Consider the plague. I mean the actual, literal, bubonic plague, the disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. In this pestilential season the subject has been impossible to avoid, because so many people are calling coronavirus “plague” — even though, as pandemics go, they have almost nothing in common. Plague has an astonishingly high fatality rate — between 50% and 80% of its victims die — but is rarely transmitted directly from person to person, traveling instead through the bites of infected fleas. Covid19, by contrast, is much more contagious but significantly less fatal. And there are other distinctions. While the plague comes with painful, swollen tumors, running sores, and putrid secretions, coronavirus leaves no visible marks on the body. Most victims will survive it. Some might never even know they had it. There has also been plenty of talk about Ebola and AIDS and influenza and what all of them have to tell us about the present crisis. (I have no intention of interpreting the present crisis). But plague has retained a special hold on the imagination. To Thomas Dekker, the Elizabethan hack pamphleteer, it was simply “the sicknesse,” a disease with “a Preheminence above all others…none being able to match it for Violence, Strength, Incertainty, Suttlety, Catching, Universality, and Desolation.” The Black Death is still the most deadly pandemic in recorded history. At its height, between 1348 and 1351, the disease may have killed half the population of Eurasia. It has only two close rivals for sheer morbidity: the Spanish influenza of 1918-1919 and the smallpox pandemic brought to the Americas by Europeans after 1492. Both events caused untold human suffering, but neither left behind the same long history of written records. That was because the plague kept coming back. Its periodic recurrences swept through Europe with devastating regularity until the 1770s, and continued to ravage the Ottoman Empire into the 1850s. For almost five centuries, it was not unusual for cities to lose a quarter of their population in a year. So when Asiatic cholera spread to Europe in the 1830s, a century after the last plague outbreak, it was swiftly termed “the new plague.” Newspapers from 1918 proclaimed that influenza was “just like a plague of olden times.” Yellow Fever was called “the American plague” when it struck Philadelphia in 1793, and early coverage of AIDS in the 1980s demonized its victims by calling it “the gay plague.” Like coronavirus, none of these diseases are particularly similar to bubonic plague. They have different symptoms, causes, biological agents, and epidemiologies. What they share is a particular social profile: all are epidemic diseases of unusual suddenness and severity. They take populations by surprise. Cholera was the most feared disease of the nineteenth century, not the more deadly and more familiar tuberculosis. Endemic childhood illnesses killed more people than the plague before the invention of vaccination, but they did not inspire nearly the same terror. Fear of plague is not just about death or pain: more fundamentally, it is the fear of not knowing what comes next. Unsurprisingly, plague literature is currently having a moment. Publishers have announced a flood of upcoming books about the coronavirus experience. Recent months have seen rising sales of everything from Boccaccio’s Decameron to Dean Koontz’s The Eyes of Darkness (a novel about a fictional bioweapon called the Wuhan-400 virus). Camus’ The Plague is a best-seller in Italy and Korea; Penguin is currently issuing a reprint. For a couple of days in March, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year was actually sold out on Amazon. Defoe might not be the best-selling plague author of the moment (though it’s close), but he has almost certainly been the most reviewed. After all, the Journal is the original plague novel, and arguably the only genuine historical narrative of the lot. By reading Defoe, we can tell ourselves a story about what really happened in 1665, when the Great Plague swept through London — and by extension, what has really happened to us now. In just a few days I read that it “speaks clearly to our time,” offers “some useful perspective on our current crisis,” and gives an “eerie play-by-play” of recent events. And at times, reading the Journal really did give me an uncomfortable sense of familiarity. Vague rumors of the plague reach London. The threat is discussed, then dismissed. The government waffles. Deaths start to mount through the winter of 1664 and the spring of 1665. By the time quarantines are established, schools closed, and public events banned, it’s too late to prevent the worst. There is flight, uncertainty, panic, and lots of hoarding. Grocery shopping is perilous — careful vendors make sure never to touch their customers and keep jars of vinegar on hand to sanitize coins. Quack doctors peddle toxic “cures” and citizens obsess over mortality statistics. Everyone is constantly terrified and also somehow really bored. And then there is the famous ending: A dreadful plague in London was In the year sixty-five, Which swept an hundred thousand souls Away; yet I alive! I suspect that this is the true appeal of plague literature: the narrator always survives to tell the story. The glimpses of the present that we find in Defoe or Camus or Manzoni have a kind of talismanic effect, somewhere between a mirror and a security blanket. The more similarities we find — and judging by the current spate of writing about plague literature, there are always a great deal of “striking parallels” — the easier it is to tell ourselves that things will play out the same way. This, too, shall pass. My copy of the Journal is only 192 pages long and at the end of it the outbreak is over. 
There is nothing wrong with seeking this kind of comfort, but it does make me wonder: what is hiding behind the reassuring promise of human universals? If you read a lot of plague novels, you will notice that they tend to hit similar beats. The threat is dismissed, things get worse, quarantines are
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