The Culture of the Pandemic: The Spectre of the Literary and the Afterlife of the Plague Narratives in Orhan Pamuk's Nights of Plague

Abstract

The article analyses the discourses on the first, second, and third bubonic plague pandemics to reveal the contingencies associated with their interpretation, reinterpretation, and the revisionist literature on these events that have emerged across different time periods, framing a culture of the pandemic. The paper draws on the ideas of William Viney, Felicity Callard, and Angela Woods to argue that disciplinary boundaries, such as those between the arts, humanities, and social sciences, undermine the entangled web of knowledge systems that constitute biomedical culture. The critical scholarship in the modern era has been concerned with the encroachment of literary imagination in the narrativisations of plague in the pre-modern era. By the Enlightenment period, the narrative norm for describing an empirical and scientific phenomenon as a disease was perceived as a matter-of-fact descriptive account. The article analyses how the cultural imaginary of the plague pandemic is constructed between the interstices of disciplines. It examines how Orhan Pamuk’s Nights of Plague (2022), in a self-reflexive fashion, foregrounds the constructionality of plague narratives and exposes their modern cultural politics, which were intricately tied to the colonial agenda by initiating a resignification of the disease once described as the Oriental plague.