IT'S SPREADING

Outbreaks and uprisings in Orhan Pamuk's "Nights of Plague."

- JAMES WOOD

Six years ago, the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk started writing a historical novel about the outbreak of bubonic plague on a fictional island. He'd been dreaming of such a project for decades: as a student of history and of the great European plague chronicles and novels-Defoe's "A Journal of a Plague Year," Manzoni's "The Betrothed," Camus's "The Plague"-he had a particular interest in the way that plagues have tended to get what we might now call "Orientalized." Muslims, especially in the Ottoman Empire, have been portrayed as more resistant than Christians to the imposition of quarantine. In a 2020 essay, Pamuk argues that Western observers like Defoe noted a strain of fatalism in the Muslim world view the theological idea of "Every Man's end being determined," as Defoe put it. If you can do nothing to alter your fate, why bother protecting yourself from death? (Historians have vigorously contested the claims about both resistance and fatalism.) Pamuk maintains that, in the nineteenth century, the rise of pilgrimages to Mecca or Medina ensured that Muslims became "the world's most prolific carriers and spreaders of infectious disease." And since people always imagine that plague comes from elsewhere, from anywhere but within one's own society, it may have been politically convenient for Westerners to imagine that it somehow originated in Muslim lands, or, more vaguely, in "the East." As Pamuk reminds us, "Crime and Punishment" ends with Raskolnikov grandiosely fantasizing of a great, obliterating plague "that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia."