Calamity in literature

Nasir Abbas Nayyar

Literati
April 5, 2020

Writing is an act of creating order out of disorder, coherence out of

chaos and an attempt at making absurdity bearable

(Calamity doesn’t occur momentarily, it is a product of years of nurturing. — Qabil Ajmeri) 

Calamities, pandemics, and wars are an abrupt, devastating performance of a

‘competence’ constituted by an overall world view of society. The question is:
what happens to a competence when a performance is in unusual yet full swing?
Maybe, if performance is there, on the scene, manifesting its power with all its
dreadfulness and destructiveness, competence is severed from the
performance.
In simple words, in times of wars and pestilence the old order of peacetime is
flung into suspension or experiences disorder. There are no clear-cut answers
as the overwhelming calamity leaves little room for the kind of reflection that
can result in a reliable cause-and-effect analysis.
However, our experience of calamity and its representation in creative
literature tends to confirm that present disorder and its auxiliaries like
uncertainty, disorientation, confusion, fear, gloominess etc originate in the
order of the past. Disorder sprouts from within, like chaotic dreams that come
from well-organised minds. What is more significant currently is that the
well-planned order for globalisation seems to be on the verge of collapse.
Borders are closed; free mobility, a hallmark of the globalised world, has
ceased and the recent chain of events augurs no certainty for the near future.
Only virtual mobility reins the socially distanced, quarantined individuals. In
our own country, we are seeing a conflict of ideas regarding putting off
religious congregations: a performance representing the competence of an
ideological state.
Writing literature, too, is an act of creating order out of disorder and
coherence out of chaos. It is an attempt to make absurdity bearable by
describing it in a meaningful manner. So, it is not surprising to see that some
of the great works of literature were produced in the backdrop of wars,
epidemics, earthquakes and other calamities. A significant feature of the
greatness of literature produced in times of crisis is the way it adapts to deal
with human suffering. 
The quote on Library Walk from Camus's The Plague

Sorrow represents one face of the coin that is suffering. The other side is a site
where metaphysical, ethical and existential questions about the origin and
reason of suffering are registered and debated. It might seem bizarre to be
engaged in such philosophical questions while people are dying and need
help, but the emergence of such questions makes sense. Suffering hits not only
our corporeal bodies but our egos too. “Why me?” is a question asked by
every tormented soul. The effort to discover the origin of our suffering is
meant to salvage our anxiety-ridden egos.
The prototypal site of the debate about the origin of suffering is
supernatural/abstract and corporeal/experiential. Every society inherits this
prototypal site, but it is the historical trajectory of each society that shapes the
mode, intensity, and norms of the debate over its origin.
Thinking in supernatural terms leads to the idea that sufferings unleashed on
humans by natural calamities are the price of the crime humans commit in
violating the will and order of their Creator. For instance, in the Holy Bible a
plague is depicted as one of the punishments for sin. Voltaire, the French
enlightenment-era writer, registered the same point in his Poem on the Lisbon
Disaster written in the backdrop of the earthquake which destroyed Lisbon in
1755. He was disparagingly referring to the priests and philosophers insisting
that ‘All is well’.
“Seeing this mass of victims, will you say,
“God is avenged. Their death is the price of their crime?
“What crime, what fault had the young committed,
“Who lie bleeding at the mother’s breast?”
In Urdu, we have Nazir Ahmad’s novel Tauba tan Nasooh (Repentance of
Nasooh) written in 1874. Set in Delhi in the 1860s, it revolves around a moral
reform project initiated by the protagonist, Nasooh, after, his recovery from
cholera. He watches his late father – a victim to the epidemic – in his dream
soon after surviving from cholera. The father shares with him a list of sins he
had been guilty of. “Alam-e-asbaab mein reh kar asbaab-parast ho gia” (living in
the material world, one became a materialist) is the crux of the long speech.
Being a materialist, is thus the origin of sins and wrongdoing. 
Our experience of calamity and its representation in creative literature tend to
confirm that present disorder and its auxiliaries like uncertainty,
disorientation, confusion, fear, gloominess etc, all originate in the order of the
past.
In simple terms, the state of one’s faith and not some microbiological
organisams, is the source of one’s sufferings. The idea not only recurs in
popular Urdu literature of colonial and postcolonial periods but also lies at
the heart of the debate that began in the late 19th century and has gone on. The
novel shows how a resuscitated belief in the religionist explanation of the
world gets heightened in times of pestilence and inculcates a missionary zeal
among believers to initiate a moral reform project. The disorder caused by the
common, yet unusually strong fear of death is used thus as an opportunity to
promote ideological agenda.
The same happens in Albert Camus’s The Plague, first published in English in
1948. It narrates the story of a plagued Oran. Excerpts from Father Paneloux’s
speech delivered from the pulpit of Oran’s cathedral show how people’s
misery was interpreted as the flail of God. The plague, according to this
narrative, was not a natural phenomenon – the work of microbiological entity;
rather it was a punishment for the sinful. The sufferers deserved no sympathy
and there was no need to do anything to lessen their pain or cure their
disease. One only needed to learn the lesson: “the lesson that was learned by
Cain and his offspring, by the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, by Job and
Pharaoh, by all that hardened their hearts against Him.” This way Father
Paneloux seeks to uphold the Bible as the sole authoritative text to interpret
everything that happens under the sky and to brush away any texts produced
by humans that might claim to offer an understanding of natural phenomena
and the social world. For him, the plague was a great opportunity to lead up
the sufferers to giving in to the command of truth – the origin. Paneloux’s
views are challenged by Dr Rieux who remains busy in his hospital, curing
the patients. “Do you believe in God, Doctor?” asks Tarrou, a journalist
visiting the fatigued doctor’s house in the evening.
“No – but what does that really mean? I’m fumbling in the dark, struggling to
make something out. But I have long ceased finding that original,” answers
the doctor. “Isn’t that it – the gulf between Paneloux and you?” Tarrou puts
another question. What Rieux says in his reply is the summation of a
worldview:
“I doubt it. Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn’t come to contact
with the death; that’s why he can speak with such assurance of truth – with a
capital T. But every country priest who visits the parishioners and has heard a
man gasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do.”
Dr Rieux tells Tarrou that it was the suffering of dying people that drove him
to form his ideas. In Faiz’s words “Bara hae dard ka rishta, ye dil ghareeb sahi”.
Suffering can remove all kinds of distinctions, differences and hierarchies
established by our racial, national, gender, ideological or religious identities.
Common sufferings tend to unite people while ideologies cause splits. In
times of suffering, we are closer to humanity.
The following couplet of Mirza Ghalib can be read in response to any of the
calamities or the necessity to be quarantined.
(Let’s move to a place where there is no one else. No one to share our
thoughts and none to know our feelings.)
Rajindar Singh Bedi’s Urdu short story Quarantine describes how bravely
William Bhago, a sweeper, served patients of a plague in quarantine and lost
his wife. An Daata (Benefactor), a short story by Karishan Chandar depicts the
hard-hearted response of colonial rulers to the miseries of famine-ridden
Bengalis. This story also shows that a calamity and its representation may be
quite different: representation is a highly volatile ‘place’. It has equal potential
to disrupt or strengthen the existing political order. That is why the elite never
let the representation of a calamity take a fact-based course.
The kinds of psychological and existential behaviours shown by common folk
in times of pandemics have been dealt with in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque
of the Red Death, Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Gabriel Garcia
Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, José Saramago’s Blindness  among other
stories. There are diverse behavioural responses registered in these stories of
epidemics. They range from fear, irrationality, avarice and jealousy to true
love and indulgence in bizarre joyousness – all in their unusual, disorderly
outpourings.