Epidemics Have Lost the Plot Guillaume Lachenal, Gaëtan Thomas

Epidemics Have Lost the Plot Guillaume Lachenal, Gaëtan Thomas Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Volume 94, Number 4, Winter 2020, pp. 670-689 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/786010 [ Access provided at 23 Mar 2021 17:58 GMT from Columbia University Libraries ] Epidemics Have Lost the Plot GUILLAUME LACHENAL AND GAËTAN THOMAS Summary: This article draws on Charles Rosenberg’s classic essay “What Is an Epidemic?” (1989) to reflect on the complex narrative structures and temporalities of epidemics as they are experienced and storied. We begin with an analysis of Rosenberg’s use of Albert Camus’s The Plague and a discussion of how epidemics have been modeled in literature and in epidemiology concomitantly. Then, we argue that Charles Rosenberg’s characterization of epidemics as events bounded in time that display narrative and epidemiological purity fails to account for the reinvention of life within health crises. Adopting the ecological, archaeological, and anthropological perspectives developed within African studies enriches the range of available plots, roles, and temporal sequences and ultimately transforms our way of depicting epidemics. Instead of events oriented toward their own closure, epidemics might be approached as unsettling, seemingly endless periods during which life has to be recomposed. Keywords: epidemics, outbreak narrative, crisis, Albert Camus, colonial medicine, AIDS activism, African public health The second wave has come for Charles Rosenberg’s essay. More than thirty years after its publication, “What Is an Epidemic?” has been read as never before in the past months, becoming a stimulating, if unlikely, companion for COVID times. A text written as a reinterpretation of the history of epidemics through the experience of AIDS is now reinterpreted through our experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. A mundane sentence reads like secretly planted wisdom for our troubled times; a passing anecdote seems strangely prophetic—see how neatly the story about the “glass enclosed cubicle” designed to allow a “child with AIDS” to attend class in Florida (p. 575) loops back on the images of Plexiglas partitions and distance marks taped off in every primary school today. Cholera revisited by HIV- AIDS, revisited by coronavirus; epidemics and their narratives nested into Gaëtan Thomas’s research was supported by REACTing-Inserm, project “Science, information et decision entre ouverture des données et fermeture des frontières,” coordinated by Daniel Benamouzig. 670 Bull. Hist. Med., 2020, 94 : 670–689 Epidemics Have Lost the Plot 671 one another. This is perhaps where the conversation should begin: how do we as historians confront the complex, palimpsest-like structures and temporalities of epidemics as they are experienced and storied, without flattening them as “constants”? How helpful is a simple model like the one proposed by Rosenberg, which, drawing from the literary analogy with Albert Camus’s The Plague, identifies in epidemics a recurring dramaturgic structure?1 Or, to put it differently, how do we emancipate the historical narration of epidemics from a set of literary tropes cemented by centuries of intertextuality? To answer these questions, we follow the invitation of the BHM edi- tors to make a step aside and read “What Is an Epidemic?” from the perspective of African colonial and postcolonial histories of epidemics and medicine. Such an operation might be termed, to borrow from Africanist colleagues, a “post-coronial” perspective:2 a reexamination of our historical habits in light of the current crisis,3 combined with a somewhat classical postcolonial move, which uses the detour through histories of (post) imperial peripheries to reveal the silences and situatedness of a seemingly universal model and to suggest alternatives framings.4 We further expose how Rosenberg’s dramaturgic pattern can be read as an instance of epidemiological imagination, which aligns (or fails to reflect on the mutual shaping of) narrative arcs and epi-curves. This curve fitting of epidemic narratives is mired down in a twentieth-century Euro-American era that believed in the conquest of infectious diseases and perceived AIDS as a semi-scandal for that reason.5 In a recent commentary of this essay, Richard Keller pointed that modeling epidemics as discrete events is rather “limiting . as a tool for thinking about the pandemic,” as it cuts it away from the “broader experience of late capitalist modernity, or of peak Anthropocene.”6 Building on this remark, we contend that the dramaturgic modeling of epidemics fails 1. Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Robin Buss (London: Penguin, 2020). 2. Fanny Chabrol et al., “La pandémie de Covid-19 et ses « après » vus d’Afrique,” Politique africaine, https://polaf.hypotheses.org/5001. 3. P. Wenzel Geissler and Ruth J. Prince, “Corona, How Are You?,” Africa Is a Country, https://africaisacountry.com/2020/05/corona-how-are-you; Guillaume Lachenal and Gaëtan Thomas, “L’histoire immobile du coronavirus,” in Comment faire? (Paris: Le Seuil, 2020), 62–70. 4. Warwick Anderson, “Where Is the Postcolonial History of Medicine?,” Bull. Hist. Med. 72, no. 3 (1998): 522–30. 5. Jeremy A. Greene and Dora Vargha, “How Epidemics End,” Boston Rev., June 26, 2020, https://bostonreview.net/science-nature/jeremy-greene-dora-vargha-how-epidemics-end/. 6. Alex Langstaff, “Pandemic Narratives and the Historian,” Los Angeles Rev. Books, May 18, 2020, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/pandemic-narratives-and-the-historian/. 672 guillaume lachenal and gaëtan thomas to account for the reinvention of life within health crises. Going beyond the intellectual strategy of using Africa as the continent that “does not fit” global models, we argue that adopting the ecological, archaeological, and anthropological perspectives dear to African studies might enrich the range of available plots, roles, and temporal sequences and ultimately transform our way of depicting epidemics. Instead of events oriented toward their own closure, epidemics might be approached as unsettling, seemingly endless, periods during which life has to be recomposed. The Plague guides our commentary for two reasons: First, its structure highlights the potentials and pitfalls of framing epidemics as crises bounded in time. We propose a genealogy to the idea that epidemics fit into a four-act sequence, “a conventionally structured play,” as illustrated, according to Rosenberg, by the narrative of The Plague. And second, this novel, set in Oran, written by an author whose life is intertwined with Algerian history, is well known for the almost complete elision of what was colonial in its colonial setting and for the notorious absence of the “Arabs” who were the main victims of the fictional epidemic.7 Focusing on African histories of epidemics, our commentary reintroduces these ghostly presences, and other people living within and through epidemics, to the narrative. The Dramatic Curve: Epidemics, Dramaturgy, and Narration The decision to pick Camus’s novel as a model for narrating an epidemic was a daring one since this midcentury French allegorical fiction stands apart in the European literary canon of plague descriptions. From Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War to Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, there is an estab- lished tradition of literal texts—as much as a work of fiction can be—on plagues. The European literary canon has given epidemics a central role, not only because storytelling needed them as an escape strategy in a situation of crisis but also because, as a dramatic device, they provided a “powerful and inevitable background against which the masquerade of life with all its pleasures defines itself.”8 In addition, the genre of plague 7. Conor Cruise O’Brien, Camus (London: Fontana, 1970); Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993); Jacqueline Rose, “Pointing the Finger,” London Rev. Books 42, no. 9 (2020): 3–6. 8. David Steel, “Plague Writing: From Boccaccio to Camus,” J. Eur. Stud. 11, no. 42 (June 1, 1981): 88–110, quotation on 90. See also Ernest B. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Epidemics Have Lost the Plot 673 literature was transformed by the surge of gay auto-fiction around the time Rosenberg’s essay was published, as the AIDS epidemic became a central concern across artistic and literary practices in the United States and Europe. But in contrast to the contemporary literature on AIDS, as well as celebrated historical texts in the same genre, The Plague’s structure and style serve an allegorical function. Camus was unambiguous about his intentions. In a letter to Roland Barthes, he wrote, “The Plague, which I wanted to be read on a number of levels, nevertheless has its obvious content the struggle of the European resistance movements against Nazism.”9 The collective fight against the disease, the superior interests of society, the sense of duty of individuals, are to be read as parable for the fight against fascism in the context of the Nazi occupation of France. “In allegorical structure,” posits the cultural critic Craig Owens, “one text is read through another, however fragmen- tary, intermittent, or chaotic their relationship may be.”10 As an allegory, The Plague lacks the texture of a classical novel. Arabs are not the only conspicuous absence in the text (victims

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