Eothen

"Kinglake’s travel narrative comes up for a lot of legitimate criticism, such as in Edward Said’s Orientalism , for having a patronizing tone and a limited perspective. But Kinglake is certainly someone with whom it’s very interesting to think about epidemics. He actually begins his voyages throughout the Middle East from a lazaretto , a quarantine station. Not because he’s in quarantine, but because that is the point on the border between the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire where he waited to be handed over to an Ottoman boat crew that would sail him down into the Ottoman domains down the River Save. The handoff is really dramatic for him. He begins his book by saying: “I had come, as it were, to the end of this wheel-going Europe, and now my eyes would see the splendour and havoc of the East.” You could see one from the other, he says, but the plague separates the two ostensible civilizations. There’s a small ceremony where, Kinglake says, his Austrian traveling companions dropped back, and a guy called the “compromised officer” approaches: he’s an Austrian officer but he lives—as Kinglake says—“in a state of perpetual excommunication” from his fellow Austrians. This man asks Kinglake’s traveling party if they’re sure they were “done with the civilized world?” He offers his hand, and Kinglake takes it. That touch alone meant he would have to be quarantined on returning to Western Europe. Kinglake compares the solemnity of the occasion to departing from this life. So, this plague/no-plague dichotomy structures his entire experience of the so-called East. “The ‘compromised officer’ lives in a state of perpetual excommunication” He says that all the while in Istanbul, the plague was simmering, but not in the middle of a violent epidemic. He claims this actually made things more exciting, writing that plague gave “a tone and colour to all I saw”; it shapes his own perception of Orientalist exoticism, and that’s interesting—the way in which the flexibility of disease as a metaphor allows it to imaginatively accentuate pre-existing stereotypes. He’s writing retrospectively, of course. And perhaps it’s that safe perch, back in Britain and away from the plague, that allows Kinglake to paint himself as some kind of ideal English traveller of the 19th century, ever-ready with a witticism and able to rely on limitless sang-froid . He was not scared of disease at all, he insists. He tells us on one occasion that a beautiful Turkish woman came up to him, and touched him on the arm, and said ‘plague.’ That is a joke, or a flirtation, in a way. But if we push back on that a bit, it shows the resentment that people living in Istanbul may well have felt about the elaborate rituals European travellers were taking to avoid them. There are a lot of ways in which this travel narrative that isn’t explicitly about the plague shows us about how disease can set up divides, reinforce stigmas and stereotypes, and yet also seem exciting to people in a semi-paradoxical way. Kinglake is a witty writer, and though it may be a retrospective fiction that he was so blasé about the plague, I do think his ability to joke about it is a little comforting now—as is the ease with which he managed to go around and not become ill himself! I don’t think so. One of the things that drew me to this topic in general is my own fear of disease! But I do feel calmer when I read some of these books—seeing people living through epidemics and seeing that it doesn’t take over their every thought is certainly helpful. Maybe a better way to answer that is: yes, my research has made me calmer about day-to-day life during the coronavirus era than I would have been otherwise. But the scariest thing for me, and I think for many people, is not what any one day will bring, but the uncertainty about what the world will look like in a few months. How can you even begin to plan for life in future weeks and months, when you have no sense of what kind of timeline this will have and how society can emerge from it? While these books can’t answer those questions, they can certainly show that uncertainty about the nature, extent, and course epidemics is absolutely nothing new."