In comparison, Mary Shelley’s Last Man is striding out into a world picked clean, inheriting an arena of tainted freedom – tainted because it is absolute and purchased with death – but freedom nonetheless, the ultimate perfection of privacy. This is about apocalypse as escape from the other.
Shelley’s contemporary, Byron, was particularly concerned with this notion and sought to preserve a sanctum of private individuality from the crush of everything else. ‘I only go out,’ he wrote in his journal in 1813, ‘to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.’ It was after he left England in 1816 that he began to realise that the very idea of privacy was under threat, or even that it might be, to use his preferred word, cant. What one critic calls his ‘pathological desire for privacy’ was his growing acknowledgement that there may be no such thing.
This, perhaps, is the paradoxical force of the ‘last man’ trope: the strange notion that the only way to safeguard our privacy absolutely would be to eliminate everyone else. After all, hell is other people, as the phrase goes, and the appeal of this particular apocalyptic dream is not only its lonely harmony, but its tacit validation of the notion that such a harmony is worth the price of everybody else in the universe dying.
Of course, this leaves the dangerous supplement of you, still lingering on after the disease has caused a collective extinction. And that brings us back to reality. To the way coronavirus has confronted Shelley’s last-man fantasy of perfect mobility with a reality of lockdown and house arrest. It seems facile to note that the fantasy of plague-apocalypse is different to the reality, but the situation is more extreme than that – in fact, the fantasy and the reality are diametrically opposed to one another.
However, this is all wrong. Ultimately, humans are social creatures; the majority of us rely on the connections and interactions we have with each other – don’t we? Society is built on them. Disease does not just threaten death, whether individually or on a mass scale, but devastation to the way we live our lives through, and with, one another.
Helen Marshall’s fantasy novel The Migration (2019) is a beautiful meditation on the horrors and strange potentials of disease in such terms. One character notes:
Disease shaped our development, and on a biological rather than a superficial level. Our genome is riddled with the debris of ancient viruses, invaders, colonizers who inserted their genes into our own. They changed us, and we changed them in return . . . Think about this: it was only when people began to gather in large communities, during the Neolithic period, that the opportunities for disease to spread increased dramatically.*
The core truth of disease is that it correlates with physical intimacy. If we are physically intimate with somebody who is ill, we are liable to get ill ourselves. If we separate from us those who are ill – from large-scale projects like leper colonies down to simple precautions, such as keeping a sick child at home rather than sending them into school – we contain the spread of contagion. The coronavirus lockdown in 2020 emphasised this banal but powerful truth, but it also brought home its overwhelming correlative: just as disease involves intimacy, so intimacy actualises disease. We might be scared of being intimate with other people but more often we desire such intimacy – it’s reassuring, pleasurable and exciting.
There is an intuitive linking of plague and sex.* Think of John Donne’s erotic poem ‘The Flea’, in which the bloodsucking insect (a vector in the spread of bubonic and septicemic plague) becomes associated with sexual intimacy:
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pampered swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do.
Before the 2020 pandemic, the greatest plague panic of recent times was AIDS, a debilitating and potentially fatal autoimmune disease passed from person to person by – among other mechanisms – unprotected sexual intercourse. We are at our most intimate during sex, which both provides our most intense pleasure and is how we bring new life into the world. For sex to become the potential vector not merely of non-fatal sexually transmitted disease but also of a new deadly contaminant that turns sex into death is a peculiarly culturally potent eventuality. Sex makes us, and if we believe that it can literally unmake us, it’s not surprising that we will become fascinated and repelled by it.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, AIDS provided the focus for anxious and hysterical pseudo-moralistic commentary about sex. In March 1983, reviewing a TV documentary about the new phenomenon of what was then called ‘full-blown AIDS’ for the Observer, Martin Amis wrote:
It seems to be promiscuity itself that is the cause. After a few hundred ‘tricks’ or sexual contacts, the body just doesn’t want to know any more, and nature proceeds to peel you wide open. The truth, when we find it, may turn out to be less ‘moral’, less totalitarian. Meanwhile, however, that is what it looks like.
The truth turned
