Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year (1722).
A novel disguised as an account of a public health scare that happened sixty years before the book was published. I would expect a book on this subject to be full of emotional appeals and specific fleshed- out characters suffering and being generally emotional. First, because we have gotten so used to the emotional appeal when dealing with tragedies and especially illness. Second, because the writer was only a toddler when the events happened so we know that writing over half a century later it is reasonable he would have to fabricate far too much detail to convincingly write a factual account.
And yet… Defoe writes a surprisingly fact filled book that is almost chillingly detached. A first person narrator identified only as “H.F.” and that on the last page of the novel, recalls the terrifying months of the Bubonic Plague that swept through London in 1664-1665. Calmly relating facts, symptoms, death figures, public policy, burial procedures, and his own movements through the ordeal, Defoe paints a more realistic effect by being entirely devoid of emotion than all the moody dramatic wranglings of contemporary fiction writers on similar themes. Indeed, he has more effect than most journalists today because he presents things in such a detached manner.
“These objects were so frequent in the streets that when the plague came to be very raging on one side, there was scarce any passing by the streets but that several dead bodies would be lying here and there upon the ground. On the other hand, it is observable that though at first the people would stop as they went along and call to the neighbors to come out on such occasion, yet afterward no notice was taken of them; but that if at any time we found a corpse lying, go across the way and not come near it….(p.60). “
Another interesting thing to be taken by contemporary writers from this novel is its structure: it is a spiral structure. That is,the story keeps coming around and around to the same ideas again and again. Throughout the book one gets the feeling you have already read a certain passage because it is so similar to a previous one. And while this gets tedious for the reader, it imparts another level of realism in that when people tell stories orally they often go back over the same points and examples again and again. The discourse in a story is often jumbled up, events narrated remind the storyteller of something else and that leads them back to a point already partially covered. In this way, with patience, the listener (or reader) can discover the points the storyteller finds most important.
Journalists today covering a tragedy like to point out the examples of goodness of human nature, of people coming together and helping one another out; Defoe here discusses many more examples of the selfish, greedy side of human nature. And that seems very real, especially considering the source of the disaster was a highly contagious disease that not much was medically known about. Certainly interesting to wonder what would happen in a city like London today if such an outbreak occurred.
Defoe here continues to marvel me with the way he can pack so much reality, detail into a straightforward, at times bland, style. His prose is worth studying closely for the way he captures a reality without authorial intrusion. That is a lesson many of us writing novels today could certainly stand to learn.