"Read your fall": The signs of plague in The Last Man.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-05

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How are we then to understand the message on each leaf, the doubly inscribed leaf that forces us from the botanical realm of organic continuity to that of the written text: how are we to read this volume of scattered pages?

--Carol Jacobs on Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1)

MARY SHELLEY'S THE LAST MAN, BEGUN IN 1824 AND PUBLISHED IN 1826, embraces a confluence of narratives that resists an interpretative closure or categorization: combining tales of multiple love-triangles, political debates, psychological struggles, historical vignettes, records of war, bits of travelogues, the text is cast as a dystopian vision invoking a classical myth. In addition, the novel enfolds the author's psychological state into the fabric of the narrative: the "Sibyline" prophecy of the war-torn, plague-ridden, desolate earth prophesied in the text reflects Mary Shelley's emotional inscape as she mourned Percy's death, a loss which threatened her sense of human agency. The novel's formal hybridity also calls into question various thematic or conceptual boundaries and fixed identities, including those of self, gender, class, race, religion, and nationality. The phantasmatic coalescing of personal tragedy with the apocalyptic extinction of humanity destabilizes hierarchical power dynamics and nullifies any illusory hope for humanistic redemption.

In light of such a textual explosion, it may be helpful to attempt to examine the rhetorical devices and ideological impulses that underpin the web of reality and fantasy, history and vision, destabilizing drives and (un-)conscious elisions. With the premise of apocalypse, the text relentlessly insists on radical freedom through the "decomposing figure" of the plague, "the vast annihilation that has swallowed all things--the voiceless solitude of the once busy earth" (193). (2) Despite the text's almost transcendental leap beyond fixed identities, however, the political unconscious of racialized British-Eurocentrism persists. This paper investigates the conjuncture, equivocation, and explosion of these two aspects. On the one hand, the textual deconstruction of human agency (the autonomy of the consciousness-of-the-self) in general and the British nationalist subject in particular propel the narrative towards the apocalyptic fall of the human race. On the other hand, the remnants of British white subjectivity manifest in racialized configurations of color. In other words, The Last Man's textual insights into the limits of (British, Eurocentric, Western, white) consciousness through the dystopian prophecy of the borderless society coexist with its blindness to a racial ideology that appropriates different races to maintain a wholesome oneness. Examining an array of textual figuration and disfiguration, this paper locates historically-specific, ideological moments couched in the futurist narrative of the post-human perspective and the textual rhetoricity of its delimitation.

Crossing Boundaries, Annihilating Identities

The text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing: thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but an explosion, a dissemination.

--Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text"

In The Last Man, plague is set up as the "other" to the logic and concomitant social relations that exist in the late 21st century, when the story begins, and it unleashes numerous literal and figurative boundary-crossings. The boundaries crossed have been essential to maintaining Eurocentric domination and conquest. When the plague breaks out, characters repeatedly assert that a breach has been made and that the Rubicon has been crossed (188). The plague rapidly breaks loose various fixed identities or dynamics, unsettling, dislocating, and displacing the existing chain of identities and events. (3) With the plague, England's historical antagonism against Ireland and ambivalence towards America are displaced by awareness of humanity's common bond. As the pacifist leader Adrian declares, "You [the Irish and Americans] are dear to us, because you wear the fragile shape of humanity" (218). England itself becomes an empty theater of ruins as the survivors prepare to desert it to search for "other" space: "England is in her shroud--we may not enchain ourselves to a corpse. Let us go--the world is our country now ..." (237). (4) Verney reflects on changes the plague has brought to the ex-Queen, the embodiment of monarchical values such as rank, hereditary right, and wealth:

To me this proceeding [the changed attitude of the Countess of Windsor, the ex-Queen] appeared (if so light a term may be permitted) extremely whimsical. Now that the race of man had lost in fact all distinction of rank, this pride was doubly fatuitous; now that we felt a kindred, fraternal nature with all who bore the stamp of humanity, this angry reminiscence of times for ever gone, was worse than foolish. Idris was too much taken up by her own dreadful fears, to be angry, hardly grieved; for she judged that insensibility must be the source of this continued rancour. This was not altogether the fact: but predominant self-will assumed the arms and masque of callous feeling; and the haughty lady disdained to exhibit any token of the struggle she endured; while the slave of pride, she fancied that she sacrificed her happiness to immutable principle. False was all this--false all but the affections of our nature, and the links of sympathy with pleasure or pain. There was but one good and one evil in the world--life and death. The pomp or rank, the assumption of power, the possessions of wealth vanished like morning mist. One living beggar had become of more worth than a national peerage of dead lords--alas the day! than of dead heroes, patriots, or men of genius. There was much of degradation in this: for even vice and virtue had lost their attributes--life--life--the continuation of our animal mechanism--was the Alpha and Omega of the desires, the prayers, the prostrate ambition of human race. (212; my emphasis)

In the face of the plague, the dividing "principles" that mask privileged people's interests and prejudices seem pointless and false. Human existence in the aftermath of the plague is understood as merely "the continuation of our animal mechanism," whose essence is "sympathy with pleasure or pain" (212). While the faculty of sympathy has been defined as a fundamental human quality, (5) here it is seen as primordial and animalistic. Plague eludes human(ist) attempts to identify and control and, subjecting itself to nothing, it becomes an impossible moving target. It displaces the human subject as a driving force of human action; human life--"the Alpha and Omega of desires, the prayers, the prostrate ambition of human race"--is subjected to the absolute indifference of the plague.

The plague introduces ambiguity and paradox on a massive scale. The religious interpretations it invites, especially with the thematic crux of Apocalypse, do not lead to clear-cut answers. On the one hand, plague is seen as an act of God, divine justice responding to years of corruption and war. If human life began with one man, The Last Man reverses the creator-destroyer's creation process, leaving us with one man. On the other hand, the plague is seen as Satanic or demonic. In language that recalls Frankenstein, Verney speaks of the plague as the monster that annihilates the harmony of divine law: "That same invincible monster, which hovered over and devoured Constantinople--that fiend more cruel than tempest, less tame than fire, is, alas, unchained in that beautiful country--these reflections would not allow me to rest" (160). Challenging the existing social hierarchy, plague leads the survivors to shift, reexamine, and displace their firmly held values. Beyond the traditional apocalyptic sublime (the revelation of the divine will), and beyond good or evil, the plague transcends human law and consciousness and becomes the inevitable counterpart to human will and consciousness. The textual premises of apocalyptic annihilation and post-humanity supersede the humanist agenda for identity-construction as quintessential to establishing norms and ideologies, identities, or consciousness. Goldsmith argues that these textual premises unleash a radical political impetus against ideological norms and displace the "human" with narrative (Goldsmith 311).

As deciphering the plague takes urgent priority over any other matter (such as territorial domination), the text thematizes the interrogation of language, questioning the transparency of language as representational and human subjectivity as self-representational:

Thus, losing our identity, that of which we are chiefly conscious, we glory in the continuity of our species, and learn to regard death without terror. But when any whole nation becomes the victim of the destructive powers of exterior agents, then indeed man shrinks into insignificance, he feels his tenure of life insecure, his inheritance on earth cut off. (166-67)

This passage typifies the textual movement that displaces images of violence and catastrophe with questions that interrogate "intricately contradictory rhetorical operations." (6) Although the characters are continually compelled to read the signs of the plague, which are fundamentally contradictory and uncertain, they continually misread them. In other words, as the plague and the language of the novel become analogous (Goldsmith 301), even the word "plague" takes over the human voice that tries to assume power over it. Vexing characters and readers alike, the plague becomes an opaque, inscrutable, and yet performing sign: "When I [Verney] inquired for them [the missing men], the man to whom I spoke, uttered the word 'plague,' and fell at my feet in convulsions; he also was infected" (292). These episodes suggest that the epidemic carries as much a discursive effect as a clinical one. Prompting the interpretive predicaments that signs of disfiguration engender, the text urges us to decipher "both a rhetorical and physical process or effect" that leaves "uncertain the relationship between them" (Chase 6).

As the plague keeps frustrating human expectations to pin it down, it emerges as the agent of radical change:

O death and change, rulers of our life, where are ye, that I may grapple with you! What was there in our tranquillity, that excited your envy--in our happiness, that ye should destroy it? We were happy, loving, and beloved; the horn of Amalthea contained no blessing unshowered upon us, but, alas! [la] fortuna deidad barbara importuna, oy cadaver y ayer flor, no permanece jamas! [Importunate fortune, / the barbarous deity, / today a cadaver and yesterday a flower, / forever changes! (Calderon de la Barca)] (186)

This passage recalls Percy Shelley's political radicalism. His "Necessity of Reform" makes clear...

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