ABSTRACT
Late twentieth-century criticism of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), his fictionalized account of the 1665 plague in London, can be divided into two camps. One reads the text in terms of its didactic purpose and its reassuring message that it is possible to fight misery with charity, to manage the plague effectively and to impose order and sense onto the material world. This line of interpretation sees the Journal as an exercise in the ordering powers of man, with the plague serving as a kind of stage on which the cultural techniques of ordering – surveillance, distinction, meaning-making language – are successfully displayed.1 Alternatively, it has been argued that the text foregrounds the material experience of the plague year – pain, illness, death – as an irreducible chaos that frustrates all attempts at keeping order or making sense of the epidemic. This affects the textual representation of the plague as well: the heterogeneous, contradictory narrative ultimately obscures meaning. The impossibility of explaining and containing the plague in narrative problematizes the possibility of interpreting and mastering the world.2
