The way we portray disease in our stories is always changing as our societies grapple with the different diseases that afflict them, and their after-effects. Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353), the celebrated medieval collection of stories, is a plague book – its tales were assembled as diversions for quarantined nobles during the Black Death – but its emphasis is resolutely not on the disease itself. The stories it collects are overwhelmingly light-hearted, satirical contes, comic tales and love stories, intermixed with the occasional tragedy. This conceivably reflects the fact that the Black Death was so horrible that the last thing people wanted was to be reminded of it. Hans Holbein’s famous Danse Macabre woodcuts from the early sixteenth century are grisly, but they are also witty and even hilarious. Across dozens of woodcuts, Holbein portrays death as a grinning skeleton interrupting all manner of people in the middle of their day-to-day lives: a ploughman, an abbot, a fine lady prettifying herself, a pedlar, a king. It’s ghastly, but the look of astonishment – the ‘who? me?’-ness of it all – is grimly comic too.
The plagues of modernity, while still awful (TB, cholera, typhus and typhoid killed hundreds of millions across nineteenth-century Europe), are more diluted by a larger population and less concentrated in specific bursts. Perhaps that is why we see such a shift in tone from the comic and light-hearted to the gothic and ghastly of the nineteenth century, encapsulated perfectly by some of the stories that writers Byron, Shelley, Polidori and Mary Godwin (who later became Mary Shelley) came up with while socially isolating in the Villa Diodati in Switzerland in 1816.
Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man (1826), for example, is ponderously gloomy, its dramatis personae all poseurs, its plotting an improbable mixture of aristo soap opera and war. The story is set in a late-twenty-first-century England more or less indistinguishable from England in 1800. Shelley’s three main characters are cyphers for herself and her friends: Lionel Verney, the eponymous Last Man, is a gender-swapped Mary; Adrian, Earl of Windsor (son of the last king of England) is Percy Bysshe Shelley; and the charismatic and passionate young nobleman Lord Raymond (who becomes Lord Protector of England, as the plague continues to cull the population) is Lord Byron. As the population thins, Verney and his friends flee Britain in the hope of escaping contagion. This is a vain hope: they die on the way or drown in a shipwreck, except Verney, who swims ashore at Ravenna with the knowledge that he is the last human being alive. The novel ends with him walking to Rome, his only company a sheepdog he picks up on the way. There he contemplates spending the rest of his life roaming the now empty world:
A solitary being is by instinct a wanderer, and that I would become. A hope of amelioration always attends on change of place, which would even lighten the burthen of my life . . . Tiber, the road which is spread by nature’s own hand, threading her continent, was at my feet, and many a boat was tethered to the banks. I would with a few books, provisions and my dog embark in one of these and float down the current of the stream into the sea; and then, keeping near land, I would coast the beauteous shores and sunny promontories of the blue Mediterranean . . . Thus around the shores of deserted earth, while the sun is high, and the moon waxes or wanes, angels, the spirits of the dead, and the ever-open eye of the Supreme, will behold the tiny bark, freighted with Verney – the LAST MAN.
There were a great many ‘last man’ poems and stories at the start of the nineteenth century; far from initiating it, Shelley’s novel chased the coat-tails of this trend. Frenchman Jean-Baptiste de Grainville’s Dernier Homme (1805) was the prototype for this particular mode, and since then there have been hundreds of examples. You might think stories of everybody dying of the plague would be examples of tragedy, either gloomily or stoically encountered, but in fact these stories usually inhabit the more complicated heady elegiacism of freedom, albeit one purchased at a heavy price. Part of the appeal of this kind of story is its peculiar blend of melancholy exhilaration. The deal here is the thrill of a guilt-struck but liberated loneliness: tragic finality combined with all sorts of possibilities, the whole world our oyster, unrestricted by other people.
Freud talked of civilisation and its discontents* – arguing that the cost of living in a civilised society is the necessity of repressing our urges to kill and rape, which leaves us psychologically discontented. One route out of those discontents is to remove civilisation altogether. In Women in Love (1920) by D. H. Lawrence, lovers Birkin and Ursula discuss the apocalypse while out for a stroll:
‘I abhor humanity, I wish it was swept away. It could go, and there would be no absolute loss, if every human being perished tomorrow. The reality would be untouched. Nay, it would be better’ . . .
‘So you’d like everybody in the world destroyed?’ said Ursula.
‘I should indeed.’
‘And the world empty of people?’
‘Yes truly. You yourself, don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?’
The pleasant sincerity of his voice made Ursula pause to consider her own proposition. And really it was attractive: a clean, lovely, humanless world. It was the really desirable. Her heart hesitated, and exulted.*
This vision of the death of everybody may be beautiful to Birkin, but it’s only beautiful if, in some phantasmic way, we are there to observe it, if our consciousness escapes the collective extinction event to wander through the new pristineness.
There’s something interesting going on with this. When
