Greetings from a normal wall instead of the
traditional greenscreen - as you can probably
guess, we’ve had to adapt the structure
of this show because of the ongoing pandemic,
and what better way to start us off then a
discussion… about pandemics in literature.
What a time to be alive.
let's take a look at some forms pandemics
have taken in fiction - how have they changed
as our understanding of the science of illness
has changed?
In the scheme of human history, pandemics
are nothing new, and in fiction they have
been the inspiration for and stuff of nightmares
for just as long.
Pandemic lit helps us contextualize the real
thing.
It mirrors our fears about disease and societal
collapse while simultaneously showing us that
survival is possible and that rebuilding ourselves
into something new is not only necessary...but
inevitable.
Fundamentally, a story about a pandemic is
rarely about the disease itself - - as a genre
pandemic literature focuses more on sociology,
psychology and human behavior, in no small
part because illness is a part of life, but
a pandemic is that part of life that has exploded
into disaster territory.
According to Susan Sontag in her seminal work
on pandemics, Illness as Metaphor, “Illness
is the night-side of life, a more onerous
citizenship.
Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship,
in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom
of the sick.”
For most of human existence, people didn’t
really know where disease came from--modern
epidemiology was hardly a twinkle in our scientific
eye until the mid-19th century--so we gave
it our best guess: magic, angry gods, too
much phlegm in the system and not enough of
that yellow bile, original sin, or an evil
stinky cloud of bad air.
So early examples of pandemic literature focus
more on what people do during pandemics, with
perhaps a touch of moralizing and pontification
about human nature.
To quote Sontag again, “Feelings about evil
are projected onto a disease.
And the disease (so enriched with meanings)
is projected onto the world.”
The Black Death, which started in the mid-14th
century and wiped out anywhere from 30%-60%of
Europe’s population, makes its way into
a lot of medieval literature.
Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353), is
an elaborate anthology of tales framed by
a narrative in which ten young people flee
plague-ridden Florence to the countryside.
In order to pass the time, the party takes
turns telling stories over each night during
their self-quarantine.
See, even during the black death there were
long stretches of boring during social distancing
that needed to be filled with… something.
Obligatory Netflix joke.
*dabs*
But much in the way that social distancing
with a good bingeable story is nothing new,
so to has the way early authors and thinkers
tied disease to issues of morality and self.
The Pardoner’s Tale from Geoffrey Chaucer’s
14th century The Canterbury Tales conflates
the treacherous, violent behavior of its three
villains attempting to kill Death in the middle
of the plague, to the sinful behavior thought
to bring plague on.
Said professor of English Byron Lee Grigsby
about Chaucer and his contemporaries, "Lacking
any knowledge of vector-borne diseases, people
of the Middle Ages were left to conclude that
the plague was a consequence of sinful behavior.
The job of the medical, theological, and literary
community was to interpret the meaning of
the plague, the causes of God's anger and
man's sin!"
Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death,
features the indolent, greedy Prince Prospero
and his entourage’s unsuccessful attempt
to hide from a Plague called the Red Death
by holing up and throwing a massively extravagant
party while the poor outside die.
As York University Professor Brett Zimmerman
writes, “Prospero and his guests employ
art and the carnal pleasures to forget death
and disease… [but] on some deep level they
recognize the futility, the vanity, of their
hedonistic and aesthetic attempts to forget
disease, darkness, decay, and death."
Maybe… man is the real virus.
By Poe’s lifetime in the mid-19th century,
however, science began to fill in the gaps
concerning disease that had previously been
speculation.
Germ theory!
Pasteurization!
Hooray!...
But in order for there to be a story, first
the disease has to spread, and again as we
have regrettably learned in our current situation,
misinformation can become a PLAGUE of its
own.
In The Scarlet Plague by Jack London (1912),
London writes the terror of a disease science
couldn't keep up with it.
With no clear incubation period, and death
coming from within 15 minutes to 2 hours of
the first symptoms, news of it's spread is
censored in the papers to avoid panic--much
like it was during an outbreak of Bubonic
Plague in San Francisco’s Chinatown in early
1900’s.
In London’s book, economic greed and the
herds of people fleeing cities in terror,
further spreading the disease, is the doom
of civilization.
Failed government response, or sometimes even
government-engineered pandemics, became a
popular concept in pandemic lit during the
20th century.
In Stephen King’s The Stand, a flu-like
respiratory virus kills over 90% of the people
on earth and the survivors have to live out
a god-vs-the-devil chess game.
As bad as King’s pandemic is, it’s made
much worse by incompetent and war-focused
governance.
Then came Outbreak by Robin Cook, which was
a bestseller in the late 1980’s, which echoed
the public’s fear of germ warfare and the
inability of the government to stop the plague.
Although the book should not be confused with
the terrible film of the same name, which
was based on a nonfiction book called The
Hot Zone.
Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
elevates the inherent horror of plague by
having the infected people trapped in closed
quarters on space ships with nowhere to escape
the spread.
When the ship’s AI seems to turn on its
own people in an effort to save the uninfected,
the humans shut it down in an act of hubris,
not believing the recommended safety procedures
are necessary.
This, combined with the leadership’s refusal
to publicly share accurate information, results
in the plague spreading through the ships
and annihilating the population.
But pandemic can also be a good opportunity
to explore what it means to be human, and
what crisis does to our humanity.
French philosopher Albert Camus also used
pandemic as a vehicle to explore the “we
live in a society” experience in his novel
The Plague (1947), in which he uses plague
as a symbol to talk about war, occupation,
and oppression.
Said Camus later, referring to his experience
during the German occupation of WWII: ‘I
want to express by means of the plague the
stifling air from which we all suffered and
the atmosphere of threat and exile in which
we lived’
In I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (1954)
a pandemic not only wipes out most of the
world’s population but the ones that are
left are now vampires - the changed people
are horrifying, and they’re all that’s
left.
But the book ends with the protagonist’s
realization that the people he’d taken for
monsters actually had a society of their own,
and saw him as the horrible monster that hunted
them while they slept.
Maybe… man is the real monster.
And in Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
(2014), a flu wipes out most of the population
and the survivors split into cults and traveling
Shakespeare companies.
As a pandemic novel written in the time of
social media, it focuses on how separate we
become based on petty things like our interests
and the media we consume.
Good thing we don’t have that problem now.
And of course no discussion on pandemic literature
would be complete without talking about zombies
and other creatures that turn the sick into
monsters, I am Legend style.
For that, I want to turn it over to Dr. Z,
who is something of a zombie scholar.
Zombies, like all undead monsters, can represent
a whole slew of things.
From the dangers of science to Haitian slavery,
fears of globalization to commentaries on
political parties.
They’re kind of like a catch-all for everything
we’re afraid of.
A zombie outbreak or pandemic is even something
the CDC uses as a way to teach people about
emergency preparedness.
One of the most famous literary interpretations
of a zombie plague is Max Brooks’ World
War Z, a recorded “oral history” of the
survivors of the undead pandemic.
Brooks says that he uses zombies as substitutes
of real-world plagues.
He wrote World War Z and The Zombie Survival
Guide as a way to explore what would happen
to the majority of the population if such
a pandemic occurred, saying that “Most people
would die from what the military calls second-
or third-effects.
… For every person who dies from a zombie
bite, how many people would die from sickness
or infection?”
Basically the books are an intellectual exercise
into how different countries respond to real
plagues—something that it looks like we
should have paid more attention to.
The Walking Dead comic series is an example
of how large-scale pandemics affect communities
on a more microlevel.
Tensions arise not only because they are trying
to survive flesh-eating monsters, but because
race, gender, religion, sex, and politics
still effect day to day life.
Spoiler alert!
When it’s revealed that every living human
is infected with the zombie virus, these social
dynamics become even more pronounced.
Zombies pop up in parody literature, like
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and even in
romance novels like in Warm Bodies.
So it’s not all depressing mass destruction
all the time.
Buttt it usually not very fun.
But the genre isn’t just about what the
disease does to people - in some occasions,
disease itself can be a character….
Sort of
In the Expanse series, the protomolecule,
what looks initially to be nothing more than
a horrible infectious agent might sort of
also kind of be a hivemind?
And ultimately radically alters the trajectory
of human civilization.
And in Orson Scott Card’s Ender series,
there’s a virus called the Descolada which
is not only integral to life on its home planet,
it’s also deadly if it gets offworld - which
is complicated further by the discovery that
it might actually kind of be sentient - so
we can’t kill it!
Or that would be xenocide and Ender already
did that once by accident.
Oopsy daisy.
Boy those books get squirrely.
Interesting to note in these examples is that
the disease doesn’t think or act like a
human - it operates on its own logic, and
for its own ends.
The same could be said for diseases in the
real world - they aren’t an invisible enemy
to fight, they aren’t an antagonist to go
to war with, and they don’t think like a
human, so it’s best not to think of them
as such.
Living through a pandemic is scary and stressful--it’d
be a disservice to us all to not honor those
feelings.
But if there is hope, it’s in literature’s
ability to show us that we have always survived,
learned, and adapted.
Scalzi’s Lock-In series is an example of
books that aren’t about the experience of
pandemic itself, but the world that arises
after the dust has settled - how society has
adapted to this and now includes this entire
class of people who live with this disability
that resulted from the pandemic - by using
androids.
Life after a pandemic not only exists, it
creates a new normal.
To again quote professor Grigsby on the subject
of plague in the Middle Ages: “Eventually
the plague becomes so common that people begin
to deal with it as a normal part of the human
experience.
... The disease, consequently, becomes part
of normal experience.
If one lives long enough, he or she will experience
plague, either directly or indirectly.”
We are always worried and scared of the unknown--for
all our scientific progress, there is always
a lot more than we’d like to admit that
we don’t understand.
But with that comes the idea that society
survives after chaos, but fiction can tell
us what to look out for, and in some cases,
can seem downright prophetic in hindsight.
According to World War Z author Max Brooks:
“When I was thinking up an origin story
for my fictional pandemic...
I needed an authoritarian regime with strong
control over the press.
Smothering public awareness would give my
plague time to spread, first among the local
population, then into other nations.
By the time the rest of the world figured
out what was going on, it would be too late.”
Sometimes art imitates life, and sometimes
life imitates art.
