[In the following essay, Stephanson elucidates the differing symbolic functions served by the plague in two novels: Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year and Albert Camus's The Plague.]

In her essay Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag writes:

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor. Then, in the name of the disease (that is, using it as a metaphor), that horror is imposed on other things. The disease becomes adjectival.

Sontag's essay explores the ways in which tuberculosis in the nineteenth century and cancer in the twentieth have had "the widest possibilities as metaphors for what is felt to be socially or morally wrong." The same can be said about the plague, which, though eradicated in the West after its last spectacular appearance in Marseilles in 1720, has continued to kill millions in the Third World into this century. The plague—whether bubonic, septicemic, or pulmonary—has always been (like tuberculosis and cancer) a horridly mysterious and impenetrable essence whose pathological might is made even more unsettling by its invisibility. Given the enigmatic and unpredictable nature of plague, it is hardly surprising that symbols have been projected onto the face of this unseen predator in order to explain or justify its catastrophic biological, social, economic, and political consequences. The scores of plagues from the Plague of Justinian (542) through the Great Plague of London (1665) accounted for more than one hundred million deaths. The bubonic plague of 1346-49, known as the Black Death, swept away between one-quarter and one-half of Europe's population; the 1664-65 plague that Defoe describes in A Journal of the Plague Year claimed roughly seventy thousand lives in one year; about forty thousand deaths (nearly half the city's population) occurred in Marseilles in 1720. In the face of chaos and trauma of this magnitude, it is natural for humans to ask: what does the plague mean?

Literature has reflected the tendency to make plague a vehicle for allegory, and the interpretive bent is usually religious: plague is the punishment of a sinful people by an angry god. Such is the meaning of plague in Book 1 of The Iliad and in the opening scenes of Sophocles' Oedipus. Boccaccio situates the privileged storytellers of his Decameron near a plague-stricken Florence that suffers "because of God's just wrath as a punishment to mortals for our wicked deeds." The plague in A Journal of the Plague Year is meant to be similarly didactic; few readers have disagreed with Louis Landa's view that plague symbolizes "man under the wrath of God," although the astute reader Max Byrd adds that the "allegory a modern reader may search for in the plague might be political or economic or sociological" and cites "the potential for estrangement" as one symbol inherent in Defoe's plague.

The signposts of plague as a symbolic vehicle are relatively obtrusive in Defoe's narrative; Camus's Plague is more indirect about what plague "means," preferring ambiguity and multiple possibility to the narrow symbolism of a single doctrine. This is not to say that Camus's narrative has lacked literary commentators eager to transform his tale into allegory. Readings of his plague have included "cosmic alienation," "human indifference," "the abstract logic of the Marxist-Hegelian theory of history," "Nazi occupation of France," and "the human tendency to abstraction per se." Confronted with plague's devastation and murky causality, the modern literary critic reacts in the same way as the authors he reads and the characters he reads about: to pestilence he gives symbolic significance. Antonin Artaud understands the value of plague as a symbol, and in his essay "The Theater and the Plague," he uses plague to epitomize his notion of how theater is both catalyst and mirror of life:

The plague takes images that are dormant, a latent disorder, and suddenly extends them into the most extreme gestures; the theater also takes gestures and pushes them as far as they will go: like the plague it reforges the chain between what is and what is not, between the virtuality of the possible and what already exists in materialized nature. It recovers the notion of symbols and archetypes which act like silent blows, rests leaps of the heart, summons of the lymph, inflammatory images thrust into our abruptly wakened heads. The theater restores us all our dormant conflicts and all their powers, and gives these powers names we hail as symbols.…

Plague has never failed to elicit a symbolic cast—philosophical, religious, or political—from the mind that contemplates it.

It is precisely the capacity of plague to generate symbol making that interests me. Beneath the array of symbols engendered by pestilence can be seen a common human activity—imaginative projection in the face of the unknown and the unseen. The agonies of painful swellings in the groin and armpits, coughing, swollen tongue, thirst, fever, impaired vision, aching limbs, and delirium are in one sense bearable because we can imagine them. What we cannot bear is confronting an invisible presence that has no immediate identity and hence no imaginative coordinates. This is the imaginative threat of plague. For how does one grasp the reality of tens of thousands of deaths in one place at one time? How does one engage an ominous, lurking presence that secretly infects thousands of human bodies and poisons the very air we breathe? Through an act of the imagination. Because it is unknown and unseen, and because its presence can be inferred only by its effects, the plague in a sense compels an imaginative response, just as the darkness of night, outer space, and infinitude have never failed to engage the symbol-making energies of the mind.

The unknown unleashes the imagination from the restrictions of ordinary experience. But plague is an unknown that also focuses the other end of imaginative life—the confinement and emptying of the imagination as it confronts the intimate yet impersonal ravages of the body, the devouring of the self's terrain by an invading, mysterious other. Responses to the plague form the spectrum of imaginative life itself: at one end is the initial release of the imagination excited by the novel or unknown and at the other end a return to the demands of a more prosaic material reality. Plague initially is a symbol of imaginative potential, a symbol whose unformed significance we create ourselves; but plague also becomes an unsymbolic fact that confronts us with our imaginative emptiness in the face of the permanence of time, matter, and the contingencies of human existence.

A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and The Plague (1947) are the most profound plague narratives in Western literature. They do not relegate pestilence to a peripheral or background role. Both writers imagine themselves at the center of human contact with plague and try to create some sense of what it means. Their sustained imaginative encounter with the experience and significance of plague makes both narratives an ideal testing ground for my argument that the deepest meaning of plague concerns typical energies and limits inherent in imaginative activity. Neither Defoe nor Camus wrote about plague for the sole purpose of dramatizing vital features of the human imagination; the authors' immediate intentions are located in moral, social, and political issues. But from plague as subject matter necessarily emerge fundamental issues concerning the imagination that both writers pursue. And what Defoe's narrative suggests is as true in 1722 as it is for Camus in 1947 and for readers in the late twentieth century: the imagination is unrestrained in its potential for creativity at the same time it is confined by experience.

When, in the Spectator of 30 June 1712 (No. 418), Addison commented that "the Imagination can fancy to it self Things more Great, Strange, or Beautiful, than the Eye ever saw," he was reflecting the increased self-consciousness in eighteenth-century queries about the imagination, especially in regard to contact with the infinitely vast or infinitesimally small worlds thrown open by the new science. Newtonian physics and the anatomical discoveries of the new physiology provided vistas of enormous imaginative possibility, vistas whose theoretical and mathematical models awaited a corresponding set of imaginative touchstones and a concrete imagery. New insights into the shadowy realms of astronomy and microbiology, made possible by improved telescopes and microscopes, inspired an intense imaginative reaction, as the creative responses of eighteenth-century poets and the metaphors and analogies of the scientists themselves have testified. And so it is with plague: the blank face of a ghastly pestilence provokes the imagination to create images to fill the void. But there are no visual hints to prefigure the alien identity of plague; the imagination is radically free to invent its own shape for the unseen.

Thus the frequency with which Defoe refers to the imagination of the people, particularly in the first quarter of the text, should come as no surprise. "The poor People were terrify'd, by the Force of their own Imagination" is a typical observation by H. F., the tenacious narrator of the Journal. Defoe senses that plague, lacking imaginative anchor for the mind, allows for a creative projection of extravagant and fabulous imagery onto the unseen protagonist. And he uses considerable space to dramatize imaginative response to the plague, including substantial accounts of the people's attraction to magic and addiction "to Prophesies, and Astrological Conjurations, Dreams, and old Wives Tales," of hallucinations, of reported ghosts, and of "Charms, Philtres, Exorcisms, Amulets":

Some heard Voices.… Others saw Apparitions in the Air.… but the Imagination of the People was really turn'd wayward and possess'd: And no Wonder, if they, who were poreing continually at the Clouds, saw Shapes and Figures, Representations and Appearances, which had nothing in them, but Air and Vapour. Here they told us, they saw a Flaming-Sword held in a Hand, coming out of a Cloud.… There they saw Herses, and Coffins in the Air.… Heaps of dead Bodies lying unburied, and the like; just as the Imagination of the poor terrify'd People furnish'd them with Matter to work upon.

Unconstrained by conventional modes of identification, the imagination is free—painfully and fearfully free—to create its own picture of the unseen foe. For the people as well as for the reader, the thing without becomes the thing within: plague is internalized and the mind is set free to create and then confront its own scenario, however bizarre or grotesque.

Camus's Dr. Rieux, calm and scientific, reacts to the first halting, tentative use of the word "plague" in the same way as Defoe's Londoners do. After a moment of astonished recoil, his imagination rushes forward to meet this covert foe for the first time, carrying with it a creative adrenalin so intense that even the lifeless statistics of history are charged with colors, smells, and sounds:

… a word was echoing still, the word "plague." A word that conjured up in the doctor's mind not only what science chose to put into it, but a whole series of fantastic possibilities utterly out of keeping with that gray and yellow town under his eyes.… Athens, a charnel-house reeking to heaven and deserted even by the birds; Chinese towns cluttered up with victims silent in their agony; the convicts at Marseille piling rotting corpses into pits; the building of the Great Wall in Provence to fend off the furious plague-wind; the damp, putrefying pallets stuck to the mud floor at the Constantinople lazar-house, where the patients were hauled up from their beds with hooks; the carnival of masked doctors at the Black Death; men and women copulating in the cemeteries of Milan; cartloads of dead bodies rumbling through London's ghoul-haunted darkness.… Dr. Rieux called to mind the plague-fires of which Lucretius tells, which the Athenians kindled on the seashore. The dead were brought there after nightfall, but there was not room enough, and the living fought one another with torches for a space where to lay those who had been dear to them.… A picture rose before him of the red glow of the pyres mirrored on a wine-dark, slumbrous sea, battling torches whirling sparks across the darkness, and thick, fetid smoke rising toward the watchful sky.

To such "fantastic possibilities" the doctor reacts with stern objectivity: "He was letting his imagination play pranks—the last thing wanted just now." But as Camus realized, the doctor's response is not some eccentric prank; his imaginative energy is archetypal. Plague excites the innermost recesses of imaginative flight, and out of plague's mysterious presence the mind creates a drama of intense life.

During a time of plague, when human attention is thrust onto the threshold of the unknown, there are always dream merchants, the grasping fakes who sell imaginative fodder to a public eager for images that will satisfy their hunger for shape, vision, and meaning. The "Apprehensions of the People" in the Journal prompt a "running about to Fortune-tellers, Cunning-men, and Astrologers … to have their Fortunes told them, their Nativities calculated." Dr. Rieux takes note of "the remarkable interest shown in prophecies of all descriptions" and points to the "printing firms," "journalists," and "popular prophets" who were "quick to realize the profit to be made by pandering to this new craze" for "predictions," "apocalyptic jargon," 'Nostradamus and St. Odilia," "superstition." The purveyors of imaginative wares—charlatans who shamelessly sell dreams, fortunes, and predictions—are a symptom of the people's need for an imaginative act that is equal to the stifling power of the invisible plague. H. F. writes of finding (even "before the Plague was begun," when Londoners were only dreading its recurrence) "a Crowd of People in the Street"

all staring up into the Air, to see what a Woman told them appeared plain to her, which was an Angel cloth'd in white, with a fiery Sword in his Hand, waving it, or brandishing it over his Head. She described every Part of the Figure to the Life; shew'd them the Motion, and the Form; and the poor People came into it so eagerly, and with so much Readiness; YES, I see it all plainly, says one. There's the Sword as plain as can be. Another saw the Angel. One saw his very Face, and cry'd out, What a glorious Creature he was! One saw one thing, and one another.

Camus's Jesuit priest, Father Paneloux, though sincere, fills the same need and offers the same release as do the conjurers. First, he challenges his anxious congregation with the ominously vacant symbolism of plague, and then he fills his sermon with Old Testament imagery calculated to harrow the hearts of his listeners. More important, the concrete imagery provides an outlet for the pent-up imaginative energy of the people:

"For plague is the flail of God and the world His threshing-floor … See him there, that angel of the pestilence, comely as Lucifer, shining like Evil's very self! He is hovering above your roofs with his great spear in his right hand, poised to strike, while his left hand is stretched toward one or other of your houses. Maybe at this very moment his finger is pointing to your door, the red spear crashing on its panels.…"

At this point the Father reverted with heightened eloquence to the symbol of the flail. He bade his hearers picture a huge wooden bar whirling above the town, striking at random, swinging up again in a shower of drops of blood.…

These passages (and others like them) provide evidence of the mind's need to "picture" the unknown entity. Plague becomes a mirror of the imagination, calling forth heightened creative energy by liberating the imagination from the quotidian. And the direction this imaginative projection takes will vary from person to person and from one historical moment to another: the response of the common people in 1664-65 is characterized by superstition; Defoe's response is dominated by the notion of divine retribution; for Camus, the plague suggests the dangers of moral and social ennui. The content of these various responses is not particularly relevant; what is significant is their shared genesis—the encounter of the creative fire and flight of the imagination (sometimes exhilarating and satisfying, sometimes frenetic and fearful) with the unknown. In the process of grappling with the enigmatic plague, the imagination itself becomes the subject as well as the object of its own surging energy, signaling its vast potential for the creation of life, form, and meaning.

While plague may at first liberate the imagination, it soon represses that inherent freedom. Camus's narrator, Dr. Rieux, appreciates this other side of plague as symbol for imaginative life:

The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence… In the memories of those who lived through them, the grim days of plague do not stand out like vivid flames, ravenous and inextinguishable, beaconing a troubled sky, but rather like the slow, deliberate progress of some monstrous thing crushing out all upon its path.

No, the real plague had nothing in common with the grandiose imaginings that had haunted Rieux's mind at its outbreak.

Camus is not suggesting that Rieux's earlier imaginative response was not "real," but rather that the brutal, inescapable statistics of plague accumulate and oppose the creative activities of the imagination, finally forcing a confrontation with the possibility of imaginative closure and death. H. F.'s use of the weekly "Bills of Mortality" and his citation of various social, economic, and political statistics function in this way. As the biological and social effects of pestilence begin to touch men and women directly, as the metaphorical thing without threatens to become the physical thing within, the initial energy of the imagination begins to fade.

Rieux observes, for instance, the initially carefree attitude of the people of Oran: "They went on doing business.… How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences." What the people in both narratives come to experience is the social alienation, physical imprisonment, and threat of other that plague entails. Plague means physical separation from lovers and family, quarantines and the shutting up of houses by city officials, paralysis of business and trade, death of a husband or daughter, and invasion by a mysterious, invisible other (far more potent than the footprint in Robinson Crusoe) that can consume the self and its imaginative horizons: "unperceiv'd by others, or by themselves," plague "prey'd secretly on the Vitals," "the penetrating Poison insinuating itself into their Blood in a Manner, which it is impossible to describe, or indeed conceive" (Journal). Pestilence also brings the overwhelming fear of contagion. To the imagination, such realities are forms of confinement and dispossession that ultimately deplete and exhaust our creative potential. Imaginative life in a world of plague quickly veers from the energetic and endless possibility in the unknown toward stasis, toward an oppressive inertia in which physical, social, economic, and intellectual possibilities threaten to cease altogether. For Camus's narrator, pestilence eventually causes "that sensation of a void within":

Sometimes we toyed with our imagination, composing ourselves to wait for … a traveler coming by the evening train … and though we might contrive to forget for the moment that no trains were running, that game of make-believe, for obvious reasons, could not last. Always a moment came when we had to face the fact that no trains were coming in… In short, we returned to our prison-house.…

Although one might "set the trains running again in one's imagination" and "[fill] the silence with the fancied tinkle of a doorbell," there is always the inevitable return to a world of plague in which real doorbells are "obstinately mute."

Camus describes a similar imaginative impotence that claims those who dwell on their separation from lovers and spouses:

At the beginning of the plague they had a vivid recollection of the absent ones and bitterly felt their loss. But though they could clearly recall the face, the smile and voice of the beloved, … they had trouble in picturing what he or she might be doing at the moment when they conjured up these memories, in a setting so hopelessly remote. In short, at these moments memory played its part, but their imagination failed them. During the second phase of the plague their memory failed them, too. Not that they had forgotten the face itself, but … it had lost fleshly substance and they no longer saw it in memory's mirror. Thus, while during the first weeks they were apt to complain that only shadows remained to them … by the end of their long sundering they had also lost the power of imagining the intimacy that once was theirs.…

Pestilence finally defeats man's power to imagine. While the imagination gazes at it in fascination, plague moves inexorably, crushing dreams and life itself. Before long, the miserable fate of the city and its people becomes a metaphor for what awaits the imagination: "The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes" suggesting the "final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice." Defoe's narrative also images the ultimate confinement of the collective imagination as physical emptiness and cessation of human activity: "whole Streets seem'd to be desolated, and not to be shut up only, but to be emptied of their Inhabitants; Doors were left open, Windows stood shattering with the Wind in empty Houses, for want of People to shut them." Even the dream makers and false purveyors of imaginative expansion are gone: "all the Predictors, Astrologers, Fortune-tellers, and what they call'd cunning-Men, Conjurers, and the like; calculators of Nativities, and dreamers of Dreams, and such People, were gone and vanish'd, not one of them was to be found." Camus's Father Paneloux also is gone, victim of plague.

If initially a liberator of the imagination, plague finally leaves the imagination no escape. In the Spectator of 23 June 1712 (No. 412), Addison writes,

Our imagination loves to be filled with an Object, or to graspe at any thing that is too big for its Capacity … The Mind of Man naturally hates every thing that looks like a Restraint upon it, and is apt to fancy it self under a sort of Confinement, when the Sight is pent up in a narrow Compass, and shortened on every side by the Neighbourhood of Walls or Mountains.

Where Camus deals literally with imaginative confinement, Defoe expertly dramatizes imaginative restriction and paralysis through physical confinement—a "Neighbourhood of Walls." The words "confin'd" and "Confinement" are everywhere in the Journal, and the sense of imprisonment both in anecdotes and in diction and imagery is overwhelming. The reason is not hard to find: the threat of plague means the shutting up of houses, and in a world besieged by plague, "here were just so many Prisons in the Town, as there were Houses shut up.…" Many people have "lock'd themselves up" to avoid contagion, and those unfortunate victims in the agonies of swellings and fever are occasionally "ty'd in their Beds and Chairs, to prevent their doing themselves Hurt." Being "restrain'd" and "ty'd" by force is "counted a very cruel and Unchristian Method, and the poor People so confin'd made bitter Lamentations," but these domestic confinements are only part of a much larger, more appalling picture of stasis and constriction. When H. F. reports that "it was said, there was at one Time, ten thousand Houses shut up, and every House had two Watchmen to guard it," Defoe is suggesting a kind of physical confinement whose claustrophobic implications are staggering. Defoe describes a people who, at the height of the plague's mastery, are paralyzed and imprisoned in a city whose activities have been negated and confined by the plague's menacing void: trade and navigation are "at a full Stop"; "Employment ceased"; "The Inns-of-Court were all shut up"; "All the Plays and Interludes … were forbid to Act; the gaming Tables, publick dancing Rooms, and Music Houses … were shut up and suppress'd; and the Jack-puddings, Merryandrews, Puppet-shows, Rope-dancers, and such like doings … shut up their Shops.…" What the imagination confronts is the specter of a city that has been captured, confined, and emptied by plague: "London was as it were entirely shut up." In response to this oppressive landscape, the imagination adopts a defensive posture, and its creative energies are quickly replaced by a fear of contagion.

Confinement is not limited to the intercourse of trade, commerce, and exchange. It also afflicts social relationships: "a vast Number of People lock'd themselves up, so as not to … suffer any … Company, to come into their Houses, or near them." Plague severs the normal bonds between people, who now confine themselves to their tiny window frames and maintain only a distant contact with a dying world: "I look'd thro' my Chamber Windows (for I seldom opened the Casements) while I confin'd my self within Doors …"; "They had no way to converse with any of their Friends but out at their Windows, where they wou'd make such piteous Lamentations."

Physical features and tableaux such as these offer an objective correlative for the centripetal movement of the imagination as it is hemmed in and threatened by the "acute penetrating Nature of the Disease." The sick are confined with the healthy, people fleeing London are confined in the spaces between towns, people are "imprisoned," houses are shut up, many have "lock'd themselves up, and live on board" ships, neighbors are confined to their homes, the sick are tied down to beds and chairs, and there is, finally, the ultimate confinement in the Aldgate pit or in a pine box. While such diction and imagery refer literally to forms of social, economic, and physical imprisonment caused by the pestilence, they also provide an effective emblem of imaginative stasis and retreat: every imaginative avenue normally allowed by ordinary experience is either nonexistent or locked up. One cannot move; one cannot touch neighbors with the loving stuff of small talk; one cannot do business. One can only be shut up with the dying and the dead; the earlier flights of the imagination are now in thrall to plague.

These various kinds of restriction and imprisonment are the metaphorical vehicles in the Journal for imaginative immobility in the face of a threatening and incomprehensible void, and such structures of confinement are a feature in most of Defoe's anecdotes. One narrative sequence, for example, concerns "Another infected Person" who visits the family of a close friend to announce that he has "got the Sickness, and shall die to morrow":

The Women and the Man's Daughters which were but little Girls, were frighted almost to Death, and got up, one running out at one Door, and one at another, some down-Stairs and some up-Stairs, and getting together as well as they could, lock'd themselves into their Chambers, and screamed out at the Window for Help.… The Master … was going to lay Hands on him … but then considering a little the Condition of the Man and the Danger of touching him, Horror seiz'd his Mind, and he stood still like one astonished.… And so he [the infected friend] goes immediately down Stairs: The Servant that had let him in goes down after him with a Candle, but was afraid to go past him and open the Door. the Man went and open'd the Door, and went out and flung the Door after him.

What is noteworthy here and elsewhere in the Journal is the claustrophobic, almost pathological quality of the scene: the oppressive sense of futile flight, confinement, physical and social paralysis, fear of touch or movement, and the final sense of being shut up in one's own domain. This powerful sense of physical confinement is an effective way to illustrate how the plague shackles both physical and imaginative movement.

But Defoe ultimately is interested in re-creating in us a tangible experience of what this confinement is like. The ubiquitous presence of paralysis and confinement in diction, imagery, anecdotes, and subject matter profoundly influences our realization of the text. Like the Londoners faced with a diminishing physical and social world, we recoil from repeated accounts of inertia and decreasing possibility. The story of the soldier, sailor, and carpenter (the longest anecdote in the Journal) is paradigmatic in precisely this way. The preparations of the men as they ready themselves to escape London are the stuff of romance or adventure; what the narrative stresses is their excited voyaging forth into a realm of possibility that will test and reward their individual talents. This narrative formula, with its predictable resolutions and adventure plots, also presages a setting forth of the reader's imagination. The sudden possibility of imaginative excursion into the world of adventure and romance stands in sharp contrast to the typically claustrophobic events in the Journal. Having encouraged the imaginative flight that attends any adventure formula, Defoe then stifles and neuters that energy by concluding with confinement and stasis. What might have been escape and expansion for the three men becomes an entrapped, glum survival in an area between communities; what might have been imaginative flight for the reader becomes yet another exercise in imaginative entropy and narrative inertia.

This vicarious experience of imaginative confinement is evident even in the apparently unstructured shape of the plot itself. The traditional claims that the Journal is "an incoherent jumble" lacking a plan and that the structure of the narrative is "repetitive" and "undisciplined" fail to account for the way in which Defoe's organization of incident and anecdote contributes to the powerful feeling of confinement that the Journal evokes in its readers. The forward progress of the "journal" and its chronological advance in particular are frequently suspended; the ponderous movement of the daily and monthly account very often seems to give way to a more static representation of the plague year in which temporal and spatial features tend to recede altogether. This is true of many of Defoe's more striking anecdotes, which, although specific in detail, are characterized as without clear temporal or physical location. This paratactic or disjunctive narrative process can be attributed in part to H. F.'s use of the unique "case" to substantiate some general historical point. But the narrative structure can be accounted for in a different fashion as well.

As much as Defoe dramatizes temporal flux (however haltingly) in H. F.'s journalistic account of the events of 1664-65, he also restricts the reader's experience of the passage of time by developing a chronology of events in London only so far and then returning to issues that he already has handled. Numerous transitional sentences take the reader backward in time: "But I must go back again to the Beginning of this Surprizing Time, while the Fears of the People were young …"; "But I come back to the Case of Families infected, and shut up.…"; "But I return to the shutting up of Houses"; "But I must go back here … to the Time of their shutting up Houses … "; "But to return to the Markets"; "But I return to the Coals as a Trade." This retrogressive, da capo movement creates an illusion of time stopping, of the normal experience of narrative duration being held in abeyance, and this structural feature effects another form of imaginative inertia for the reader a sense that even the ordinary progress of time has been paralyzed. And the focus of the majority of these circular moves involves the reader's repeated confrontation with both the imaginative and spatial confinement that accompanies the shutting up of houses. Such movement is not "incoherent" or "undisciplined"; it is rather an effective rhythm of closure, a re-creation of the imaginative paralysis brought by the plague.

The narratives of both Camus and Defoe dramatize the symbolic import of pestilence in ways that go beyond religious, social, or political allegory. At its deepest and most threatening level, plague means the erasure of imaginative potential through a negation of those social and physical categories whose presence we need to maintain even a modicum of sanity. As plague devours those imaginative avenues we take for granted, our initial thrust of imaginative energy against the unknown is quickly confined by our fear of bodily disintegration, death, and nothingness.

If the threat of plague in part follows from its invisibility and lack of imaginative coordinates, then an equally unsettling implication is that once an image or symbol has been supplied, the imaginative structure finally fails to "contain" plague. Pestilence ultimately refuses to yield to the very act of imaginative appropriation it has precipitated and threatens to obliterate the self. We are left with our dwindling imaginative energy and with the realization that our apprehension of the world of others is like our experience of plague: the attempt to possess or neutralize through imaginative projection always will be met with that unknowable, irreducible essence that makes its own claims on us and that refuses to become a malleable figure in our psychological tableau.

Indeed, plague and the threat of infection force the drama of self and other to be played out at its most intimate and terrifying level. The site of confrontation is not some accidental place of contact, but within. The other has been literally internalized as a physiological presence, telling us that we are other. To be a victim of plague dramatizes an essential truth about our imaginative transactions with the other, namely, that our attempts to "know" or to translate the significance of the foreign entity are really about how we create a fictional second self, an alter ego, and locate it at arm's length, often forgetting that such an act is as much a measure of self as it is an understanding of other. Plague does not permit us to forget; its simultaneous invitation and impenetrability to the imagination, as well as its concurrent embodiment as abstract statistic and intimate physical presence, paradoxically suggest that to grapple with the unknowable other compels a better knowledge of self, however disquieting such insights may prove.

Both texts constantly imply the drama of self/other and the fundamental fear of the dissolution of the ego, although Defoe and Camus seem more interested in the temporal dynamics of the imagination than in the ontological status of the imagination and its objects. Their plague narratives offer a structure and focus for the nature of imaginative life itself, revealing both the corporeal tenterhooks against which the charging imagination strains and the typical sequence of imaginative passage through time. What both texts pose is a fundamental paradox: the transcendental quality of the imagination creates significance beyond its immediate location in space and time, but this generative quality is finally never free of its physical and temporal definitions. The plague intensifies these two ends of the imaginative spectrum by representing first an unknown that draws the imagination into heightened activity and then a hostile other that threatens a confiscation of the ego and its imaginative potential.

Defoe presents an apposite image of these complementary yet opposed aspects of the imagination when he speaks of a plague world in which "confining the Sound in the same House with the Sick" becomes a pressing physical threat, and Camus speaks of the gruesome possibility of "the dying embrac[ing] the living" in public squares. Such a union of the dying and dead, sick and well offers a compelling image of what imaginative life entails: plague confronts the mind's eye with its creative power at the same time it extinguishes that power through the certainty of closure and death, and the generative force of imagination finds its own death in the very act of giving imaginative life to the unseen void. The spirit is indeed trapped in clay.

But the Journal and The Plague also reflect the typical sequence of the imagination as it moves through time—first, a moment of imbalance or uncertainty as the imagination is seized and then released by metaphorical potential, then a headlong flight into the dark mysteries of the cavern or excited ascent into empyrean light as the mind's eye is carried by the energy of its own creativity, and finally, the inevitable return, that sobering decrescendo into thoughtful repose when we attempt to reconcile the imagined and the "real," editing and discarding so that the shape of our visions will fit the limits of a mundane, material world. The structure of both narratives reflects this sequence: anecdotes and episodes that dramatize the initial release and flight of the imagination are followed in both texts by an exploration of the inevitable deflating and closing of the imagination as it collides with an intractable physical reality.

The presence of these underlying truths and deep structures makes the Journal and The Plague such moving (and, one might add, disquieting) reading experiences. The narratives of Defoe and Camus explore the experience of plague as a mirror of the imagination, thereby witnessing one of the great dramas of mental life. "I know positively," says one of Camus's characters, "that each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth, is free from it."