We all know Moby-Dick opens on Gansevoort Street, right?
5.
By the time Defoe was writing, the works of man had begun to make solid inroads against the unchecked spread of communicable illnesses, largely through improvements in construction and sanitation, and a generally less credulous approach to the supernatural etiology of disease. When the plague struck Marseille in 1721, officials in the city did not move swiftly enough to check its advance, and, over the next two years, nearly 130,000 people throughout France were felled by the disease, most of them in Provence. Throughout Europe, Marseille became a watchword for advocates of civil reform, a rallying cry for those who hoped to arrest the spread of disease by enacting policies that would embargo various forms of travel and trade as a means of arresting the progress of the disease, even as the effects of the epidemic were minimized by those who sought to keep the wheels of commerce spinning. A Journal of the Plague Year was, in a sense, one part of this effort, a means of encouraging more robust civic reform given the ongoing occurrence of bubonic plague in European port cities; and in elevating the characteristics of human reason over those who gave themselves over, wholly, to superstition. A proto-utilitarian, Defoe was interested in the maximization of human happiness–an ethical norm he took to be roughly coterminous with the principles of efficiency and thrift–and he had little sympathy with those whose unreflective deference to tradition or superstition presented a barrier to its realization. As this vision of human happiness was generally aligned with the ethics of a British Puritanism that was increasingly deployed in defense of the bourgeois state as an institution of class domination under the sign of capital, Defoe’s account of the of 1665 might be read as part of the ideological armature of the capitalist state at the moment of its consolidation, a story of civic minded institutions fostering the health of populations not from any sense of altruism or need, much less moral incentive, but as a function of capital, its need for labor, for consumers and markets. Left to their own devices, Defoe avers, people will turn to amulets and charms. Men must be tended and brought ever nearer to health; the state is their shepherd and their guide.
The growth of the administrative state would provided a hedge against ancient maladies like the bubonic plague, but as the midwife of the world market, it would come to serve as a nexus for new forms of infection, new maladies and infirmities, as well as highly differentiated, and wholly hierarchical, distributions of care. Industry was, almost from the first, recognized as a scourge in a very literal sense, while the emergence of the global market gave rise to a host of new vectors for the spread of disease, not least of which was the efficiency and speed of coal-fueled steam, coal debris, and the toxicities wrought from new intensities of metal work, of construction, manufacture, and mining. Well before the basics of germ theory were taken for granted, human communities understood enough about the role of communicability in the spread of infection to employ forms of isolation and quarantine as the best hedge against epidemic plague, while elemental limitations upon circulation presented their own barriers to the spread of pathogens. Post-Napoleonic innovations in transportation infrastructures–the building of wider roads and deeper canals, the application of coal-fired steam power to both production and circulation–overcame many of these impediments, as state command over space, and the consequent compression of time, allowed for more regular integration of markets, as well as the ever more routine interaction between putative centers and their subject peripheries. While new measures of sanitation and techniques of construction, as well as the steady decline of nominally urban forms of agricultural husbandry, would ensure that bubonic plague would become isolated to zones of extreme poverty and systematic, rural underdevelopment, the emergence of a coal-fired world economy introduced new pathogens, and new modes of transmission. The cholera epidemic of 1832–widely recognized as the first global pandemic–was of a piece with this market revolution, the most stunning achievement of a bourgeoisie unanimously contemptuous of the physical barriers to its own realization and insatiable hunger. With an alarming haste, in the United States, cholera spread quickly from the port cities of the coast to the market outposts of the frontier periphery, driven–in no small part–by the movements of military personnel deployed to defend the increasingly substantial populations of settlers congregated throughout the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi River valley.
Refracted, through metaphor, as a story about the death of the old colonial burgher class, the cholera pandemic of 1832 left a strange mark on the history of American literature, while offering a potent allegory for the insatiable drive of new market forces in the face of the organic barriers to capital accumulation. While literary pursuit, in the early United States, was a largely patrician endeavor, its earliest aesthetic flourishing, in the 1830s and 40s, came in the context of its nominative proletarianization; through the commercialization of artistic endeavor, the delinking of the aesthetic from older, established networks of patronage, and the emergence of the writer as a figure dependent upon the whims of the market. These processes coincided with, and were abetted by, the material fabrication of the same capitalist infrastructures that would abet the circulation of pathogenic organisms; and while cholera makes only fragmentary appearances in the literature of the period, the prevalence of disease, and the appearance of the maritime as a vector of non-organic pathogenic transmission, evokes the impact of the market revolution on the conceptualization of illness and madness and the relation between them, madness begetting illness and illness begetting the same, an endless recursion of dementia and debility. A proving ground for a host of new illnesses, both physical and affective, the material toll of the market revolution made itself felt in the literature of the time, sometimes as disease, but just as often as insinuations of sickness, the implication of hysterias describing a metaphorical corruption of the body and the spirit; heretical defilements that were as infectious as plague, sent not by God, or from the vagaries of the earth, but from somewhere within, something unknown, something as yet unknowable, something, somewhere, a terrain that might never be mapped. Literature said all the things that could not be said, even the things it could not say about itself, all the things that could not be seen, all the things that were too much to bear.
The revolution of the 1830s broke the old world into pieces, putting it together in new and unfamiliar shapes, eating up bodies, taking them apart, stitching them together with bronze and iron and a barely haphazard sense of design. Likewise, its literature: an impetuous mosaic of glass and solder, flesh and desire, a luminous tracing of the shape of what was to come from the refuse of what had been, all that remained in the afterwards of that which had lingered too long before. In much of the literature that begins to appear in the two decades following the pandemic of 1832, the history of the cholera is manifest as an obscure phantom, haunting, stalking the cobblestoned streets that return to the wharves, a gloaming, a shiver, silver; an absence that is a presence, lingering and inscrutable, an allegory for a thing that cannot be grieved. A means by which to approach, through device and innuendo, the literal and figurative death of the colonial and revolutionary elite, as well as the inconsolable wound dealt the social body by the unendurable fact of collective immiseration, these works serves also as opportunities for a new schematization, a means of grappling, through prose, with the conditions of the unfolding present. Poe and his contemporaries were unfortunate cartographers, lost among people they might have known but did not recognize, in places they might have been but whose streets had been blocked. Their uncertainty in the present, like our anxiety in ours, was the occasion for a range of anxieties over the future, which had lost its moorings and no longer presented a clear or fixed shape. Outside a decrepit version of the Pascalian wager–You do not know if you will be rewarded for your labors, but isn’t it better to act as if you will?–what choices did they have? What choices do we? This anxiety is the shape of that absence, which is the sound of what happens to the air in the moment before the bomb goes off. As for the creature, as for Makdisi, as for HF in Defoe, there are places we must go where the words cannot, roads down which we must stumble even when there can be no words adequate to the journey. Even the shriek is inadequate to the event at its unfolding, to the real of the thing that will not be known. Having only fragments of the future, writers borrowed from the before to sketch the shape of the now, gesturing only toward an after they could not hope to conceive, nor barely want to know. Among these, few were as conspicuously irreverent as Poe, who languorous excavations sought the ruins of the feudal as a kaleidoscope on the ruination of the what was to come, the remains of one for the rubble of another, in a circuit, a movement, that cut through the heart of the inexpressible present.
The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal–the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, which dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body–and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men.And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.
First published in 1842, “The Masque of the Red Death” appeared little more than a decade after epidemic cholera first struck the United States, traveling along new roads and canals from the port cities of the coast to the more distant outposts of frontier trade, the provincial towns and hardscrabble settlements that served, primarily, as bases of operations for those agents and factors who carried out the extractive designs of eastern merchants. The story, like Frankenstein, like Beirut, is less known than overtold, a cipher for the present hidden within the trappings of a morality play and a fable. As with most of Poe’s fiction, “The Masque of the Red Death,” traffics in the appurtenances of the European gothic, its aesthetic conventions and tropological figures, its sublime ethereality, its layers upon layers of architectural device. The highly elaborated gothic structure in which the story unfolds–the exceedingly precise evocation of the architectural elements which surround the fiction and heighten its effects–situates the work, insistently and irremediably, at the most awkwardly oblique angles with respect to the social and historical conventions of contemporaneous American writing, yet its title and its subject all but demands that it be read as allegory, one in which the nominally transhistorical phenomenon of plague is brought to bear upon its most immediately relevant incidence, in which the phenomenon of the recent past is read in relation to the historical structure of plague as a symptom of human sociality under the auspices of the state. In “The Masque of the Red Death” Poe draws upon the figure of the plague to evoke the identity of a class hectic about the business of constituting itself in the face of its demise, establishing itself and its identity through a relationship to disease that it also, invariably, a relationship to death and to those people who bear the burden of death as a premature, ineluctable visitation. Refusing to acknowledge the imminence of its dissolution, or the absurdity of its continuation as concerns the purposes of the present or the shape of the future, they hide themselves behind heavy walls, dedicated to the perpetuation of meaningless conventions and the endless pursuit of empty pleasure. The characters in Poe belong to a class that has become a dead-end to itself, a class becoming present to itself and to history through the obsequious application of antique forms: the mummer and the masque, the masquerade and the dance. An irruption of time within this cloistered antiquarium, the Red Death arrives to upend their revels, putting an end to the party, a portent of a future that has already arrived.
The narrator describes a remarkable gothic extravagance, a masque, or masquerade; a magisterial, radiant, luxurious performance, enacted at the behest of–and as a celebration for–the prince, Prospero. Enveloped within the morbid guarantees of rank, Prospero evinces no concern for the sick or the dead, sneering in defiance of the plague, certain that he is protected from whatever scourge has come to infect his dominion, his faith another battlement reinforcing his castle walls. This confidence, however, is little more than a ruse; an act of self-deception concealing a certainly unconscious desperation. The redundant corescations of the structure betray the hysterical dimensions of Prospero’s idiosyncratic wariness, the physical encrustations of his paranoia, the arcane expressions of his decadence. “This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric and august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammer and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within.” Impudent and incautious, Prospero calls upon “a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court,” so they might be barricaded together, trapped, within “one of his castellated abbeys,” huddled together in a luxurious repose in which they will be afforded “all the appliances of pleasure…buffoons…improvisatori…ballet-dancers… musicians…Beauty…wine.” A voluptuary of the elite, dining upon a banquet of chestnuts set before a court impervious in its wretched, languid recline, Prospero’s gothic arsenal offers all these, and more: a sense of disarmament, of secrecy and seclusion, a stage for a performance adamantly disavowed of any public. A proscenium under which the players play at nothing so much as vice, as the plague wages its campaign against the unlucky provincials of the country, the dancers are set under the battlements of the prince and the overture is raised. “The abbey was amply provisioned,” we are assured. “With such precautions the couriers might bid defiance to the contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve or to think….All these and security were within. Without was the ‘Red Death.’”
The success of the story rests upon the force of its prose, which is attuned less to the details of character, conflict or plot than to questions of spatialization and the elegance of its illustration. As the story proceeds, the reader follows the narrator ever deeper into the bowels of Prospero’s dungeon, revealing for the reader the wonders he might see, or the horrors she may behold, or the decorative contrivances by which the space around them has been convened, should they have been invited to join such an august collection of inmates.
It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade…as might have been expected fro the duke’s love of the bizarre. The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel effect. To the right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed corridor which pursued the windings of the suite. These windows were of stained glass [in a profusion of contrasting colors]…Now in no one of the seven apartments were there any lamp or candelabrum….There was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or candle within the suite…But in the corridors that followed…there stood…a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire, that projected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illuminated the room.
No grand audience chamber or vaulted cathedral nave, branching out in a series of arbitrary turns and misaligned transepts, the space prepared for the celebration is as constrictive as the form of the masque, as well as the masks the congregants wear. Limiting their appreciation for the scene, at large, while heightening their apprehension through the formal misalignment of the features of its design, through arbitrary turns among blankly drawn windows, looking upon nothing but admitting a surfeit of light, the congregants stumble through a mottle of colors of languid dissipation. Always alert for some outlandish surprise, the congregants must comport themselves with an appreciation for an unknowable disorder, an eclectic accumulation of devices meant to keep the revelers ever on the defensive, never wholly comfortable except as denizens of an inescapable nightmare, partisans of “the beautiful…the wanton…[and] the bizarre,” witnesses to “not a little of that which might have excited disgust.” “To and fro in the seven chambers,” Poe tells us, “there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams…[writhing] in and about, taking hue from the rooms, and causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their steps.” Trapped inside, alone together, punished by the garish light of the relentless braziers, Prospero and his guests barricade themselves against the passage of time, of day or night, the fluttering of eyelids, the transit of the moon or the stars; only to find themselves courting the imminence of madness of which they cannot be relieved. Neither awake, nor asleep, they travel within the space of a hallucination; their dreams have become flesh and sinew, smell and cloud, the substance of the haptic. Moving in step together, their dreams have been fulfilled and they have become horrible. Together, shackled to the realization of their desire, the revelers have held death at bay at the cost of paranoia and delusion: everything is bizarre and wonderful and they are disgusted.
For the characters absorbed by the masque, what is without is history, or history as a terrain of contingency, of open ended possibility that, while conditioned by a structure, is nonetheless pregnant with possibility, the substance of the instance enfolding the undoing of the whole. Within the space of the story, the Red Death arrives as the substance of history, the figuration of history as drive, as the movement toward destruction, the propulsive movement of the bourgeoisie, its obsession with the organism and its dominion over time. With the appearance of the Red Death, exhaustion is fated: “There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores….[T]he whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease [are] the incidents of half an hour.” Locked behind the walls of his castle, Prospero’s guests mark the passing of time as a minor distraction, the interruption of a convention that is dressed up “loud and clear and deep and exceedingly musical” at the crest of the hour, but present, throughout, as a “dull, heavy, monotonous clang[.]” When the hour arrives, it is “stricken…[and]...from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound [is heard]…of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at the lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause, momentarily…there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company…the giddiest grew pale…and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows…”
Against this portent of decay, stands the opulence of the space; it serves to entice, yet its primary function is to define, to establish the lineaments of a class abandoned to itself, to become an image of all the things they hope themselves to be. Everything at once, arcane and wonderful, obscene and horrifying and diabolically rococo, inside the walls of Propero’s castle, the reader is confronted by the magisterial fullness of all of the things, everything together, girdled in iron. Engorged and effulgent, resplendent with shadow and desperate with light, it is the unhappy domain of the undead and the aesthete, here and forever after condemned to an eternity grappling toward the impossible satisfaction of the undying forms. Less invitations to delight than elicitations of ennui, the more ancient the forms the more stubbornly they persist, greedy and insatiable, eliciting a frenzy, but nothing of release. In Prospero’s dungeon, there will be no rest for undead hands. Everyone you meet is forever a stranger. Everyone you meet is already a friend. The castle holds the plenitude of all things as a hedge against loss; it holds all things together except the immediacy of grief, the study of pleasure without the shattering of jouissance. The masque of the Red Death is what the Red Death is not: the torture of a story that refuses to climax, the torpor of a life outside the imminence of its end.
[These] other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly the heart of life. And the revel went whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the sounding of midnight upon the clock. And then the music ceased…and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus is happened, perhaps that more thought crept, with more of time, into the meditations of the thoughtful….And thus too, it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before….The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat….[T]he mummer had gone so far as the assume the type of the Red Death…and his broad brow, with all the features of his face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.
When the Red Death finally arrives at the party, he appears as the avatar of the materiality of ends, of the materiality of time and the inevitability of flux. He is the apparition of time in the wholly capitalist sense: time not as something that passes or recurs, but time as something that accumulates and moves, time as the substance of a surplus that scatters. This is time as the embodiment of the viscera of labor, time as the standard of the measurement of value. This is time as a resource that will run out; yet time as adjacent to history as contingency, a field of circumstance that is riddled with possibility, a structure released from the cruelty of gods. While the revelers in the story place their faith in a damnable eternity, the Red Death appears before them as both surplus and negation. He is the thing that, being empty, is more them than they are themselves, yet he cannot meet their gaze. Behind the mask, there is no reflection. He will not see; he will not be seen. Unable to see themselves in that mirror, they are undone, and the revels come to an end.
And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers [sic] in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock when out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
Composed, at the end, as a series a conjunctions, at the conclusion of the tale, the reader is ushered away from the castle and into the night, forced to confront an unfolding present, now lived in awe of the future, a future which betokens no guarantees but maybe something of hope. Piling “and” upon “and,” the story lurches forward, breaking free of the mimicry, the repetition and the masque. The Red Death arrives as the herald of freedom, of a new life after death, a world newly freed from the hoarding of time. This is a world that may be complacently mechanical, merciless and indifferent, where life will spent, as a clock winding down, to a meaningless end; yet it is a world that is also disabused of its betters, of the illusion of their sanctity, their sanctification, their nobility, their exclusive claim on the good. Like Christ, for St. Paul, the Red Death arrives among the celebrants as “a thief in the night,” a figure of menace, conspicuously without malice, a shadow one can neither wholly prepare for, nor wholly ever dispel or disregard. “For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.” (Thessalonians 5:3) Drawing upon the image from the evangelist, Poe likens the Red Death to the imminence of birth, to the pain of birth and again to the violent expression of blood. Originally characterized as its Avatar, Poe courts the luxuriousness of the Indo-Oriental, and the Orientalist fascination with the Avatar as the sublunary manifestation of some transcendental good. If the Avatar is the masque of the godhead on earth, the flow of the blood is the truth of his appearance, the blood from the womb, the blood from the pores, the blood of the laborer, sacrificed to capital, spent now in service to the new god of physics, of thermodynamics and motion.
As with Frankenstein, so with Poe: Inasmuch as it is a story about the death of a class, “The Masque of the Red Death” is a parable for the emergence of capital, a gothic entertainment that fabulates upon the reality of its horrors, but that nevertheless hold out some thin gruel of hope. Death by the Red Death is hideous, indeed; and Death will come for all of us, hideous or not. There will be no escape from the terms of that contract. The promise of the Red Death, nonetheless, is the promise of release. There will, it assures us, come some kind of end. Moreover, and more generously, you will not find yourself trapped in eternity, bored to distraction by either the radiance of supplicant choirs or unbearable tedium of uninterested devils. If Frankenstein, as Victor, is the figuration of the new bourgeoisie–its mechanics, its science, its empirical trust in a universe absented by God–the Red Death appears as the instrument of his most infernal creation. We have brought life from death; a life robbed of purpose, to be sure, yet still a life in which death will bring, if nothing else, the promise of rest, an end to labor if no place in the celestial firmament or the kingdom of God. The old world gets sick and dies while the new world is born and goes mad. The old words will no longer suffice to console us and the new words do not exist by which we might make ourselves heard. Death by the plague is the birth of a new kind of literature, one that is terrible and morbid, unbearably angry and deeply romantic, committed to hope against the suffering of the world, but no less committed to a faith in the world as an unrelenting accumulation of pain.
It is the Thing that cannot be borne, or told, or known as such, but cannot be undone or obscured. It is the feeling of walking into a gay bar in Chelsea in 2001. It is the feeling of walking across Manhattan on Fourteenth Street in the spring of 2023. Something is missing. But there are too many people. The time is out of joint. There is a loss that has gone ungrieved.
Would Herman Melville have felt better about himself watching us waiting on line at the club on Little West 12th Street and Gansevoort, hoping to be pretty enough to be let in? Would he be happy knowing the cobblestones are still there? And the view to the Hudson? Call me, Ishmael. But I never gave you my number.
It is 2003 at the Maritime and I am sick of it here. Let’s go to the Wonder Bar. Let’s go to the Cock. Go south. Go east. Look for the light from the towers. Look for the lights on the Battery. Whatever we do. Let’s get out of this dump.