Leprosy and Living Ruins in Lawrence Scott's Night Calypso‪.‬

Declaring that, "[a]llegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things" (178), Walter Benjamin alluded to an aesthetic hermeneutic of allegory and ruins premised on a capacity for multiple meanings. Like allegory, ruins are often associated with hidden, parallel narratives and are meaning-full beyond the sum of their individual parts. This capacity for meaning, however, hinges on acts of aesthetic enquiry that ascribe cultural significance to states of decay, dereliction and fragmentation. Often evoked metaphorically, as "history [that] has physically merged into the setting" (Benjamin 177-178), ruins can inspire nostalgic narratives of past achievement or render visible the passage and traumas of time. Images of ruins recur in Night Calypso as part of the novel's criticism of colonial institutions. These ruins, however, are deployed in relation to Caribbean peoples and societies in the aftermath of plantation slavery, indentureship, and other colonial experiments and do not inspire nostalgic reverie. Indeed, in Night Calypso images of infrastructural ruins on the island leprosarium at El Caracol (1) conceptually intersect with metaphorical ideas of ruins. (2) The ruins of the leprosarium in the novel's opening vignette, for example, mark the decline of a colonial medical experiment, under the banner of Christian missionary care, whose project was to order, discipline, and regulate individuals infected with leprosy. (3)