Preexisting Conditions and the Recounting of Plagues

This essay is conceived as the introduction to a book that will be published under the same title.It begins by demarcating the traditional plague-bubonic and other-from the current pandemic,with which it shares certain similarities but from which it is also quite different.It then goes on to raise the question of how and why the experience of plagues depends in great measure on narrative accounts.To this end,Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay on "The Storyteller" is found to provide a useful framework within which to approach this question,since it determines storytelling as a response to a situation of extreme distress("Ratlosigkeit" in German).That response does not purport to resolve the distress but to provide "advice" or counsel(Rat),calling for the invention of further stories.Simply put,even the most epic of epics,the Odyssey,tends to confirm Benjamin's insight that "there is no story for which the question,'What comes next?'could not be asked." If the storyteller has only "borrowed" his authority from death,it is because "death" has no authority that it could give to anyone for all eternity.The time of the storyteller,like the time of human lives,is limited.That being said,there may always be another story waiting.