[In the following essay, Kurman perceives common elements in six works in which a plague is prominently featured in the narrative.]

Should an alert and omnivorous modern reader chance to reconsider comparatively the Old Babylonian Atrahasis Epic and the first book of Samuel (chapters 4-7); book seven of Ovid's Metamorphoses and Pearl Buck's The Good Earth; Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, it would soon occur to her, among other things, that all six texts deal, in substantial part, with plague. But what is she subsequently to make of such a connection, beyond merely noting it?

Fortunately for the essay at hand, upon reflection plague turns out not to be the only common thematic element uniting these six otherwise quite diverse texts: our hypothetical reader may realize, with a flash of insight, that in all of these works separation of the nuclear family unit precedes the advent of plague.

And with increasing excitement the further realization may dawn upon her that each of the six works in question presents an instance of what might be termed "unnatural birth." As a result, the presence of all three thematic elements (viz. family separation, plague, and unnatural birth) in all six works mentioned above, usually in the sequence given, becomes awkward to ascribe to mere chance, and our comparatist faces a familiar set of questions: can the perceived pattern be due, then, to influence or to tradition? To similar and causative psychological or societal or economic circumstances present at the genesis of each work? To biological or medical inevitability? To a heretofore undiscovered regularity tending to govern imaginative literature? Or merely to our sample of six texts being neither random in general nor representative of plague literature in particular, but rather, contrived? And how many more—and which?—texts should one now consult in order to frame an adequate reply to the above questions? Or would we be best advised to abandon our inquiry in view of the depth and breadth of the formidable difficulties confronting us; difficulties augmented by the menacing prospect of arriving at unpublishable results?

Before we pursue such vexing matters, we can note that although many adepts of comparative literature may agree with Robert J. Clements that "the real excitement of our discipline … and indeed its challenge, remains in the mythic, generic, and other homogeneities inexplicably occurring over two millennia on our five continents," the apparent contradiction between Clements' use of "discipline" on the one hand and "inexplicably" on the other should not be taken lightly. Yet the problem here is not all that different from a recurrent one in the exact sciences. Albert Einstein, for example,

considered scientific theories to be "free creations of the human mind." … Such theories are the outcome of the mind's activity: its unceasing attempt to make sense of its surroundings. This drive seems to be basically the same in both the sciences and the arts. In both cases the data of experience are continually shuffled, consciously and/or unconsciously, until a meaningful pattern is obtained.

However, Einstein's term "meaningful pattern" begs a key question and it is well to note that even in the quantitative sciences, statisticians have not yet rigorously solved the problem of determining the optimal size of a statistical sample and have of course conceded that determination of "meaningful" levels of statistical significance is essentially arbitrary. Thus it is not only in the humanities that the number or proportion of contrary instances regarded as sufficient to contravene an apparent—albeit limited—"homogeneity" or "meaningful pattern" is flexible; methodology continues to be problematic in statistics as well as in the humanities. As Professor Clements puts it with regard to the comparative study of literature: "It is more exciting to discover that a great number of folk epics include a trip to the afterworld than to observe that a lesser number do not.

Little is to be gained by proving that there are exceptions to Otto Rank's comparative observation about the birth and death of the epic hero."

But let us now return to the six works mentioned at the beginning of the present essay. In the fragmentary Babylonian-Assyrian Atrahasis Epic, Enlil, the chief of the gods, "became disturbed by their [i.e., mankind's] gatherings," and in retribution sent drought, plague, and a flood. Yet prior to the advent of any actual disaster (save, perhaps, a famine), "the mother does not open her door to the daughter" but rather "prepared the daughter for a meal, / For food they prepared the child." Then drought and plague strike, and "Disease was let loose upon the people. / The womb was closed, so that it could not bring forth a child." Further in tablet V of the Atrahasis Epic the theme of disease "let loose upon the people" is repeated, concluding with the recreation or rebirth of humankind from clay kneaded by the gods.

The first book of Samuel not only reiterates the themes of separation of the nuclear family, plague, and unnatural birth, but with the sense of grim justice typical to the Old Testament, sees plague as a punishment inflicted by God. I Samuel 4-7 recounts the struggle of Israel with the Philistines, where it is military service and death that separate Phineas from his wife, who "was with child and near her time." Upon hearing of her husband's and father-in-law's death, "her labor suddenly began and she crouched down and was delivered. As she lay dying, the woman who attended her said, 'Do not be afraid; you have a son'." Shortly thereafter, the Lord afflicts Israel's enemies: "He threw them into distress and plagued them with tumors, and their territory swarmed with rats." Our pattern has been bent here, but not broken: although the plague in I Samuel follows shortly a birth that can be termed "unnatural" on the basis of its precipitateness and the death of the mother, our three essential elements appear, albeit out of sequence.

With one exception, the other references to plague in scripture do not contain both separation of the family and unusual birth. The exception occurring in Genesis is worthy of our attention, however. In order to preserve his own life during their wanderings in Egypt, the aged Abram (Abraham), it will be remembered, instructs his wife Sarai (Sarah) to tell the Egyptians that she is his sister a realignment if not a break in the family unit. Pharaoh, struck by her beauty, subsequently takes her into his household, as a result of which her "brother" (i.e., Abram) also prospers. "But the Lord struck Pharaoh and his household with grave diseases …" Many years later, the reunited married couple, now both of exceedingly advanced age, miraculously conceive a son, Isaac:

God said to Abraham, "As for Sarai your wife,…" I will bless her and give you a son by her.…Abraham threw himself down on his face; he laughed and said to himself, "Can a son be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah bear a son when she is ninety?"

As is the case for the two works of near-Eastern literature just discussed, in Greek and Roman texts plagues are also often interpreted as manifestations of God's revenge. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, for example, the seventh book contains a story cleverly inset, in the Ovidian fashion of the wrath of Juno upon Aegina:

.… A plague struck at us through the heat
Of Juno's anger and she hated us
Because our island had her rival's name.

Then countrymen were struck down to their
  doom
And the Great Sickness walked through city
  walls:

.… all vanished
To the blind wilderness of wind. Nor earth to
   hide
Plague-spotted bones and flesh, nor wood for
   fire.

Not only is Juno, the goddess of marriage, jealous of her husband's love of Aegina, for whom the land she ravages has been named, but Ovid's plague narrative is preceded by a retelling of the ill-fated marriage of Jason and Medea; what is more, it is immediately followed by the tale of Cephalus' accidental slaying of his wife, Procris. And within the plague narrative itself, the birth of the Myrmidons from a colony of ants in order to repopulate the plague-stricken country is anticipated by reference to Carthaea, whose father saw her "Deliver a mild dove from her heaving body," and to a "sacred spring," where "men grew from rainswept fungus." Thus once more we see an account of plague flanked, as it were, by references to drastic family separation and unnatural birth.

Ovid's sources for his account of plague were, of course, Thucydides, Lucretius, and Virgil (of the Georgics). We are interested to note that Pericles' funeral oration which immediately precedes Thucydides' account of the outbreak of plague in Athens, concludes with commiseration with the parents, sons, brothers, and widows of the Athenian war dead. Likewise, the outbreak of plague in Sophocles' Oedipus the King as well as in his Antigone is immediately preceded by a violation of the nuclear family unit (via parricide compounded with incest, and reciprocal fratricide, respectively), and accompanied by the presence of Oedipus' "unnatural" children, in the former case, and by Antigone's lamented barrenness in the latter.

To be sure, there are a number of classical texts treating the subject of plague that do not conform with the pattern enumerated above (Livy's History of Rome, for example). But we have already called attention to the lack of a generally accepted (however arbitrary) quantitative level of significance in scholarship in the humanities in general, and in comparative literature in particular. Thus the question of the significance of the recurrent pattern so far discovered remains largely a matter of selection and emphasis, and therefore, it seems, of what might be termed rhetoric—an attempt to persuade that such a pattern in fact exists (or is somehow useful to be thought to exist).

Even a cursory survey of the vast medieval plague literature is beyond the competence of the present author. Likewise the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, while giving us both Boccaccio's and Chaucer's literary responses to the black death that swept Europe, are beyond the purview of the present essay, as is the plague literature of the more than three following centuries. Yet it is precisely a screenplay set in the medieval period, namely Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, that can serve to initiate our discussion of modern plague narratives.

Bergman's film takes place in a land ravaged by a "terrible pestilence." Repentant flagellants course from village to village and a church painter is at work depicting the Dance of Death. Max von Sydow, as the knight and returning crusader Antonius Block, is engaged in a game of chess with Death. More to the present point, however, is the knowledge that ten years earlier Block abandoned his then-recent bride for his quest of faith and of the Holy Land. Block's cynical squire, Jons (Gunnar Bjtrnstrand), was also wed before departing for the Holy Land, but expresses hopes for his wife's death. But Bergman's account of plague does not only refer to antecedents of drastic familial separation; there is also a disquieting reference to unnatural births. We learn of "terrible omens.… Worms, chopped-off hands and other monstrosities began pouring out of an old woman, and down in the village another woman gave birth to a calf s head." The only people to escape the plague and to witness the cinematically memorable Dance of Death are Jof, Mia, and their small, healthy child. Pursued by Death but rescued by the knight Block (who thus continues his solicitude for the Holy Family, now represented by its namesakes), Jof, Mia, and their child huddle in a small wagon, as all of the others (including Plog, the smith, who, interestingly, is still searching for his unfaithful wife) perish.

Indeed Plog's situation restates the plot of the skit or play set within the broader plot of Bergman's film: the playlet is "a tragedia about an unfaithful wife, her jealous husband, and the handsome lover."

The device of a play within a screenplay is strikingly similar to Albert Camus having his pestilence-menaced characters in La Peste (1942) attend an opera—Gluck's Orfeo—where the theme of family separation is reiterated. That is to say, not only are four of the leading characters of Camus' novel (i.e., Grand, Rieux, Rambert, Castel) separated from their wives and families before or because of the plague, but, in the inset opera, Orpheus is seeking his lost Euridice. Then, with a dramatic stroke, Camus has the singer playing Orpheus die on stage, but for real. But this is not all. Camus, providing an eerie echo of the dwarf waitress who appears in cameo role in Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg (1924, where tuberculosis patients, separated from family, patiently await their cure or their death), writes in a dwarf barkeep ("Un petit homme … le nabot"), thereby prefiguring the title of yet another Nobel prize-winning author's novel.

Per Lagerkvist's The Dwarf (Dvargen, 1944) likewise gives the theme of plague a prominent place. A prince, who has a sterile dwarf as an advisor, also has a mistress and is in doubt about the paternity of his daughter. As though he didn't have sufficient problems, after this prince decapitates his poisoned enemy's son upon discovering the latter in bed with his daughter, plague strikes to teach everyone a lesson.

But what can all this mayhem have to do with still a fourth Nobel prize-winning novelist's—Pearl Buck's—The Good Earth (1931), the fifth of six titles cited at the beginning of this essay? Little, except that the pattern centered on plague is the very same: following the breakup of the nuclear family as a result of the husband Wang Lung's taking of a second wife, a "plague" of locusts descends; there occur also unnatural birth in the person of a "fool"—Wang Lung's deaf and dumb daughter—and incest of sorts (the second wife traffics with her husband's eldest son); and this second wife remains barren.

An extremely cursory and selective perusal of nineteenth-century literature does not do violence to the pattern we have so painstakingly extrapolated from near-Eastern, classical, and twentieth-century works. Confirmation (whatever that might mean—vide passim) of such a sweeping hypothesis in comparative literary study is, as we have seen, of course quite another matter; and the utility or application of such hypotheses is altogether problematical. Nevertheless, before mentioning four nineteenth-century texts, we can tentatively—taking a cue from Northrop Frye and other theorists of his persuasion—hypothesize that literature is a descendant and extension of myth. Myth serves the purpose of fostering the continuance of the civilization which has created it for just this purpose; violation of the family unit is seen as a threat to the survival of the civilization in question, and is therefore punished in fiction by plague; and subsequent unnatural birth compounds the fictional punishment, confirms the propriety of such punishment, and symbolizes the civilization's projected decay. The function of myth in art (comparable to the function of myth in government, history, etc.) is therefore not merely to reproduce or modify reality but to store potentially useful capacities of the species at a time when they might not be immediately applicable, but with a view toward a future when they might or must be applied for survival. Or to put it in another, Darwinistic manner: for civilizations myth and literature are positively selective traits. Myth and literature can be regarded as the cold storage of things that we cannot for the moment use but are loath to relinquish; the repository of truth, justice, beauty, tears, magic, and the like. Artists can thus be regarded as the guardians, not the counterfeiters, of lasting value. Literary representations of plague, therefore, tend to take place following literary violations (sexual, violent, etc.) of a basic unit which must remain integral if society as we know it is to survive. Further support for this viewpoint can be found in the more frequent occurrence of our pattern in fictional rather than in historical accounts of plague. Thus not only is truth stranger than fiction, but fiction more conservative than truth (cf. "… more philosophical than history"). We can, with Frye, see the historical source of a plague narrative as constituting, perhaps, its material and efficient cause, but the governing "myth" furnishing the formal and final cause of the shape of the fictional narrative.

But to continue with our nineteenth-century texts, Heinrich von Kleist's unfinished historical tragedy, "Robert Guiskard" (ca. 1802), is set in an armed camp before the walls of Constantinople. Guiskard, the Duke of Normandy, is father to a widow who is also the beloved of his nephew an aspirant to Guiskard's throne. The camp is ravaged by plague. Some three years earlier, America's first professional novelist, Charles Brockden Brown, preceded his description of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia (in Arthur Mervyn) with an account of the disintegration of the hero's family, including his mother's death, his father's remarriage, the suspicion that Mervyn has been his stepmother's lover (which the hero, however, denies), concluding with young Mervyn's marriage to an older woman, whom he avows to be a replacement for his "lost mamma." Interestingly enough, the epidemic described by Brown in Arthur Mervyn may have been the same one (historically) from which Longfellow draws his final scene in Evangeline (1847). Many years after the violent eviction of the Acadians in 1755 (an event that led to the massive separation of families), Evangeline, working as a nurse in Pennsylvania during an outbreak of "pestilence," is reunited with her long-lost betrothed—alas upon the latter's deathbed. While these three nineteenth-century texts dealing with plague lack the element of unnatural birth consequent to the advent of the pestilence (although all three stress separation of the family as an antecedent), Manzoni's I promessi sposi (1840) is the exception that conforms to our rule. Separated lovers, characters in a "marriage story, the story of the foundation of a household, a home," encounter a variety of adversities, among them plague. Subsequent to the plague we have a still-birth and "when Renzo returns to his village.… The first person upon whom his eyes fall is, symbolically, the village idiot."

Like Manzoni's important novel, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (1963, the last of the six works mentioned at our essay's start) presents, albeit disjointedly, the pattern we are, by now, not entirely surprised to uncover repeatedly in the plague literature of the world. In Vonnegut's novel, within the context of an account of a disaster that ends all life on earth, we learn that the wife of "the father of the atomic bomb" had been unfaithful: another man is reputed to have fathered her three unusual children, one of whom is a midget! In the meantime, far away on a Caribbean island, an epidemic of bubonic plague in a development hardly central to the main plot decimates the populace.

A final reference to recent novels might well be to Anthony Burgess' The Wanting Seed (1962). While there is, strictly speaking, no literal plague in this dystopia, the society Burgess portrays suffers from overpopulation, institutionalized war and homosexuality, a grain blight, cannibalism, and a variety of other collective (and infectious) misfortunes. True to our pattern, Burgess' work begins with the death of the leading characters' child, and continues with the wife's adultery while the state encourages homosexuality and fraternal enmity. Subsequent to the various "plagues" that ravage the society depicted in The Wanting Seed, the heroine gives birth to twins, fraternal twins whom she believes to be fathered—one each!—by her husband and his brother, her lover; hardly the most conventional of births, to be sure. Offered still one more confirmation of our pattern by Burgess' novel, we are able to essay a sweeping historical generalization: while texts dealing with plague from the Bible through seventeenth-century British literary accounts tend to emphasize plague resulting from God's wrath, modern texts see mankind plagued by the absence of God, an absence of love. As Gian-Carlo Biasin puts it, "after the second half of the XIXth century … Disease-passion inexorably became physical illness in all of its terrible concreteness and painful evidence; disease-punishment disappeared." In any case, in both traditional and modern views of the essence of literary plague, the pattern of: (1) disintegration of the family; (2) plague; (3) unnatural birth recurs sufficiently enough to warrant our recognition of it as significant.

We have now completed a perfunctory, selective, and somewhat superficial inventory of a three-part pattern (including some permutations) in the vast territory of world literature. Such an inventory could be readily extended to folklore. Consider, for example, the motifs of "Plague as punishment," "Unborn child affected by mother's broken Tabu," "Misshapen child from brothersister incest," and the like. A more contemporary sociological inventory would soon encounter the "plague" of drug abuse an affliction that is conventionally often preceded or accompanied by family separation and, as various medical authorities claim, endangers the drug abuser's ability to bring forth normal offspring. Likewise the recent epidemic of venereal disease in the West had similar antecedents and consequents, further reinforcing the significance of our pattern. But even if we confine our inquiry to imaginative literature, two things are certain: a number of texts dealing with plague can be found that contravene the pattern I have been so determinedly pursuing, and a number of plague narratives will display the pattern with what will be perceived by me as sufficient rigor. Or as William H. McNeill phrases this methodological quandary in his introduction to his monumental revisionist volume on the history of world plagues:

Study of simultaneity among multiple processes is presumably a better way to approach an understanding. But the conceptual and practical difficulties here are enormous. Recognition of patterns, and observation of their endurance or dissolution is, at most levels of organization, about as much as people are capable of; and at some levels, including the social, there is profound uncertainly and dispute about which patterns are worth attending to, or can, in fact, be reliably detected. Divergent terminologies direct attention to different patternings; and finding a logically convincing test, acceptable all around, that can determine whether one such system of terms is superior to its rivals, is often impossible.

Thus we are inevitably brought back to the question of the proper methodology of comparative literary study, including its congruences with, and departures from, procedures in other disciplines—most of them presumably more precise ways of knowing. It might first of all be pointed out that the notion of absolute regularity in literary history (indeed in all history, and by extension in any branch of the humanities) is demonstrably absurd. One can, for example, hypothetically contravene any regularity postulated in literature through writing (or commissioning) and publishing a sufficiently large number of suitably contrived texts. Furthermore, all plague texts written subsequent to the appearance and diffusion of, say, the present essay may theoretically be "contaminated" by their author's awareness of my hypothesis. Fortunately, the works discussed in the present essay almost all have literary stature; knowledge of literary history will help us identify "contaminated" works in any future sample; and there remains a large number of literary texts dealing with plague of which I am unaware, or have not read, or cannot read. Thus the continued verification (or refinement, or rejection) of the pattern discerned in the present essay is not an unreasonable hope. Of far greater import, however, would be the development of a theory of sampling and level of significance, cast in terms appropriate to humane studies in general (and comparative literature in particular), in order to enable us to choose among patterns contending for general validity, in the meantime of course avoiding both triviality and outright falsehood.

The continued status in comparative literature of methodology as Schmerzenskind (far more so than problems of self-justification, organization, and definition) can be seen, for example, in critical responses to papers presented at the Budapest Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association in 1976. "The disasters" among the papers read there were deemed by Frederic Garber to be "due, once again, primarily to problems of methodology." Yet two pages later Garber continues: "If the text is at all meaningful and complex, it will resist every kind of categorization, proving itself bigger than our scholarly straitjackets, richer than any facts we can learn about it." Garber's sentiments illustrate nicely how western comparatists have traditionally been torn in opposite directions: on the one hand, it is desirable on a number of counts to have and be part of a "discipline," hence practice a more or less rigorous methodology; on the other hand, likewise on a number of solid grounds, it is desirable to resist all irrelevant reductionism, positivism, and the like in favor of the meaningfullness, complexity, bigness, and richness (all four Garber's words) of literature attributes that have drawn men to imaginative literature and its study for millennia. In practice, of course, we do our best with an ad hoc combination of, on the first hand, more or less flexible "scholarly straitjackets," reinforced by as many historical facts as seem convenient, and, on the other hand, we devise fictions of our own with which we embellish the avowedly fictitious (but decidedly useful—see above) texts that inspire or amuse us.

An illustration of this point with reference to the pattern recurrent in plague narratives described earlier in the present essay should prove helpful. Rene Girard, in a recent article, argues that "there is a strange uniformity to the various treatments of the plague, not only literary and mythical but also scientific and nonscientific, of both past and present.… the differences, at close range, turn out to be minor." Girard goes on to isolate a

thematic cluster that includes, besides the plague or, more generally, the theme of epidemic contamination, the dissolving of differences and the mimetic doubles.… [and, finally, the "sacrificial element"—Girard's italics;] this same thematic cluster almost never fails [emphasis added] to gather around the plague in a great many texts that may appear to have very little in common. Some of the elements may be more emphasized than others; they may appear only in an embryonic form, but it is very rare [emphasis added] when even one of them is completely missing.

Now Girard, in an effort to support his analysis, has had to go out on some extremely shaky limbs. For example, speaking of Sophocles' Oedipus, Girard has Oedipus, Creon, and Tiresias "all turn into each other's doubles." And once he is beholden to his "thematic cluster," Girard apparently must unearth it everywhere. Thus we are told that in Bergman's Seventh Seal, "The mimetic doubles are there, and Death is one of them"—surely a forced interpretation to no apparent purpose other than to shore up the original analysis. Yet the purpose of the present remarks is not necessarily to argue for the advantages of my proposed "thematic cluster" over Girard's (or Sontag's, or anyone else's) but to pose once more the venerable question of method: on what grounds is one "thematic cluster" or interpretation or explanation or explication to be preferred to another? Possible answers include: parsimony, predictive power, explanatory power, and conformity with the larger number of texts (ignoring for a moment the obvious petitio principi difficulties of, especially, the lattermost). Perhaps the phrase "at close range," used rather glibly by Girard and cited above, introduces still another complication. Compare, for example, the delightful interplay of notions of closeness-of-range and triviality in the case of the hypothetical physical scientist who observes, first, the motion of atoms of a gas at the molecular level and concludes they are random, chaotic, and hence trivial; then at the molar level, eventually hitting upon the gas laws; and finally at some extremely remote remove, over an enormous span of time.… leading to his formulating God knows what kind of analytically ingenious proposition that best explains what the gas molecules seemed to be doing. (We are of course not trying to be frivolous or obscurantist here by citing such rough and ready parallels with the philosophy of science, but rather seeking a broad and stable base for the framing of method in literary study.)

In the meantime, I am convinced that—when met by difficulties such as those rehearsed above—we should not abandon our search for patterns in literature in favor of concentrating only on the specific, aesthetic use made by an author of a theme such as plague in a specific work or works. That would be tantamount to abandoning a vision of regularity (i.e., the pattern we think we see) for the "reality" of a work that implicitly avows its fictionality in the first place. In comparative literature we must continue to exercise the choice between embellishing single fictions with fictions of our own or drawing rather weak, necessarily "ill defined generalizations" about a larger number of fictions, or retreating to a time-honored—but still as stodgy and sterile as ever—applied positivism in literary study.

Perhaps temporary relief from this vexing selection of the lesser-most methodological evil lies in the emphasis of the suitability of rhetorical models for literary study. Rhetoric has been defined, of course, in a variety of ways; one is as the art of persuasion: "Rhetoric as distinct from the learnings which it uses is … concerned with movement. It does rather than is. It is method rather than matter. It is chiefly involved with bringing about a condition rather than discovering or testing a condition." Or as Walter J. Ong puts it when recapitulating Aquinas: "Rhetoric … and poetics both differ from the logic of the sciences in that neither requires certitude for its arguments." Now statistics is like rhetoric in that the former too "is an art, a science, and a technique.… concerned with the making of wise decisions in the face of uncertainty." Therefore, to take a sanely cynical view, the inventio for authors of literary essays, if they are to be successful, must usually be fraught with gross and intentional sampling errors (i.e., with rhetorical technique), in order to favor convincingly the hypothesis proferred. What is more, the purpose of the entire rhetorical performance can be regarded as being directed towards persuading editorial boards to publish the essay in question, thereby advancing the career of the author, who as a result succeeds to the extent that her "sampling errors" are forgiven. Thus in the article referred to above, Rene Girard is well advised to be selective in the texts he analyzes at greater length (as opposed to those he cites in passing); it is understandable that contrary evidence is gently suppressed and there is resort to such locutions as: "The sacrificial element is sometimes an invisible dimension, something like an atmosphere that pervades every theme but cannot be pinpointed as a theme.…"; "… the plague … must be viewed, I believe, as a mask for the crisis leading to the scapegoat process.…"; "… our entire cluster is strikingly intact"; and the like. There is no other way. Almost all of us system-mongerers do it. That is to say, we remain rhetoricians rather than discoverers of absolute truth; our truth remains impacted in our rhetoric. Thus the presentation of general discoveries in the humanities is a "rhetorical situation."

It remains for us to dwell with this recognition, as well as with the possibility that if the comparison offered above (between rhetoric and methodology in literary study) is forced, it becomes false; and if not, it remains trivial—a situation not unlike the one confronting the "alert and omnivorous modern reader" whose apercu concerning plague texts launched the present essay.