How Pandemics Seep into Literature https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/04/08/how-pandemics-see...

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INF LUENZ A V IC T IMS C R OWD IN TO A N EMER GEN CY HOSPITA L N EA R F ORT R ILEY, KA N SAS IN 1 9 1 8 .

In October of 1918, a delirious Katherine Anne Porter experienced what she termed “the beatific vision.” Close
to death from the novel influenza virus that would kill 50–100 million people, Porter felt transported to a
paradisal landscape, one free of the pain and fear that had overtaken her body. To the surprise of all, she
survived her illness, and later transformed the experience into her powerful novella “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.”
That story is one of the few literary works directly about the pandemic that killed more people in the United
States than the country lost in all the twentieth- and twenty-first-century wars, combined. The experience,
Porter said, “simply divided my life … and after I was in some strange way altered … it took me a long time to go
out and live in the world again.”

COVID-19 promises to alter us all in strange ways. It’s a paradigm-shifting event that divides lives and cultures
into a before and after. We will emerge changed, though how those changes will manifest is far from certain.
The sensory details of this outbreak—the masks, the faces of doctors and nurses creased with worry and fatigue,
the closure signs, the antiseptic smells, the empty streets, the stacks of coffins—will weave their way into our
minds and bodies, triggering us back to this moment years in the future. For me, the experience has also held an
uncanny familiarity. I have spent the last five years writing a book about how the sensory and affective climate of
the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic infuses interwar literature, often in ways we have not recognized. My new
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And the timing mattered: the influenza pandemic came on the heels of the deadliest war the world had yet to
see, an overlap that meant the pandemic received far less attention, despite killing so many more people. The
second mass-death event in five years, the pandemic arrived when the world was already overrun with corpses
and grief.

Yet the literature that arose from the influenza pandemic speaks to our current moment in profound ways,
offering connections in precisely the realms where art excels: in emotional landscapes, in the ways a past
moment reverberates into the present, in the ineffable conversation between the body’s experiences and our
perception of the world.

Right now, every few days brings another reality into focus; what seemed far-fetched yesterday arrives
tomorrow. The past is always another country, but the speed at which knowledge becomes outdated, naivete
turns to realization, and basic truths change is dizzying during a pandemic. In “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Porter
wove her own paradigm-altering experience into a broader meditation on the vertigo induced by such shifts.
She encodes these swings in a play of styles, moving between a hallucinatory, dreamlike language to convey the
virus’s invasion of bodies and a more straightforward, realist style to convey the war. Part of the challenge for the
characters is to read correctly the story they are in; saturated in a war story that is terrible but familiar, this
narrative is what seems real. They know their roles (male soldier, female civilian), the threat (artillery warfare),
the enemies and the allies, and they know how this story ends (death for the soldier). Caught up in this
paradigm, they miss that reality has changed, that the enemy is now invisible, that women face equal threats,
that the home front is as dangerous as the front lines. There are consequences for misreading: as they worry over
the threat to the soldier’s body in war, they circulate through restaurants, theaters, hospitals, and workplaces.
Even after one of them falls ill, they touch and kiss and share cigarettes, believing themselves in the outdated
story as a new delirium takes over the narrative and their lives. Porter captures the emotional and physical jolts
of a constantly shifting reality, and the inherent risks in failing to adjust quickly enough to a new paradigm.

One’s reality doesn’t simply shift in a pandemic; it becomes radically uncertain—indeed, uncertainty is the
reality. The unpredictability of the COVID-19 virus and all we don’t know about it means we have no idea where
we are in the story or even what story we are in. Is this the first wave of something even deadlier to come? Have
we reached the top of the curve? What’s the scope of the tragedy? Is the economy the real story? What do we
think we know now that may prove fatally wrong? The narrative uncertainty causes many of us to turn to genre
fiction and predictable movies (even if they are about disaster)—they allow us to pull down another story like a
shade and sit in a place where we already know the ending. The modernist literature I spend my days teaching
and studying typically grants the opposite, capturing the fragmentation and plotlessness of a
postwar/postpandemic world. T. S. Eliot, who along with his wife caught the flu during the pandemic, felt
weighed down by what he termed the “domestic influenza” of his health and home life, and his worries that his
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ears. The poems sense of chaos and horror comes, of course, from many causes, including war, revolution, and
Ireland’s political violence, but the poem also speaks to the terror of an agentless, hidden threat, one that drowns
innocence and lets loose mere anarchy and a blood-dimmed tide.

The invisibility of the threat in turn produces what we might term contagion guilt, a haunting fear that one
might pass a deadly infection to another. Routes of transmission are known generally but rarely specifically; one
fears but does not know the precise means of transfer. In William Maxwell’s elegiac novel They Came Like
Swallows, which recalls his own pregnant mother’s death in the influenza pandemic, the characters are haunted
by all the what-ifs: what if they had taken their boy out of school earlier? What if they had chosen the next train
car rather than the first one? What if they had not entered the room that day? Such guilt can live in the mind as
a low-lying presence, unresolved and unresolvable. And this guilt comes, too, in its anticipatory form—what if
that touch, that visit, that missed hand wash harms a loved one or a stranger? Porter’s central character in “Pale
Horse, Pale Rider” dreams of a nightmarish invisible bow that shoots arrows at her beloved, who dies again and
again despite her attempted interventions.

As we are witnessing every day, a toxic brew of uncertainty and fear also flows into well-worn channels of
scapegoating and cruelty, turning an invisible viral enemy into an illusory but visible foe. The xenophobia woven
into a “Chinese virus” or even the “Spanish flu” sets up whole groups for denunciation. Factual medical
descriptions of contagion, disease, and contamination morph into poisonous discriminatory metaphors of
moral uncleanness and danger. The early-twentieth-century horror writer H. P. Lovecraft channeled into his
postwar/postpandemic writing his prejudicial and homophobic beliefs that immigrant hordes and deviants
were tainting pure Aryan blood lines. After the influenza pandemic had swept through his home state of Rhode
Island, Lovecraft populated his stories with proto-zombie figures rising from the dead in the midst of
pandemics or wars, bent on further destruction. Lovecraft transforms a miasmic blend of diseased atmospheres
and deep-seated prejudices into monsters that can be seen and killed with impunity, a move that suggests the
dangerous ways anthropomorphizing the threat may mask vicious discriminatory impulses.

And yet what pulses through all these works—and through our current moment—is the body itself. Virginia
Woolf, who knew so much about illness and whose heart was damaged by her encounter with the 1918 virus,
observes in her essay “On Being Ill” how illness and the body are left out of our art and conscious experiences.
We deny how in truth, “all day, all night the body intervenes.” In the midst of acute illness, the world both
narrows and broadens into the body’s suffering, an experience hidden in part because of the profound isolation
it so often produces. As Woolf writes, “those great wars which [the body] wages by itself…in the solitude of the
bedroom against the assault of fever” go unrecorded. The post-1918 pandemic works encode these internal
battles, sometimes directly and sometimes in fragments and echoes. They capture the way a virus may shatter the
body’s internal perceptions, the way fever and pain and fear of death turn reality into delirium. Porter depicts
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exhaustion that lingers after an illness. Like Woolf, Clarissa Dalloway has heart damage from her encounter
with influenza, and as she moves through the streets of London and at home, she sees her world through her
sense of bodily vulnerability, her very heartbeat and its lags pulsing through the memories of her illness. The
sights and sounds and smells of the sickroom float back through her consciousness, shifting the ways she
perceives the London day. Whether in illness or in observation, our own bodies are busy now. They are
recording our pandemic, setting in place the reverberations that will echo into our future.

Elizabeth Outka is a professor of literature at the University of Richmond. Her latest book, Viral Modernism: The
Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature is out from Columbia University.

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My Lighthouses
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False Alarm
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By The Paris Review
May 15, 2020

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