What literature tells us about pandemics
In this period of
isolation, one turns to literature and art to come to terms with reality, and
place it in the context of history. As I continue to stay indoors because of
the pandemic, spring has given way to summer. I follow the turn of seasons with
elation — I look out of my window and see flowers blooming and the changing
shades of green on trees. Yet this tranquil radiance invites dark thoughts as
scenes of pandemic recorded in literature — bodies piled sky-high waiting for
burial, cries of pain searing through the London smog — crowd the mind.
This worldwide pandemic is certainly not the
first. Nor will it be the last.
In denial
The work that comes most readily to mind is,
of course, Camus’s ThePlague, that bleak parable illustrating the
human condition. Like the French army marching into Algeria, the plague
descends on the Algerian town of Oran, where one “never hear[s] the beat of the
wings or the rustle of leaves.” The plague “rules out any future, cancels
journeys, silences the exchange of views”. Although people “fancied themselves
free”, the novel tells us that “no one will ever be free so long as there are
pestilences.”
But The
Plague is not merely an allegory; it is also the tale of a
devastating natural calamity. Dr. Bernard Rieux decides to stay back in Oran to
tend to the sick, accepting a life of “exile and imprisonment” that is the
inherent fallout of every pandemic. Camus writes at the beginning of the novel
that “everybody knows... pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet
somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our head from a
blue sky.”
Indeed, the initial response to any pandemic
has always been denial, with the state machinery playing down the number of
fatalities to conceal the seriousness of the situation. This happened in the
early days of the Great Plague in London in 1664 — Daniel Defoe’s A
Journal of the Plague Year testifies to the common practice of the
state spreading misinformation and manipulating the media to suit its
interests. From our own experience of the way some states round the world have
reacted to the COVID-19 crisis, we know this all too well by now.
One can trace a few patterns: the U.S.’s
recent denunciation of China echoes the efforts of the KGB to hold the U.S.
responsible for the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Nearly two millennia ago, Roman
emperor Marcus Aurelius held the Christians culpable for the smallpox
affliction in his empire. During successive plagues, Jews were accused of
poisoning the wells of Europe. Defoe underscores the bigotry and xenophobia
that underlie this tendency. Racist bias is apparent in the haunting figure of
a hooded man surreptitiously contaminating public places.
Living to tell the tale
Pandemics spare no one, rich or poor. “The
vast cities of America, the fertile plains of Hindostan, the crowded abodes of
the Chinese, are menaced with utter ruin,” writes Mary Shelley in her dystopian
sci-fi novel, The Last Man (1826). This is the story of
the plague in Constantinople in 2092, lasting a year and returning in spring in
a more virulent avatar. People rush to churches and mosques to appease the
gods. While legislatures vacillate on taking suitable action, human
achievements in the fields of arts, commerce and agriculture gradually decline.
At the end, wandering in the ruins of Rome, the narrator comes across a
manuscript in Italian and decides to write a book, The History of the
Last Man, dedicated to the dead. It will have no readers.Modelling
his plot on Mary Shelley’s, Jack London wrote the post apocalyptic novel, The
Scarlet Plague, in 1912.
The protagonist here, a professor of English
literature, is among the handful who live to tell the tale. Looking out across
San Francisco, he says, “Where four million people disported themselves, the
wild wolves roam to-day.” His grandsons have no idea what money is: he finds it
difficult to explain to them how, as the plague arrived in the world run by
capitalists, trains stopped, stores were looted, and huge swathes of population
starved and died while the wealthy fled to their farms or islands.
If we come through this pandemic, many would
perhaps be inspired to write about their personal tragedies and future fears.
“All a man could win in the conflict between plague and life,” says Camus, “was
knowledge and memories.” History repeats itself, with none growing wiser with
experience. Only literature continues to fight for a more equitable world,
where healthcare is a right not a privilege and transparency in governance is a
justified expectation not a pipe dream.
