Isha Biswas
Ph.D. Scholar, English Department, Vidyasagar University
Abstract
In the current global scenario, we find ourselves approaching rapidly-escalating paranoia about survival, enmeshed in heated, increasingly frantic discussions about long-term consequences once the madness recedes. Trapped in the inescapable periodicity of historic recurrence of pandemics, there is a hike in readership of postmodern SF and contagion dystopia, where fantasies awaiting manifestation seem far less impracticable. In this paper, my objective is to examine how Dan Brown’s Inferno, the highly-acclaimed science fiction – meets art history thriller represents the calamitous event of a terrifyingly infectious virus outbreak, which takes an incalculably unpredictable peripatetic turn at the end where the supposedly deadly virus is revealed to be an airborne contraceptive, thus effectively staging potential moral and ethical pitfalls for the protagonist and the readers who are left to question the legitimacy of socially constructed paradigms of humane principles disintegrating in the face of their polluted, overpopulated, dying home planet.
Keywords: pandemic, infertility, sterilization, demodystopia, demografiction, vaccine, eugenics
Open your eyes! We are on the brink of the end of humanity, and our world leaders are sitting in boardrooms commissioning studies on solar power, recycling, and hybrid automobiles? How is it that you—a highly educated woman of science—don’t see? Ozone depletion, lack of water, and pollution are not the disease—they are the symptoms. The disease is overpopulation. And unless we face world population head-on, we are doing nothing more than sticking a Band-Aid on a fast-growing cancerous tumor
. ̶ Dan Brown, Inferno (139)
Scientist-antagonist Bertrand Zobrist’s “villainous” master plan was more or less success – as one could expect from a speculative, near-dystopian fiction – while constantly suffering (even posthumously) epithelization ranging from inspired genius to raving lunatic. However, for a postmodern audience struggling under the rising pressure of an overpopulated world, the premise of the novel strikes a chord in the sense that perhaps for the first time in our life of adult readership, we find ourselves in the awkward position of wanting the heroic, erudite professor-protagonist to lose the game for once. Throughout Brown’s Robert Langdon series, where meticulously weaved plots met learned scholarship of the history of art and literature, there had been innumerable “what-ifs”. What if Langdon had failed to suspect the Grail was buried beneath La Pyramide Inversée in The Da Vinci Code? What if the sensory deprivation tank in The Lost Symbol he was submerged and left to die in wasn’t filled with breathable oxygenated liquid? In every step along the way we are compelled to evaluate the hero’s chances of survival against near-impenetrable odds, with our nerves taut in anticipation of the worst, tethered to reality by the “what-ifs”. While our sympathy remains undeniably strong for the life of the protagonist as he rushes to stop a cataclysmic act of bioterrorism, it’s the anti-climactic explanation of the weapon being unleashed upon the world that stops us in our tracks and shakes our resolve about the actual consequence of the “crime”. We face the what-if dilemma once again, this time for a very different cause when the villain’s accomplice Sienna Brooks explains the truth about the virus released:
“The virus has the ability to render the human body…infertile.” She shifted uncomfortably. “Bertrand [Zobrist] created a sterility plague.” Her words struck Langdon hard. A virus that makes us infertile? Langdon knew there existed viruses that could cause sterility, but a highly contagious airborne pathogen that could do so by altering us genetically seemed to belong in another world…some kind of Orwellian dystopia of the future. (Brown 438, emphasis mine)
Inferno posits the diametrical opposite of the more popular creed of speculative science fiction where the story revolves around a hypothetical situation of the way residual humanity rebuilds itself up from the ground after catastrophic external/internal factors have done their work causing a landslide of deaths. The idea of “depopulation” in literature concerned with mass annihilation, Lionel Shriver notes, “has some kid-in-a-candy-store appeal; houses, groceries, and liquor are free and abundant” (155), although such a comment would very well be viewed as socio-politically tone-deaf and imperceptive in the present COVID-19 scenario, and with good reason.
On the contrary, Dan Brown’s Inferno presents a new addition to the emergent genre of the literature of population excess, in variance with the previously noted literature of population decline. Fiction dealing with demographic changes fall under two major umbrella terms: the first being ‘Demografiction’, coined Anton Kuijsten in The Joy of Demography…and Other Disciplines: Essays in Honour of Dirk van de Kaa, who categorized fiction focusing on demographic changes as a newly developed genus where “population dynamics either is their central theme or is the all-dominating context in which the theme develops” (86). The second is an expeditious follow-up clarification by critic Andreu Domingo called ‘Demodystopia’ (2), where “demographic evolution [is] a social problem in need of a (usually urgent) solution”: a subtype that had been anticipated through H. G. Wells’ literary productions and achieved in the post-1945 era of Judgment Day fantasies.
Perfunctorily, Inferno could very well seem a run-of-the-mill doomsday novel of apocalypse fiction. The text is speckled with countless appellations for the proposed agent of infertility – from the fear-inducing, quasi-medical “plague”, “airborne virus”, “contagion”, “pathogen”, “infection”, “DNA-altering viral vector” – terms immediately reminiscent of the diabolical gyre of historic pandemics ravaging the world (as we temporally and spatially sit right in the middle of such a global calamity), to the outright Molochian “chthonic monster” rendered in riddles concocted by its creator himself, spurred on by descriptions of literal, physical Hell/Inferno in Dante Alighieri’s The Divina Commedia: “…for here, in the darkness, the chthonic monster waits, submerged in the bloodred waters…of the lagoon that reflects no stars” (Brown 278).
Given to masterful theatricality, Zobrist’s character infuses the readers with terror from the beginning with gory, imbrued half-truths about the actual physical and genetic transformation he’s aiming for through his creation, in the way that we are almost blindsided when Sienna Brooks presents before us the purported impact of the virus, and the extraordinary workings of a mind which took insight from one of humankind’s most devastating moments of annihilation:
…“[Zobrist] was fixated on the Black Death—the plague that indiscriminately killed one third of the European population. Nature, he believed, knew how to cull itself. When Bertrand did the math on infertility, he was exhilarated to discover that the plague’s death rate of one in three seemed to be the precise ratio required to start winnowing the human population at a manageable rate.” That’s monstrous, Langdon thought. (Brown 438)
So did we, when we had not yet known the truth about a supposed genocidal ideologue. Our moral compass begins floundering under the deluge of new information, much like Langdon’s, who instinctively grasps the reality of the pre-existent, overlooked evil: “Our own virility stalks us, Langdon realized. The chthonic monster” (Brown 437).
With a widely-read author producing a piece of popular literature explicitly devoted to the “what-if” of etching out a parallel timeline of events where a third of the world shall remain childless, genetically mutated in a way that the ratio is somehow preset undisturbed across generations, one begins looking beyond the efficacy and into the conundrum of morality, or amorality in this case, at play. The sterility-inducer in question supposedly chooses hosts – or study participants, if the catastrophe is reductively analyzed as an experimental treatment plan – using randomized selection procedure, which veritably problematizes the issue of “worthy” candidature. Patrick Reilly in Bills of Mortality: Disease and Destiny in Plague Literature from Early Modern to Postmodern Times discusses the significance of the concept of “random”, or chance happenings, in case of pestilence and associated texts:
Destiny, for instance, figures prominently in plague literature, wherein it engenders a lexicon—“chance,” “providence,” “preordination,” “fortune,” “fate,” “luck,” “contingency,” “random,” “doom”—to produce texts that variously delineate, in the matter of destiny, the metaphysics of plague. (Reilley 3)
So, who exactly “deserves” this form of chemical/genetically engineered castration? The world of socio-criminal justice has been neck-deep in multiple, century-long arguments about issuing castration as a noncapital punishment and potentially an emasculating deterrent for rapist-murderers and pedophiles, including serial offenders. With randomization and no legally validated parameters for selection in place, it begins the challenge of protecting innocents from becoming guinea pigs to the undesired breach of bodily autonomy.
The ultimate question is one of choice. The motive behind the spread of the “disease” possesses functionality and practicality – in a planet whose biospheric balance is already on the brink of collapse from the scars humanity is leaving behind – separates it from being another middling terror that one could take an unyielding stand against armed with righteous rage and minimum moral dilemma. However, the alleged effect of nonconsensual sterilization that doesn’t spare innocents becomes both literally and figuratively equivalent to the violation, to rape, ironically the same criminal offense for which lawmakers had been arguing about the castrative penalty. It is, as Joel E. Cohen argues in his essay “Demografiction”, a fascist intervention (122).
Issues of health hazards, governmental arm-twisting and consequent public outrage at similar procedures, however legal or well-intentioned they may be, have echoed across reality and fiction like Indira Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi’s mismanagement and flawed execution of family planning programmes, which was dealt with in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and “The Free Radio”. Furthermore, the very idea of infertility in females, in particular, still stigmatized as an aberration to be abhorred and demonized, brings to mind the horrific conduct towards the sterile “Unwomen” who were considered redundant in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Perhaps it was a social critique on Dan Brown’s part to have taken the telling and powerful narrative decision in his novel to render the director of the World Health Organization (WHO)- Dr. Elizabeth Sinskey- infertile, decades before the conception of the virus:
Her fiancé had spied a beautiful hand blown mobile and innocently commented that he wanted to hang one just like it someday in their baby’s nursery. Overcome with guilt for having kept a painful secret far too long, Elizabeth finally leveled with him about her childhood asthma and the tragic glucocorticoid treatments that had destroyed her reproductive system. Whether it had been her dishonesty or her infertility that turned the young man’s heart to stone, Elizabeth would never know. (Brown 308)
One could assume it was perhaps to point out her sentiment of extreme empathy towards the unwitting “lab rat” men and women under the weight of coercive genetic transmutation, while at the same time paradoxically emphasizing the nonsensicality of the presumption that a woman’s sole avenue for completeness, worth and fulfillment lies in motherhood and ability to procreate. Dr. Sinskey’s value in the eyes of the world and of time is immeasurable, extending far beyond the childhood trauma of the unfortunate medical accident that had wreaked havoc on her body, and her worth is accentuated even more in the lines that immediately follow, describing her indefatigable merit and formidable bond with the profession that saves lives: “Her only memento of the heartbreak […] had been a lapis lazuli amulet. The Rod of Asclepius was a fitting symbol of medicine [and] she had worn it every day since” (Brown 309).
Could Inferno’s eponymous infernal virus, in retrospect, be life-saving as well? Despite the doubts regarding its efficacy in bypassing any harm to life’s other functional qualities through the DNA metamorphosis, it would induce Sienna Brooks quite vehemently maintains her belief in the non-fatalistic, non-homicidal aftermath that Zobrist aimed for. The author thus sites the novel in direct defiance of the genre of Plague Literature- from Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, where death lurked in a miasma of unvaccinated and hence unpreventable certainties, with relentlessly snowballing numbers of wounded and infected in a world without cure. Through comparisons harkening to the Black Death, Inferno (and Inferno, the virus) presents itself as an unambiguous critique of the same:
. . . [Zobrist] created Inferno as a kind of modern-day catalyst for global renewal—a Transhumanist Black Death—the difference being that those manifesting the disease, rather than perishing, would simply become infertile […] The effect would be similar to that of a recessive gene…which gets passed along to all offspring, and yet exerts its influence in only a small percentage of them. (Brown 438)
Transhumanism has been argued by many as a direct descendent of Malthusian Eugenics, which maintains that “all cultures, from the primitive to the advanced, rose and fell in accordance with their relative ability to balance the needs of the strong against those of the weak and defective” (Moberly 88). We circle back to the same ethical quandary: who merits being elected to decide the criteria of life-or-death for mankind at large, and what would be the specifications for the same. Would someone like Dr. Sinskey, the Atwoodian “Unwoman”, be forced to experience the handmaids’ dehumanization, while the arbiter of eugenicist survival circumvents her intellect and acumen to simply deem her unsuitable based on her incapability as a reproductive progenitor? To imagine a dystopia like that recede any progress Brown had been striving for in his attempt to subvert the archetypal disease-outbreak narrative.
Embroiled in the debate of ‘ex post facto’ preservation of life versus the egregiously invasive ‘means to an end’, the pandemic created in Inferno seems less because of an active pathogenic intrusion, and more because of something which for all intents and purposes works self-contradictorily similar to a vaccine rather than a disease. The skeptic in us would take a leaf from Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, where the pinnacle of advanced genetic splicing ended in devastating tragedy because of mankind’s hubristic, illusory endeavour to control and bend Mother Nature to their own devices. Life would always find a way, as the authorial mouthpiece, Dr. Ian Malcolm had stated with surety (Crichton 65).
Dan Brown presents the audience of the novel with the same deliberation, which he partially resolves through Brooks’ unwavering optimism and Darwinian perspective:
. . . Nature has always found a way to keep the human population in check—plagues, famines, floods. But let me ask you this—isn’t it possible that nature found a different way this time? Instead of sending us horrific disasters and misery … maybe nature, through the process of evolution, created a scientist who invented a different method of decreasing our numbers over time. No plagues. No death. Just a species more in tune with its environment. (Brown 453, emphasis mine)
Dan Brown had always been familiar with the depths of human psychology explored throughout his authorship. In Inferno, he takes up the mantle of foraying into the connection of humankind to nature and dives into genre-bending Plague texts and Demodystopia with Deep Ecology, exploring the endless possibilities of how we can bring ourselves back to safety from the edge of the abyssal precipice of extinction by simply attuning ourselves to the needs of Earth which houses and nurtures us, and by never defying or denying intellectual evolutionary progression in favour of reproductive propagation, but to hold both developments in equal respect and with equal fervour.
Works Cited
Brown, Dan. Inferno. London: Bantam Press-Transworld Publishers, 2013. Print.
Cohen, Joel E. “Demografiction.” Secrets of Inferno: In the Footsteps of Dante and Dan Brown. Ed. Dan Burstein and Arne de Keijzer. Stamford, CT: Story Plant, 2013. Web. 24 Apr. 2020.
Crichton, Michael. Jurassic Park. UK: Random Century Group, 1991. Libgen. Web. 7 Mar. 2011.
Domingo, Andreu. “Demodystopias: Prospects of Demographic Hell”. Population and Development Review, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Dec., 2008), pp. 725-745. JSTOR. Web. 26 Apr. 2020.
Moberly, Kevin, and Brent Moberly. “The Dark Ages of the Mind: Eugenics, Amnesia, and Historiography in Dan Brown’s Inferno.” Ethics and Medievalism. Ed. Karl Fugelso. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014. Libgen. Web. 13 Sept. 2017.
Reilley, Patrick. Bills of Mortality: Disease and Destiny in Plague Literature from Early Modern to Postmodern Times. Ed. Tamara Alvarez-Detrell and Michael G. Paulson. New York: Peter Lang. Libgen. Web. Vol. 223 of Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures. 2015. 23 Apr. 2020.
Shriver, Lionel. “Population in Literature.” Population and Development Review, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Jun. 2003), pp. 153-162. JSTOR. Web, 26 Apr.
Isha Biswas is a Ph.D. scholar in the Department of English at Vidyasagar University, Midnapore. She is also a faculty member of the Department of English at Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis Mahavidyalaya, Kolkata. Her doctoral research investigates the representation of the figure of the witch in American literature. She holds a master’s degree in English from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and has been awarded the Bachelor’s Gold Medal for academic excellence having been ranked first class first in English at Presidency University, Kolkata. An avid writer, she had previously been published in the Socrates journal and various e-magazines.