‘Confusion’ is what might happen if you think about literary theory in your sleep. I wasn’t actually asleep but drifting somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. It must have been in the morning, because I don’t drift off at night, just lie awake for ages and then it’s time to get up and I feel more knackered than when I went to bed. It must also have been a weekend, because I don’t get the time to drift awake during the week.
Anyway, somewhere in this liminal state, I was thinking about the distinction between metaphor and metonym – doesn’t everyone? Briefly, metaphor is a figure of speech that replaces one object with another object that is like the first object; metonym replaces one object with another object that is associated, or contiguous, with the first object. Contagious diseases, I decided are metonymic – they are passed by contact or contiguity. But what if they were metaphorical – diseases passed not between people who have been in contact with each other but who have something in common. It would have to be something shameful: it didn’t take long for my slowly wakening mind to think about ‘shy Tories’. What if everyone who voted Tory (shyly or otherwise) was susceptible to a disfiguring disease?
Once I’d woken up properly, I decided this was the ideal topic for a short story. I’d recently finished a collection of short stories by China Mieville, Three Moments of an Explosion. One story, ‘Keep’ provided a template.
In ‘Keep’, a soil scientist investigates a mysterious pandemic, the symptoms of which are a moat appearing around the body of any infected person who stays still for too long. Apart from featuring a female investigator, I don’t think my story has a lot in common with Mieville’s.
As a writer, I don’t strongly identify with, or prefer, any genre. Mieville belongs to the science fiction genre, and that seems a reasonable catchall for this story. When it was broadcast by Bandit Fiction as part of a podcast, it was described as ‘political body horror’, which is a new one (I think). Recent developments have given it a new twist, although I am duty bound as a sleepy literary theorist to point out that Covid 19 is a metonymic disease, like every other real one.
Jason Jawando 