in the first place (and about applying it in general, thanks to Jakobson’s famous essay on the topic, which I recently read), but here at least we can categorically state it doesn’t apply. And this is not because of the cited material here, but because the requirements for its effect are not there: there is not a surrounding density of fiction that would set off these orders and make them yield reality. At the very most, they pad the text. And they bring up a larger question: can we really consider this work a novel? Is it not just the relation of information like this? In other words, contrary to what we might suppose, doesn’t the fiction in this text interrupt the quotation and the relation of facts?

This brings us to the second function, which would refute this supposition: indeed, because the fictional parts serve as testimony, they tone down the informative function of the account and ends up turning it back into a novel—fiction, in other words, and not information, remains the base line for the account. This is so even though the testimony could not be real (or not entirely real—Defoe did live through the plague, though he was only five). Why? Because the constant acts of witnessing thicken the events related, give them a bit of depth and, through fictionalizing them, give us a greater sense of their contours. In other words, there is present a narrating-function of asserting this indeed happened (which need not mean that this indeed is real).

However, the interesting thing is how the H.F. does this: it will be precisely through doubting the story that he might relate. So he tells the story of the person cured by swimming across the Thames:

I heard of one infected creature who, running out of his bed in his shirt in the anguish and agony of his swellings, of which he had three upon him, got his shoes on and went to put on his coat; but the nurse resisting, and snatching the coat from him, he threw her down, ran over her, ran downstairs and into the street, directly to the Thames in his shirt; the nurse running after him, and calling to the watch to stop him; but the watchman, frighted at the man, and afraid to touch him, let him go on; upon which he ran down to the Stillyard stairs, threw away his shirt, and plunged into the Thames, and, being a good swimmer, swam quite over the river; and the tide being coming in, as they call it (that is, running westward) he reached the land not till he came about the Falcon stairs, where landing, and finding no people there, it being in the night, he ran about the streets there, naked as he was, for a good while, when, it being by that time high water, he takes the river again, and swam back to the Stillyard, landed, ran up the streets again to his own house, knocking at the door, went up the stairs and into his bed again; and that this terrible experiment cured him of the plague, that is to say, that the violent motion of his arms and legs stretched the parts where the swellings he had upon him were, that is to say, under his arms and his groin, and caused them to ripen and break; and that the cold of the water abated the fever in his blood.

I have only to add that I do not relate this any more than some of the other, as a fact within my own knowledge, so as that I can vouch the truth of them, and especially that of the man being cured by the extravagant adventure, which I confess I do not think very possible; but it may serve to confirm the many desperate things which the distressed people falling into deliriums, and what we call light-headedness, were frequently run upon at that time, and how infinitely more such there would have been if such people had not been confined by the shutting up of houses; and this I take to be the best, if not the only good thing which was performed by that severe method (161-2).

This is a typical instance: H.F. hears something and relates it (indeed little of the novel is his own personal story—if anything we want to know more about what being an alderman involved, say: but this desire only gives the narrator more authority to talk about others, in a way). But his skepticism, his doubt, his need to say how likely the story is true or false, serves to actually testify, to bear witness to the possible reality of the thing, as is the case here, where this maneuver is the most condensed: the very unlikelihood of the story testifies to the very reality of one of its details—namely, the fact that some those with the plague would start off running through the streets, and thus that it was necessary to confine people in their houses (the biggest issue of the text, for reasons to which we will return).

Another aspect of this function can be found in the skepticism H.F. has towards that which he himself actually sees (in other words, it need not be only his skepticism with regard to other stories). Take the long account of the astronomers and quacks at the beginning of the tale, who came out at the beginning of the plague with all sorts of predictions and remedies for the poor—capitalizing on the situation, in other words, to take advantage of people’s superstitions. H.F. laments all this, and yet he relates it: it is precisely through his disappointed attitude at the poor, who are suckered into the magic, that he allows us to see that it did happen (which is again different than, this is real). It is a sort of cold attention to irony, a sort of cynicism that we see—indeed you can see it here in this passage too, where it in fact becomes a tool to move the discourse along (it introduces another paragraph):

The ministers, to do them justice, and preachers of most sorts that were serious and understanding persons, thundered against these and other wicked practices, and exposed the folly as well as the wickedness of them together, and the most sober and judicious people despised and abhorred them. But it was impossible to make any impression upon the middling people and the working labouring poor. Their fears were predominant over all their passions, and they threw away their money in a most distracted manner upon those whimsies. Maid-servants especially, and men-servants, were the chief of their customers, and their question generally was, after the first demand of 'Will there be a plague?' I say, the next question was, 'Oh, sir I for the Lord's sake, what will become of me? Will my mistress keep me, or will she turn me off? Will she stay here, or will she go into the country? And if she goes into the country, will she take me with her, or leave me here to be starved and undone?' And the like of menservants.

The truth is, the case of poor servants was very dismal, as I shall have occasion to mention again by-and-by, for it was apparent a prodigious number of them would be turned away, and it was so. And of them abundance perished, and particularly of those that these false prophets had flattered with hopes that they should be continued in their services, and carried with their masters and mistresses into the country; and had not public charity provided for these poor creatures, whose number was exceeding great and in all cases of this nature must be so, they would have been in the worst condition of any people in the city (35-6).

The poor were idiots, but, the truth is (it did happen that), they had a hard time too… The general stupidity that he sees around him, and this tone that is not so much superior but attentive to their true interests, which they perhaps do not see (we will find that this characterizes the administrative point of view of the story)—all this makes us not believe that the account is more real, but that the account is accurate and that it relates something that did occur—that did occur to individuals who often act oddly. In other words, this cynicism with respect to the poor more generally but also to the dismal nature of the events as a whole, shows that the account is of actual people, as they are likely to behave (stupidly--and this is a cultural code), rather than, say, a collection of spectacles from the plague.

For this, I believe, is perhaps the greatest danger of the account: that we think, upon reading it, that it is just a collection of horrifying spectacles. And it is this, certainly: Defoe knows that people watch NASCAR for the wrecks, as it were. But this morbid fascination is diffused through a sort of wryness, which replaces horror with likelihood. Witness, for example, the end of the Journal, which is in the process of relating how people were too quick to conclude that the plague had receded when the numbers of the dead began to drop—thus prolonging the plague a into 1666, even though it was indeed on its way out:

But I should be counted censorious, and perhaps unjust, if I should enter into the unpleasing work of reflecting, whatever cause there was for it, upon the unthankfulness and return of all manner of wickedness among us, which I was so much an eye-witness of myself. I shall conclude the account of this calamitous year therefore with a coarse but sincere stanza of my own, which I placed at the end of my ordinary memorandums the same year they were written:—

A dreadful plague in London was
In the year sixty-five,
Which swept an hundred thousand souls
Away; yet I alive! (240).

Tonally, this is generally like the rest of the work: it proceeds with caution in order to remain optimistic, and thereby generally testifies to something like we survived (indeed, I survived, or rather an I survived, and that's the subtitle of the work)—which is nothing other than this happened. One could say that this is the “reality” effect more generalized (it surpasses the level of the insignificant detail and becomes an attitude of the narrator): but the issue involved is not reality; it is history, it is experience. One gets the sense that what Defoe is up to is just trying to unearth the past—in general: this means making it more vivid, though not necessarily real. The point is that he make people aware of the plague over the distance of time (precisely because he might have been writing this as propaganda during the plague scares of 1721), not to live in another time. Thus the sort of distance, the lack of reality, even through the sort of proliferation of information.

This brings us to the final point, which is the most vague, and is probably the most questionable: I said that the narration situates things on a particular level, by which I mean the account gives you a sort of way to enter the events which is very specific—that is not entirely that which another account of things would have—even though it itself doesn’t really need to cohere as the account of one particular person as opposed to another. We get H.F.’s point of view, but we are left with the sense that another could give us an equally good point of view on things. What is so interesting and specific about H.F.’s point of view, however, is that it is one that erases precisely this possibility: it is the view of a potential administrator, someone who can observe all walks of life with ease. It is an ambulatory point of view, that of a walker in the city: notice how necessary it is that he remain mobile, how the worst affliction in the whole novel is being shut in one’s house for two weeks straight during the height of the infection in H.F.’s parish. This is not because what needs to be related has to be first-hand: again, we’re not testifying to the reality of the events, but only to their likelihood (and insofar as that is the case, an indirect experience, a story—like the longest one, of the baker, the sailor, and the carpenter, in which H.F. completely disappears and just narrates—is even better, since it can be doubted easier). Being inside is painful for H.F. because he cannot be where the plague is: he cannot witness it, track it, relate all of its effects—and thus he loses the capability to judge likelihood in the first place. Without that, the novel collapses. But this also reveals that what is more essential to the novel is that it cover the plague (as we now say that news “covers” something), that it spread with the plague in its account. I’m not trying to draw some conclusion that says writing is illness, or something like that. Rather, I’m trying to point out that what is essential for the account is not that it string itself along in time, and develop coherently, as would be the case for a typical narration, but that it rather spread out horizontally in order to encompass all aspects of its subject matter.

This last point, however, brings me back to my main take on the novel: with these three functions operating, there isn’t really any need for a coherent narrator, who will hold everything together. The text holds together, but because of the material involved and point of view we get: but that point of view is only one way of entering the events, I feel—it isn’t necessary for us to have it. This is because it does not have to be consistent, but, as we just said, that every level of the plague’s activity be represented in the book. The goal is to saturate, not to develop. In this respect, it is much more like a history than a historical novel.

Thus, I find it odd when people try to say that the text is jumbled: it can be, insofar as the narrator still gives us scenes and has a take on them. We see that, given its principle of organization, it is precisely what is necessary: we have to skip to all sorts of reflections on the high, low, middle people, to economic effects (how trade altered), to various places in the city and the plague’s activity there (how it started in the west, moving east), to the burial pits, to the ships on the river (all docked, floating with families sheltered in them), to how people in the country fared… all this has to be there, it has to be covered—and it does not matter so much what order that it gets covered in, so long as it is covered.

Thus, the point of view which I was talking about is very specific, however its breadth: what we need is the voice of someone who would plausibly relate all these things—not having much that is kept out of his view. A middling saddler does fine then. But at the same time, what we need more than the voice itself is the coverage of the plague. In many ways, we could say that H.F. is like a (television) reporter, the view always looking past the speaker with the mike into the background, into that area where we are on the scene (this also hints at something I’d venture: the novel is or seems more cinematic than linguistic, more pictorial, framed, than related, unfolded—we get scenes more than stories). I wouldn’t push that too far, though, because this need to saturate, to cover, characterizes governmental, bureaucratic, or administrative vision perhaps more than journalistic vision. And this makes sense, both on the level of the principle of the storytelling and its role as propaganda: in a lot of ways, Defoe’s Journal is saying, look at this from the government’s perspective, which has to deal with all of it, not just your puny little perspective upon it (thus the distaste for the poor, and, more than the poor, the crowd, the stupid populous mass, who doesn’t know what is right for it—something that runs throughout the novel). It is in that sense that the expansiveness of the story comes through: all the layers must be occupied by a vision, even if they can’t be completely, totally traversed—and indeed, where H.F. can’t get information (like the court, say), if he can only get a glimpse (as he does—he knows their location), this is enough (indeed, it makes things more plausible): the point is to show the multiplicity, the complexity involved in just how many sites this monstrous thing invades, rather than be confined to any one level.

This is why the story is also the story of a city (and tends to spatialize itself--a point implied in what's already been said): London is the hero of the Journal, some people say, more than any H.F. That might be true, but it is a hero if we mean by this merely that which needs to be depicted most often in the tale—that is, in the sense that the narrative isn’t one that really needs a hero in the first place, since it doesn’t develop anything but merely depicts all of its movements, all of its activities. London is the hero of the Journal, then, in the way that Baltimore is the hero of The Wire.

The sort of viewpoint involved is indeed similar to that show: what matters less is that things remain continuous (although The Wire masterfully weaves things together, rather than just accumulates them) than that everything be depicted, everything be represented, and we get some larger sense of the totality, of the scale of what is involved. So again, we can say that it is doesn’t cohere, as the critics do, but that poorly understands the multiplicity of the functions of narration—especially as they are present in the early stages of the novel’s development, in which Defoe is working.