Spectral Currencies in the Air of Reality: A Journal of the Plague Year and the History of Apparitions Author(s): JAYNE ELIZABETH LEWIS Source: Representations, Vol. 87, No. 1 (Summer 2004), pp. 82-101 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2004.87.1.82 Accessed: 30-07-2018 04:22 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Representations This content downloaded from 128.195.65.98 on Mon, 30 Jul 2018 04:22:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms JAYNE ELIZABETH LEWIS Spectral Currencies in the Air of Reality: A Journal of the Plague Year and the History of Apparitions While other beings lose their idealism in contact with the outer world, the coin is idealized by practice, becoming gradually transformed to a mere phantom of its gold or silver body. —Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1858) Many persons in the Time of this Visitation never perceiv’d that they were infected, till they found to their unspeakable Surprize, the Tokens come out upon them, after which they seldom liv’d six Hours; for those spots they call’d the Tokens were really gangreen Spots, or mortified Flesh in small Knobs as broad as a little silver Peny. —Daniel Defoe, AJournalofthePlagueYear(1722) ANYONE WHO HAPPENS TO BE thinking of Daniel Defoe is far more likely to picture coins than she is to picture phantoms; ‘‘beings’’ come to mind be- fore seemings, real things before idealizations. Marx’s point was that, economically speaking, these are all false binaries: the practice of exchange will always turn the one into the other, though the general trend would seem to be from ‘‘body’’ to ‘‘phantom’’ and not the other way around.1 By contrast, however bizarre they look up close, Defoe’s fictions from a critical distance all seem to reduce themselves to matters of fact, and if it can be said that his protagonists are haunted by anything, this usually turns out to be some figment of alienated conscience. As he himself put it, in an allusion to one of the most popular poltergeists of his own day,the so-called Drummer of Tedworth, ‘‘conscience indeed is a frightful apparition itself, . a drummer . on the soul.’’2 This is the logic that chastens Roxana’s premonitions of her jeweller’s death, or Crusoe’s projections into that spectral footprint in the sand. And if such specters arrive in advance of the reasons for them, they are none- theless easily translated—as metaphor—back into the moral and cognitive idiom ABSTRACT Long recognized as staples of an emergent print culture, English apparition narratives of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries depicted the materialization not only of spiritual forms but also of literature—writing, and especially printed writing—itself. Equally long recognized as an impor- tant, if ambiguous, text in the history of the early novel, Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722) is in fact interwoven with contemporary practices of apparition narrative. Read in relation to those practices, the Journal opens a metanarrative about the symbolic and epistemological—the literally supernatural— dimensions of the printed page at a pivotal moment in its history. / REPRESENTATIONS 87. Summer 2004 ᭧ The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 82–101. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the 82 University of California Press at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm. This content downloaded from 128.195.65.98 on Mon, 30 Jul 2018 04:22:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms of a rationality that is part revenant of Puritan psychology and part harbinger of full-blown capitalism. There is, however, one work that stubbornly resists such translation: Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Unlike Defoe’s other protagonists, the narrator of the Journal is neither accosted by personal conscience nor overly invested in his account book. Yetthe London he depicts is a protogothic city overrun with ‘‘Appari- tions’’ indeed. Here, clouds arrange themselves into menacing ‘‘Shapes and Fig- ures, Representations and Appearances,’’ while the streets are set with ‘‘mournful Scene[s]’’ in which every ‘‘speaking sight . has a Voice with it, and a loud one to call us all to Repentance.’’3 Their differences from one another notwithstanding, these specters never reduce themselves to mere figures of material, psychological, or moral reality. Their sole purpose seems to be to leave what Walter Scott called a deep ‘‘impression of reality’’ itself, and it is their fidelity to this task that, in Scott’s words, makes ‘‘the hair bristle and the skin creep.’’4 That extraordinary fidelity helps to explain why,of all Defoe’s fictions, the Journal is the least comfortably classi- fied as such, and why some of the most fruitful and provocative criticism of this manifest piece of ghost writing turns upon its claims to be counted as history,which is to say as a sign of the real. Here, though, I would like to take the ghosts that animate AJournalofthePlague Year as historical remnants in and of themselves, viewing them through the lens of what Defoe and his contemporaries actually had to say about apparitions. Some- what surprisingly, given the alleged juggernaut of enlightenment rationality, they said quite a lot, and a no less startling majority of that was not at all dismissive.5 Indeed, five years after finishing AJournalofthePlagueYear, Defoe popularized six prolific decades of English parapsychology in his cornucopian History and Reality of Apparitions, and, as the lone topographer of his interest in the supernatural has shown, that work consummates a lifelong conversation with long oral and literary traditions of ghost belief.6 As I want to show, Defoe’s interest in these vital traditions is closely bound up with his literary practice.7 Such entwining, though, was virtu- ally inevitable, for late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century negotiations of the meaning of the word ‘‘apparition’’ actually limn a haunted house of symbolic gambits and epistemological gambles that we have come to associate almost exclu- sively with modern English fiction. I The bare frame of this house is nowhere more apparent than in the strange history of the reception of the Journal of the Plague Year. As Robert Mayer has lately shown, that history has always pivoted on the unresolved question of whether or not the Journal itself counts as history: Do the graphic tokens that com- pose it add up to fact or fiction?8 In one notorious example of the embarrassment Spectral Currencies in the Air of Reality 83 This content downloaded from 128.195.65.98 on Mon, 30 Jul 2018 04:22:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms this quandary can create, the eminent twentieth-century epidemiologist L. Fabian Hirst once diagnosed the plague that ravaged London in 1665 as, at least in its initial stages, the pneumatic—as opposed to the bubonic—strain of the disease. A recent literary critic gleefully points out that the symptoms that prompted Hirst to the pneumatic hypothesis were actually presented to him by the Journal, fraught as it is with what Defoe and his contemporaries termed the ‘‘Tokens’’ of subcutaneous hemorrhage. Some of these tokens, the Journal reports, became visible only at the time of death, a distinguishing feature of pneumatic plague. Awkwardly enough, though, the Journal was composed almost sixty years after the plague in question, and its narrator, Defoe’s fabrication, in point of fact lacked eyes to lay upon the mostly invisible tokens in question. Barring some primitive memory (Defoe did turn five during the plague year), the most we can say is that, in the words of the aforementioned critic, Defoe ‘‘saw these ‘Tokens’ in his imagination,’’ while his narrator, strictly speaking, cannot be said to have seen them at all.9 And yet, for the modern historian of contagious disease, their ideal or imaginary or phantasmic glow seemed to have been produced by their practical currency in the world of actual events. It seemed in turn possible to overlook the glow and credit these ‘‘Knobs as broad as a little silver Peny’’ (195) as plausible and articulate vestiges of that world. It so happens that in Defoe’s Journal itself, the ‘‘mortal Marks’’ of plague that sooner or later appear on each doomed body express this very paradox. Their status as visible symptoms of contagious disease (‘‘gangreen Spots, or mortified Flesh’’) can never be completely detached from an occult sense of their relevance to what cannot be ‘‘perceiv’d,’’ which is to say to what Defoe comfortably termed the ‘‘in- visible World’’ (195). Defoe’s narrator, H. F.,attributes both the plague’s arrival and its mysterious departure to ‘‘the secret invisible Hand’’ of God; even the physicians, he notes, were ‘‘oblig’d to acknowledge that it was all supernatural, that it was ex- traordinary, and that no Account could be given of it’’ (247). And yet at the same time H. F.