In a brief introduction, I will suggest that we understand the term quarantine both literally and figuratively in order to explore its historical relationship with capitalism and the ways in which the novel can be helpful in situating the subject, or individual, within this relationship. The idea of quarantine ties the (in part capitalist) concepts of circulation and social networks to the biological body: a controlled means of taking subjects or bodies out of circulation, quarantine traditionally happens in socially symbolic spaces, such as borders, detention zones, or homes, while also bearing on the productivity and enjoyment of the private subject in the name of the state’s mandate to preserve life. Hence Agamben’s fundamental insight that borders have become internalized, that “bare life,” as a state of exception from the polis, “is no longer confined to a particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being.” This suggests a paradoxical relation between capitalism and quarantine, which Todd McGowan, in his book Capitalism and Desire, articulates when he says that the “special talent of capitalism lies in its capacity for marshaling the threat of impotentiality in the service of its regime of actuality.” This paradox is often reflected in the novel form in terms of spaces and genres (as for instance, the Victorian novel’s realist/ gothic fascination with prisons, debtors’ prisons, quarantines, sick chambers, and slums) that collectively shape the ontology of the capitalist subject, and which it will be the work of these panelists to unravel.
First, Keith Johnson’s presentation on “weird capitalism” offers an alternative genealogy for Weird fiction, framed less by racist and technological anxieties than politico-economic ones. This version of the Weird is uncannily sited in factories, copy rooms, and executive suites rather than the ancient catacombs and Cyclopean structures of Lovecraft. Its world is aggressed not by alien tentacles, but the “Invisible Hand,” a Weird Capitalism that trades the dark cults and maddening wisdom of cosmic horror for the desultory water-cooler exchanges of bored menials. Melville’s Bartleby is the figure proper to this world, the put-upon clerk whose abjection—epitomized by his tiny cubicle—effectively becomes a form of quarantine. Readings of Kafka’s The Trial and Thomas Ligotti’s My Work Is Not Yet Done elaborate upon this motif and similarly uncanny partitionings of space under capitalism.
Next, Nate Gorelick’s presentation will examine two eighteenth-century novels by Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe and A Journal of the Plague Year, both stories of a man under quarantine, that exemplify the sovereign subject as developed under Enlightenment humanism. As Michel Foucault and John Bender have variously observed, the traditional ideological configuration of the capitalist subject in terms of a sovereign “individualism” is best understood as an extension and consequence of the public institution and draconian enforcement of quarantine measures particularly in response to the bubonic plague. In other words, the invention of public health and, with it, of the individual’s actual, concrete isolation, lay the material foundations for the rise of capitalism at least as far as concerns the constitution of the subject at its core. The subject is a symptom of the plague. By tracking the subject as symptom, this paper exposes a chain of association between contagion, communication, and the novel form, suggesting that Defoe’s works at once construct and subvert the imaginary, ideological ground for the subject of capitalism.
Finally, Maddison McGann’s presentation attributes the negative reception of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man to a nineteenth-century audience that was incapable of thinking through a phenomenon as unsettling and disorienting as the plague. Treating the novel’s reception as an index of environmental disruption, she suggests that the enforced suspensions of pandemic time – imposed by Shelley through narrative ‘propagation’ and ‘outbreak’ – generated an eschatological anxiety in nineteenth-century readers. The novel’s vexing temporalities (its Sibylline framing device, flashbacks, and prophetic outbursts) arrest readers then and now in an unsettling pandemic time that upends the industrial ethos sustaining modern subjectivity.