A Journal of the Plague Year: Defoe’s Grammatology and the Secrets of Belonging

This essay examines, via the agency of “writing,” the uneven modernity of Defoe’s generically unstable A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Two types of writing figure in this narrative. The first is the linear “Art of Writing,” which Defoe first spells out in An Essay on the Original of Literature (1726) and defines as an ensemble of graphic practices that plot the progress of civilization. Within this “Art” two discrete and segregated forms of writing obtain: “Apertus” (“common and apparent writing”) and “Opertus” (“occult, or secret [writing]”). When integrated, however, apertus and opertus create a dialectically charged second type of writing—here called grammatology—that reveals the inner workings of so-called linear modernity. In reconstructing the Great Plague, Defoe’s narrator H. F. assumes that his histoire événementielle is only that: a reconstruction of a once terrible time, yet careful examination discloses how secret writing insinuates itself into apparent writing. His blindness to the complexities of writing enables him to consent tacitly to the fiction of liberal belonging as its modes of subjugation, long thought past, escape his notice.