Masques of the Red Death

The title of this short essay comes, of course, from Poe’s very short story, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, which has once again become a tale for our times. It tells, as is well-known, of a plague or pestilence – none had previously been, so Poe tells us, ‘so fatal, or so hideous’. In the face of this disaster, the no doubt aptly named Prince Prospero retreats to his magnificent palace with a ‘small’ party of a thousand guests and they proceed to revel in luxury while the plague rages outside. In the end, of course, it turns out that death is not so easily kept at bay, and in a resonant phrase, albeit hardly unique in Poe, ‘the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.’11 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, in Robert S. Levine (ed.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th edn, vol. B. 1820–1865 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), 662, 666. Prospero and his aristocratic friends regard themselves, then, as able to exempt themselves from the general course of the disease – or pandemic, as we might now prefer to call it. They can do this because they are unimaginably wealthy, and this, they suppose, confers upon them a certain type of immunity. This is, obviously, a grotesque abuse of power – presumably this very wealth could have been devoted to alleviating the plight of the populace – although to go too far in this direction would be a misreading of Poe, as though he were writing a realist text, which of course he was not. Perhaps fortunately, the current pandemic of the coronavirus Covid-19 has provoked very few such illusions of immunity with, obviously, one glaring exception. Here is Donald Trump in January 2020 shortly after the first US cases emerged: ‘We have it totally under control.’ A little later: ‘It’s going to be just fine.’ And later still, and perhaps more in tune with Gothic fantasies: ‘It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.’22 These statements were widely reported. See Politifact [pseud.] and John Greenberg, ‘“We have it Totally Under Control.” A Timeline of President Donald Trump’s Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic’, Poynter, https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2020/we-have-it-totally-under-control-a-timeline-of-president-donald-trumps-response-to-the-coronavirus-pandemic/ (accessed 14 August 2020); Dan Managan, ‘Trump Dismissed Coronavirus Pandemic Worry in January – Now Claims he Long Warned about it’, CNBC Politics, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/17/trump-dissed-coronavirus-pandemic-worry-now-claims-he-warned-about-it.html (accessed 14 August 2020). American exceptionalism will, in the end, defeat the disease; it would take very little to rewrite this sentence as ‘Putting America first will defeat the invading forces of globalisation.’ By 20 May 2020, of course, the rhetoric had altered, perhaps, some would say, through 180 degrees: then we hear from Trump, remarkably, that topping the world numbers of virus cases is a ‘good thing’ and a ‘badge of honor’, because what it demonstrates is that the American testing regime is working.33 BBC News, ‘Trump Says US Topping World Virus Cases is “badge of honour”’, 20 May 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52733220 (accessed 14 August 2020). It is only fair to say, though, that Poe has no more concern for those excluded from the palace than does his character Prospero: they are never mentioned in the story. There is indeed one mention of the ‘utterly lost’, but this refers not to those succumbing to the disease but to those with no ethical compass, for whom ‘life and death are equally jests’.44 Poe, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, 665. And indeed we might argue that much of the Gothic, from Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis through to Angela Carter and J. G. Ballard, Anne Rice and many others, is similarly oblivious to the plight of the deprived. There are, though, strong exceptions: Stephen King has written compellingly and many times – in Cell and The Mist, to take but two examples – of the passage and dire consequences of pandemic events and their impact on the lives of ordinary, non-privileged people. It may be that King provides us with something of a model for how we might form a Gothic narrative out of these current events, and if so it would obviously not be possible to relegate the poor, the deprived, the outsider to bit parts in the drama; for now in this current crisis it is those who are excluded by reason of poverty or ethnicity who are bearing a disproportionate amount of the burden. On the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 on the morning I first wrote this paper, I heard a woman, a Professor of Catholic Studies, describing in some detail her enjoyment of lockdown, and especially how she could wander at will in flower-filled meadows with only the sound of birdsong for company.55 Tina Beattie, ‘Thought for the Day’, Today, BBC Radio 4, 29 June 2020, available online at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p08jb8tf (accessed 14 August 2020). I do not think she would have wanted my company. I am, I think, as fond of birdsong as the next person, but she made me rather cross. Where, for her, are the single parents on the tenth floor of tower blocks, not allowed to go out yet reliant on food parcels? Despair about this kind of exceptionalist thinking masquerading as moral and aesthetic rectitude brings back to my mind Doris Lessing’s compelling 1974 novel Memoirs of a Survivor. It is not one of her best-known novels, and I am not at all sure it would count as Gothic, except that one of the more or less central characters is a beast called Hugo who may be a dog or may be a cat, depending on how you look at him. It is a novel about ordinary processes of survival in the aftermath of a non-specific catastrophe. Quickly rereading it, I was struck by one particularly resonant phrase: ‘Attitudes towards authority, towards Them and They, were increasingly contradictory, and we all believed we were living in a peculiarly anarchistic community.’66 Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor (London: Flamingo, 1995), 8. Particularly as lockdown eases – if that is what it is doing – I find this contradiction in myself. Seeing groups of people picnicking and not observing social distancing in public spaces, one part of me says, ‘Good for them; let us all handle the problem in our own way.’ This part is fundamentally anarchistic. The other part of me, which I call my inner policeman but others may think of as the superego, says ‘What the hell do they think they are doing? Can they not sense the invisible danger?’ Which part predominates depends, I increasingly think, largely on the weather. Let me give one example of this loosening of authority. The law in the UK clearly states that it is the responsibility of parents to send their children to school except under certain strict conditions; otherwise fines and even a jail term may result. But now sending one’s children to school has become purely voluntaristic; it is interesting, to say the least, to see how the law is attempting to reassert itself, and how painful that process might be. I return briefly to ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, but from a different perspective. I am now interested in the question of masking, and my guide here is an interesting book by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein called Veils, Nudity and Tattoos. Although only tangentially relevant to pandemic, and mostly concerned with the complex ambiguities of female covering, it also contains some phrases that resonate with our current condition: ‘the veil’, the author says, ‘no longer exists as a simple, essentialist, coherent, unified, and eternalised concept’.77 Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, Veils, Nudity and Tattoos: The New Feminine Aesthetic (New York: Lexington Books, 2015); see also https://www.botzbornstein.org/the-veil-project (accessed 14 August 2020). Frankly, even within the most obvious site of Islam, I am not sure it ever did; but the process of masking, of which the veil is one example, has now become far more complex. Who is protecting what from what? How are we to establish identity when masks are the norm? The IRA has always known this; so has the population of Hong Kong, used to wearing masks anyway as a protection against pollution but now adapting the cover-up as a recourse against the police. Will we all wear masks for the foreseeable future? Will faciality vanish as a marker of relationship? I have learned one thing about this, which I have always suspected: you can always tell if somebody is smiling, because the smile is in the eyes, not the mouth, and the eyes, at least, cannot be covered – so, contrarily, you can always tell a Gothic villain even when masked. There are two other texts to which I would like to refer. One is Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils. Here the scenario is an outbreak of what we might call ‘witchcraft fever’ in seventeenth-century France. The film is, in typical Russell style, grand guignol in the extreme; it has also been regarded as so misogynistic that it should not be watched. But I am interested in one specific aspect, namely that during the most violent and repulsive scenes many of the characters, particularly those in the mere role of spectator, wear masks. This may signify their continuing participation in the theatrical masque, staged by King Louis for his own narcissistic pleasure at the beginning of the film; or it may signify, within the film, the impossibility of looking at the scenes of torture that accompany the overarching moral panic. But what is also of interest is that The Devils, unlike its precursor and partial source Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun, is situated in a time of plague; it is saturated in the rhetoric of pandemic, particularly with regard to the need to find a scapegoat, somebody to blame for catastrophe. And this leads me to my final text, which has nothing to do with masks but everything with blame and its consequences. It is Dmitry Glukhowsky’s Metro 2034, one of a series of novels set in the Moscow underground after an apocalyptic war has wiped out almost all of the human race. Now there is an outbreak of an ‘airborne plague’ in one station, Tula, and the responses separate into two approaches. One is based on continuing and intensifying the search for a cure; the other is to mobilise the military in preparation for mass extermination. One can only hope that these do not become the only two options open to us as the current disease progresses. I will conclude with a brief remark on Gothic narrative. The Gothic has always been regarded as a genre of exaggeration, of excess; but who now is to say what is exaggerated, excessive? The argument rages. Of course the current death toll is hardly even visible beside the millions lost to the so-called Spanish flu of 1918; the terror of Covid-19 rests less on numbers than on its apparently global reach, which is in turn a presumably direct consequence of globalisation itself as an instrument and manifestation of capitalism. Here within the established economic order we have a Gothic villain indeed: driven by greed and an insatiable need for self-aggrandisement, culpably careless of the lives of millions both human and animal: what worse monster could take to the stage and then, of course, conjure profit out of death? For during the time of the pandemic, as we now all know, the combined wealth of the five largest global companies – Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook – has grown, like so many creatures from the black lagoon, to be larger than the wealth of a major European state.

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