Intertextual Penetration And Cultural Fashioning Of Plague Writing ——Taking A Journal Of The Plague Year In 1722 And La Peste In 1947 As Examples

As representatives of the plague writing,Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of Plague Year and Albert Camus’ La Peste have many similarities.From the perspective of new historicism,text has historical characteristics,and the historical context of text generation has a crucial influence on text construction.A Journal of Plague Year was written in 1722,two years after the plague in Marseille.La Peste was published in1947,the second year after the end of the Second World War.The confinement of Oran City was the displacement of the island of France.Meanwhile,La Peste directly quotes the sentences from A Journal of Plague Year in the first part of the work,reflecting the direct intertextual relationship between these two works.Thus,Defoe’s plague writing became one of the historical contexts of Camus,and together with the major historical events of the time,played an important role in the process of text construction.The historical significance of literature is reflected in the influence of historical context on literary creation,but literature is not a re-enactment of history,but the expression of reproduction with the writer’s subjectivity.The subjectivity of Defoe is reflected in its way of narrative.From the perspective of plague writing,the plague condenses the painful experience of human beings since ancient times,so the plague memory has long been a permanent trauma buried in the collective unconscious of human beings.Introducing modern psychiatry knowledge about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,we can re-examine the narrative way of protagonist H.F.,and all of which are surprisingly consistent with the symptoms of PTSD patients.From this perspective,the narrative method adopted by Defoe has increased the credibility and appeal of A Journal of Plague Year,serving for Defoe’s ultimate purpose of persuading readers to believe in the authenticity of the text.The subjectivity of Camus is manifested in its control over the mood of the times.In his diaries,Camus talked about the prevailing state of the war for many times--separation.This general state made the writers of the 1940 s particularly fond of the the story of Eurydice.This mythological stories caused a wonderful resonance in the 20 th century.In addition,the sense of community awakening in the plague situation is also a unique insight of the two writers.This kind of observation reflects the subjectivity of the two writers,and also reflects their subjective differences.H.F.’s community consciousness is still in its infancy.In the case of La Peste,the characters,such as Rieux,Tarrou,and Rambert,have made their own choices,which sees the priority of community.Camus’ attempt to unite the people in the "plague" highlights its precious qualities,especially in the mainstream of modern art.Neither the H.F.in A Journal of Plague Year nor the people in La Peste have stopped questioning the meaning of the plague.H.F.inherited the Demi faith of Defoe.And at the surface of the work,he always insisted on explaining the meaning of the plague by a devout way.Such words are also seen from Paneloux in La Peste.However,this religious interpretation was subverted in H.F.’s hidden discourse of individualism,as well as in Dr.Rieux’s doubts.According to the personal notes of Camus,the war metaphor of "plague" is clear at a glance.However the connection between war and plague goes far beyond causing a large number of deaths and common pessimism.In Plagues and Peoples,William Mc Neil attempts to rewrite human history from the perspective of plague.He discovered two important parasitic forms--microparasites and macroparasites--that affect the historical process of human society.Mc Neil’s discovery made the plague a natural rationality for metaphorical warfare and tyranny.It proved that the connection between war and disease is not limited to the rhetoric.At the same time,Camus’ ambition is not only to use the plague to insinuate the war,but also to promote the plague writing to the general concept of survival,that is,to give the plague a philosophical metaphor.In this dimension,La Peste needs to be interpreted in the entire creation system of Camus.Camus intended to express the correct way of resisting the Caligula through La Peste,that is,to treat it as an objective thing rationally,rather than trying perform any abstraction and conceptual processing.As important works in plague literature,A Journal of Plague Year and La Peste have become the canons of other plague writings,because of their whole plague writing,epic writing style and rich meanings.The true plague memory in history,as a kind of social energy,is reproduced in the literary world by these two writers,and is widely accepted and read by readers because of its public attributes and classics.Thus,through the plague memory weaved by the writer as a transformation of social energy,it has returned to the reader’s world.In the end,the plague imagination that exists in the minds of mankind is a reasonable product of history and writers.It is a self-sufficient image that has been constructed,and thus completes the cultural fashioning of plague writing.