ABSTRACT
The recent COVID-19 outbreak has become a catastrophic event that has reminded us of the fragility of life on Earth. This chapter examines the recent pandemic through three literary representations of the plague—namely Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947), and most recently Orhan Pamuk’s Nights of Plague (2022)—within a framework of Timothy Morton’s theorization of “hyperobjects” and Jane Bennett’s theory of “vital materiality,” as well as object-oriented ontology and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT). The plague fictions studied here imply that plagues may give way to a more utopian order after experiencing ultimate catastrophe. As such, having had unprecedented effects on the entire globe and beings on such a large scale, the recent coronavirus pandemic can be understood in the sense that human beings’ separation from or supremacy within the natural world is challenged by a microscopic nonhuman agent. Even an inert substance like a “virus” could be a social entity with an agency of its own, which actively participates in and shapes social events. The utopian outcome of the coronavirus pandemic, the so-called ultimate hyperobject of our age, should then be to understand a web of connections among different species to embrace a more-than-human perspective in which humans respect and accommodate the agencies and vitality of nonhuman life forms, including animals, plants, and microorganisms.
