You know, up until a year or so ago, reading about the global Spanish flu pandemic from a century ago seemed like so much abstract history, like something that couldn’t possibly happen in this age of modern medicine and advanced technology.
So… that happened.
I’ve been fortunate; Friday, March 13, 2020 was the last day I worked in the company office as we transitioned to remote work, and I’ve been working from home since. It’s worked out better than I’d hoped, so I count myself very lucky in that regard.
But like so many, we haven’t gone anywhere, done anything for a year. Just the essentials: grocery shopping (when we can’t shop online), doctor or dentist visits, necessary errands, helping my mom out. Occasionally “dining out” by picking up food to bring home. Wearing masks always, always when out. All the measures that have kept us safe and healthy.
And we’ve gotten vaccinated, which is a huge relief! But we’re still laying low until more people get theirs, of course. Until case counts stop rising, and until epidemiologists deem it safe. No, we won’t stop wearing masks.
The collective PTSD we’re all going to suffer from this—are suffering—is going to be staggering. I often wonder how this is going to be reflected in creative output for the next few years; what sort of psychic imprint and influence will the pandemic have on the literature written over the next decade, for instance? If the patterns are traceable. And I wonder the same thing about the Spanish flu, if we can trace how the collective psyche changed by tracing its influences in literature and art. (Spoiler: yes, we can.)
This Mother Jones article tackles just this topic in an interview with Elizabeth Outka, author of Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature.
Did you ever predict that this would come out during a pandemic?
No. I started working on this book about five years ago. I’m a scholar of modernism—end of 19th century, early 20th century British literature, for the most part—and I’ve done some work in trauma theory. I had never heard of the influenza pandemic. When I started to read about it, I thought, huh, that’s odd. It’s right in my period, 1918-1919. Fifty million to 100 million deaths. Which means the United States lost more lives in the pandemic than we lost in World War I, World War II, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined. I know enough about trauma to know that you can’t kill off 100 million people and not have it have an impact on the art or the culture.
Then I started to wonder why, in modernist studies, we don’t study this right alongside the war, as two big mass death events of the early 20th century?We do a lot with World War I, but nothing with the pandemic. It began with that mystery, and then I started to find [the 1918 pandemic] everywhere.
What are some of the examples? Any that people could read now?
If you are interested in pandemic literature, there’s a lot of great things. I think Katherine Anne Porter’s novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider is one of the best pieces of literature we have specifically on the 1918 pandemic. It’s absolutely terrific. William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows is a short, beautiful, elegiac novel about the 1918 pandemic. It’s quite sad but it’s really beautiful. I think reading things like W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway or T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”—these are difficult texts, but this is a moment where you could see that they do match our mood.
We’re seeing some of this already with television shows set concurrently with the pandemic, with people wearing masks and doing the quarantine shuffle (those shows that deign to portray this, anyway), and I wonder in however many years’ time when people are binge-watching this or that particular series, what will they think? Will it be a reminder? Traumatic, or taken in stride? Regarded as historical curiosity?
Anyway. Right now I’m at the same stage as everyone, experiencing pandemic fatigue (covid cabin fever?), with a fuzzy sense of times and dates, general ennui, general distrust of and disdain for the anti-mask, anti-science, anti-vax idiots out there who don’t seem to understand there’s a deadly disease running rampant through the population.
Otherwise, besides working, there’s been a lot more reading, watching more TV, baking bread (just standard white bread for sandwiches, nothing fancy), noodling around with potential beer writing ideas, life with cats (a different experience when you’re always around), cooking more (a lot more)… pandemic life.
But! We’re healthy, and vaccinated, and many of those close to us are too. I realize we’ve been very lucky with me being able to work remotely and staying safe and generally getting through this; so many haven’t and it’s hard to get a handle on that to a certain extent. We’re all going to need support groups or some sort of therapy or other coping strategies when this is all over, that’s for sure.
