PANDEMIC LITERATURE
The study of epidemics helps us understand politics, socio-economic structures, and
personal relationships. Their outbreaks span across centuries and continents. From the earliest
times, to the present epidemics have affected human history in myriad ways: demographically,
culturally, politically, financially, and biologically. The earliest plague epidemics raised
questions about humans’ relation to God. Yellow fever led to the success of the Haitian
revolution. Epidemics of cholera exposed how the industrial revolution created conditions for
contagion to spread among workers and the poor. The global influenza epidemic of 1918-1920
led to an outpouring of altruism and self sacrifice. From plagues in medieval periods, Spanish
Flu (1918), herpes and legionnaires’ disease (1970s), to AIDS (1980s), Ebola (2013-2016),
severe acute respiratory system (SARS, 2002-2004), and now COVID – 19, contagious disease
continue to threaten and damage human populations. It has become a common observation that
the contagious’ diseases’ makes us feel like we are living within a dystopian novel. It may seem
an unwelcome new territory for us, but mankind has in fact stood here before many times and
written about it. In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the protagonist Raskolnikov “dreamed
that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe
from the depths of Asia” (Dostoevsky 7). This sentence can be evidenced by the dramatic aspect
of epidemic response to stigmatise and allocate responsibility. From Jews in medieval Europe to
meat mongers in Chinese markets, someone is always blamed. This story of blame exploits
existing social divisions of religion, race, ethnicity, class, political or gender identity. We feel
very attracted towards the sense of mystery and darkness through the prediction of morality and
process of death after battling the invisible enemy. In the COVID–19 situation, authors may
examine how far it, unlike the previous epidemics in evaluating situations where elderly people
will die to retain the ‘lives, and futures, of the young’? Poetess Pan Ayre’s latest ode to corona
virus contradicts this notion as she regains her strength at the age of 73.
Pandemics have affected social life since establishment of civilisation.
Hippocrates
recorded the first known pandemic in 412 BC, and numerous outbreaks were reported during the
Middle Ages. The most notable epidemic that of the ‘Spanish influenza’, occurred in 1918.
Although more than 88 years have been passed since that time, and memories of the disaster
have been blurred, the sudden emergence of SARS and avian flu has reminded people of this
painful past once more. Defoe’s chronicle shows us that behind physical and mental suffering
there also lies anger against fate, against a divine will that witnesses and perhaps even condones
all this death and human suffering. In modern times we are orchestrated by our fear and deaths.
We share our anxieties and anger via different virtual network. We wish we can build a kind of
solidarity and resistance against fate and divinity.
Medieval writings, such as The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) and The
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400), emphasized human behaviour: “the fear of
the contagion increased vices such as avarice, greed, and corruption, which paradoxically led to
infections and thus to both moral and physical death”. Under the lockdown circumstances the
above mentioned vices were displayed by elite and sometimes common citizens in urban settings
in the hoarding of essentials from superstores and groceries. However, writers such as Defoe and
Camus allowed their readers glimpses of didactic and existential philosophies respectively
beneath the waves of vulnerabilities, and fears – as something innate to human nature. A Journal
of the Plague Year, one of the most important works of literature ever written on contagion and
human behaviour, tells us how in 1664, local authorities in some London neighbourhoods tried
to make the number of plague deaths appear lower than it was by registering other, invented diseases as the recorded cause of death.
Many commentators claim that the current UK
government has likewise undermined the real figures and have not counted with death figures
from care homes or other informal institutes and people’s residences. The outbreaks of deadly diseases like typhoid, smallpox, cholera, malaria and the plague
are not recent phenomena. They are as old as civilization itself. As explorers ‘discovered’ new
lands and emperors dispatched armies to conquer new territories, they either took with them or
brought back diseases that eventually wiped out large sections of the population. The great
Roman and Byzantine Empires, for instance, battled frequent epidemics as they kept pushing
their geographical boundaries. And then there was Black Death in the mid-14th century, which
wiped out more than one-third of Europe’s population and altered the course of history. But it
was the onset of colonialism in modern times that changed the basic template of these
widespread outbreaks of disease. First, the increased mobility introduced by colonial settlers
imparted swiftness to the spread of epidemics, turning them into pandemics. Second, since
different regions across the globe were now connected through trade and travellers, diseases once
endemic to a particular region started spreading across international borders. They became
epidemics, which were further transformed into pandemics.
One of the earliest references to this is in The Indian Cholera (1835), a play written by
Norwegian poet Henrik Wergeland. The play captures the role of British colonialism in
transforming cholera, which was endemic to the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent, into a
worldwide pandemic in the first half of the 19th century. We know that the 19th century witnessed
three major waves of cholera pandemic in quick succession: 1817-24, the 1830s and 1840-60. On
each occasion, it started in the Ganges delta in India and spread to other parts of the world, such
as West Asia, Europe, the Americas, China and Japan through colonial trading networks.
The best piece of epidemic-oriented literature is undoubtedly noted French writer, Albert
Camus’ The Plague (1947). Another novel written by Colombian novelist, Gabriel Garcia
Marquez titled Love In The Time Of Cholera (1985), explores death and decay as well as against
the backdrop of recurring civil wars and cholera epidemics in the south American continent. In
this novel, Marquez presents the conflict tradition and modernity as embodied by two of his
central characters. While one of them represents the traditionalist attitude towards cholera and
advocates accepting it as part of life, the other echoes the modernist approach, which emphasises
its eradication. There are scattered references to epidemics like cholera, the plague and influenza
in Hindustani literature as well. Noted Hindi writer Phanishwar Nath Renu’s short story
Pahalwan Ki Dholak (1944), set in North India, depicts a gloomy writer night in the countryside
during a cholera epidemic. This story juxtaposes the cholera outbreak against the changing socio political conditions in 19th century India. Luttan Singh Pahalwan is the central character of the
story. Due to the decline in extravagant regional courtly in 19th century India, which coincides
with cholera outbreak, Luttan Singh loses his sons as well as his own life. Another story that captures the gruesome reality during an epidemic in India is Vibhasta
written by journalist Pandey Bechan Sharma (1900-1967), a writer noted for his provocative
satire and who used the pen name ‘Ugra’. The story, written in Hindi uses the backdrop of
Spanish flu/influenza pandemic of 1918 – the ‘Spanish flu’ did not originate in Spain but was
widely reported in that country via other countries, where there was a media blackout during
World War I – which was brought to India by Indian soldiers returning from World War I. The
initial outbreak was reported in Bombay but the disease soon spread throughout the country.
Millions of Indians succumbed to this pandemic, including family members of leading Indians
including political leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan as well as Hindi
poet Suryakant Tripathi Nirala.
In fact, British India witnessed 12-14 million deaths, the largest
number of casualties for any single country in the world due to the Spanish flu epidemic.
In Ugra’s story, the pandemic struck so much fear into the hearts of people that
performing the last rites of deceased relatives had become difficult. Nobody wanted to risk their
lives while carrying he deceased to the riverside for cremation. Spotting an opportunity to make
a small fortune, the central character of the story, Sumera starts carrying dead bodies to
cremation sites. Indeed, he earns a handsome sum for this service but gets infected and pays
with his own life. Perhaps the most poignantly tragic among India’s ‘Pandemic Literature’ is
Hindi poet Suryakhant Tripathi Nirala’s memoir Kulli Bhat (originally in Hindi and translated
into English as A life Misspent) which portrays the gruesome reality during India’s tryst with the
Spanish flu. In his memoir, written in 1983, Nirala recalls how the Ganga was laden with corpses
during the pandemic.
Noted satirist Harishankar Parsai in one of his essays titled Gardish Ke Din (1971) recalls
terrible times from his childhood during a plague epidemic. He writes that of all his childhood during a plague epidemic. He writes that of all his childhood memories, those of the plague were
most dreadful. He lost his mother during the plague epidemic of the 1930s and those events are
forever imprinted in his mind. Apart from Hindi and Urdu, literature in other Indian languages
too tells moving stories in times of epidemic. Fakir Mohan Senapati, often described as the
‘father of Odia literature’, writes about social prejudice during the outbreak of an extremely
virulent cholera epidemic.
In the first-ever short story published in Odia titled Rebati (1898), he
writes about Rebati, a young girl from a backward village hit by cholera, who is determined to
get an education. Her conservative grandmother attributes the girl’s desire for an education and
the steps taken by her father to fulfil his daughter’s wish as the reasons for the cholera outbreak.
In the 19th century, conservative Odia society viewed women’s education as taboo, and Senapati
in his story deftly shows how overwhelming social prejudice can be during an epidemic.
Similarly, famous Malayalam novelist, George Verghese Kakkanandan, in his novel
Vasoori (1968), captures the outbreak of smallpox in a remote hamlet in Kerala. The different
ways in which the local residents react to it constitutes the central theme of the fascinating novel.
Even a casual look at epidemic – centric literature speaks volumes about how people, societies
and regimes have perceived and reacted to disease outbreaks. Stay with it long enough and will
realise that if a pandemic appears to have begun as a biological phenomenon, it always has a
political, social and economic context that explains how it behaves, how it is tackled, and who
gets to live.
The word ‘Pandemic’ comes from the Greek pan meaning ‘all’ and demos ‘the people’
and the word is commonly taken to refer to a widespread epidemic of contagious disease
throughout the whole of a country or one or more continents at the same time. Nevertheless in
over past two decades, the term has not been failed to be defined by many modern medical texts.
There have been significant pandemics recorded in human history, and the pandemic related
crises have caused enormous negative impacts on health, economics, and even national security
in the world. However the term ‘pandemic’ has a long history, it is still not been defined by
many medical texts, and the conception is still changing. But there are some key features of a
pandemic, including wide geographic extension, disease movement, novelty, severity, high
attack rates and explosiveness, minimal population immunity, infectiousness and contagiousness,
which help us to understand what pandemic are. The negative impacts of pandemic are serious.
Pandemics have infected millions of people, causing widespread serious illness in a large
population and thousands of death. It represents a serious threat not only to the population of the
world, but also to its economy. The impact of economic loss can result in instability of the
economy, which is through direct costs, long term burden, and indirect costs. The social impacts
of pandemics were severe, include travel was strictly limited, and schools closing, markets and
sporting were closed. All these are a likely reality should a pandemic with true potential for high
morbidity and mortality emerges. A security threat of pandemic influenza as is not a recent
phenomenon. Global security is threatened from pandemics, in terms of lives and economic
stability.
Throughout centuries, illness, death and fear resulting from pandemics and epidemics
have played a major role in the history of humankind. In additional to historical records of these
events, we have at our disposal many fictional books that portray narratives on human despair,
sorrow, and grief originating from the authoritative force of social transformation brought about
by infectious diseases. Major pandemics documented in these works, by way of fear, have
shaped human emotions and fostered radical change in cultural beliefs. For centuries, people
considered human illnesses as phenomena caused by the supernatural or religious realms. In
medieval Europe, the disastrous spread of the black plague through urban and remote rural
settings exacerbated existential threats and precipitated a sociological transition from the middle
ages to the Renaissance. A growing secular community emerged from the pandemic, as people
searched for a new understanding of the natural world.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), the Colombian Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel
Garcia Marquez tells the story of a plague insomnia that infested the Buendia family in the town
of Macondo. As time went by, all family members lost their memory and lost track of their
identity and they recovered their stories as told by a Gypsy that visited town over the years. In
this tale, Garcia Marquez illustrates that storytelling in our collective memories supports the
pillars of our human essences. The great literature of plagues, pestilences, and pandemics reveals
that we are bound to each other, to life in general, and to the wild forces of the natural world.
Many collected of plagues contain fictional narratives of uncertainty that triggered social
disruption, demographic transition, and civil unrest. As it have mentioned earlier, in A Journal of
the Year of the Plague (1720), Daniel Defoe tells us about the social destruction elicited by the
spread of the Black Plague in London’s parishes in 1665. The works such as The last Man
Standing (1826) by Mary Shelley, The Masque of the Red Death (1842) by Edgar Allen Poe and
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The Plague (1947) by Albert Camus challenges human existence by depicting an apocalyptic
scenario of the annihilation of the human race by a pandemic and also portrays the long lasting
political change and social calamities triggered by a major pandemic. The fiction text Blindness
(1995) by the Portuguese Nobel Prize laureate Jose Saramago chronicles an epidemic of
blindness as a parable to the ruthlessness of political authoritarianism of the Twentieth century.
To write the book The Plague, Camus immersed himself in the history of the plagues. He
read about Black Death in Europe in the 14
th century, the Italian plague of 1630, and the great
plague of London of 1665 as well as plagues that ravaged cities on China’s eastern seaboard
during the 18th and 19th centuries. However, Camus was not writing about one plague, as has
sometimes been suggested; his was a metaphoric tale about the Nazi occupation of France. Like
Camus’ The Plague, Blindness by Jose Saramago uses its pandemic as an allegory of society,
where life is reduced to a substantial fight for survival and people succumb to a contagious form
of blindness which can transform your vision into a visual milky sea.
Athanasius Kircher’s investigation can be an important early step to understanding
contagion, and perhaps even the very first articulation of germ theory. Kircher was possibly the
first to view infected blood through a microscope. During the summer and fall of 1656, as
kircher remembered it, the ‘altogether horrid and unrelenting carnage’ of Naples was on
everyone’s mind, and “each man, out of dread for the ever looming image of death, was
anxiously and solicitously seeking an antidote that would ensure recovery from so fierce an evil”
(45). He predicted that the prospect of death could sometimes translate into increased inspiration,
to achieve immortality. His keen observation (1658) through the plagues reflected in Scrutinium
psetis, tells us “people scrubbed floors and walls with vinegar; burned rosemary, cypress, and
juniper; and rubbed oils and essences on their skin. The wealthy left the country if they could.
Vagrants were sent to prison or conscripted to help the sick and scrub the streets of filth” (52). Parallel to Defoe, Mary Shelley in The Last Man (1926) took her evidence from the
riveting diary of plagues, and created a kind of science fiction, Zombie apocalypse and other
apparent consequences of fate. By identifying thus with the plague in her private journal and in
The Last Man, Shelley confronted the fact that humanity is the author of its own disasters. As
scientists now remind us daily, collective human behaviour will either drive up or flatten the
curve of Covid-19’s rate of infection, Shelley also saw clearly that we are both the problem
behind and the potential solution to such a pandemic. COVID-19 has creepily invaded the world
without prior notice, leaving many, mainly the elderly and other vulnerable people isolated at
home as the only means of staying healthy and virus free.
People discussing COVID-19 frequently cite the famous film Contagion (2011) which
opens with a woman coughing. It’s not just nervous throat-clearing. The cough becomes the
protagonist and blends with other characters in director Steven Soderbergh’s film, creating terror.
Like under COVID-19 we find in the film the policy makers, “scientists and bureaucrats who are
looking, for answers, devising containment strategies, working toward a vaccine”.
Modern British authors like Benedict, Vaughan, and Lesley are trying to create fiction
under COVID-19 based on midlife crisis, vaccines, tourists with masks in pubs, characters
working in their panamas, wildly getting on planes, journalists working from homes. They are
predicting plots without excitement where characters will not interact, fight, kiss or make love,
and face mental health problems. They need to explore the new norms depending on the
imagination and the meaning of a human calamity, across an entire overwhelmed population.
COVID-19 will create a void in literary pursuits. Hence, rebuilding and resolving new kinds of
literary plots and ideas should not exist in oblivion. Literature has always been impacted by the abject of thought of humans existing in a
particular time and era. A sense of meaning, or forging an explanation evinced within literature
during the cataclysmic contemporary crisis of the pandemic, definitely resonates within the
existentialistic paradigms. Not addressing the effects this humanitarian crisis has had on humans
in literature is akin to being in a bubble of time and being immune to the devastation all around.
The pandemic which is arguably one of the most horrific disasters of modern times has nearly
irreversibly affected the outlook, imagination and thinking of humans. It will definitely have an
irrefutable impact on the literary discourse of modern times. The interactions during a crisis of
such proportions, the various texts and practices, the socio-economic and political repercussions
have an indelible impact on the way the literature of the time is doled out as literature, effectively
represents the society and its sentiments in general. The essence of the present times is survival,
with death gaping at all within the close quarters and this is the root of an existential way of
living which reflects in literature as well.
From Homer’s Iliad and Boccaccio’s Decameron to Stephen King’s The Stand and Ling
Ma’s Severance, stories about pandemics have – over the history of Western literature such as it
is – offered much in the way of catharsis, ways of processing strong emotion, and political
commentary on how human beings respond to public health crises. Literature has a vital role to
play in framing our responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is worth turning to some of these
texts to better understand our reactions and how we might mitigate racism, xenophobia and
ableism (discrimination against anyone with disabilities) in the narratives that surround the
spread of this corona virus.
Ranging from the classics to contemporary novels, this reading list of pandemic literature
offers something in the way of an uncertain comfort, and a guide for what happens next.
Homer’s Iliad, as the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard reminded us, opens with a plague visited
upon the Greek camp at Troy to punish the Greeks for Agamemnon’s enslavement of Chryseis.
US academic Daniel R Blickman has argued that the drama of Agamemnon and Achilles’ quarrel
“should not blind us to the role of the plague setting the tone for what follows, nor, more
importantly, in providing an ethical pattern which lies near the heart of the story”. In other
words, the Iliad presents a narrative framing device of disaster that results from ill-judged
behaviour on the part of all of the characters involved.
COVID-19 is certain to shake up economic systems and entrenched institutional
processes, as we are seeing with the shift towards remote learning in universities around the
world, to give just one example. These texts give us an opportunity to think through how similar
crises have been managed previously, as well as ideas about how we might structure our
societies more equitably in their aftermath. The Decameron (1353), by Giovanni Boccacio, set
during the Black Death, reveals the vital role of storytelling in a disaster. Ten people self-isolate
in a villa outside Florence for two weeks during Black Death. In the course of their isolation, the
characters take turns to tell stories of morality, love, sexual politics, trade and power. In this
collection of novellas, storytelling functions as a method of discussing social structures and
interaction during the earliest days of the Renaissance. The stories offer the listeners ways
through which to restructure their “normal” everyday lives, which have been suspended due to
the epidemic.
The normality of everyday life is also the focus of Mary Shelley’s apocalypse novel The
Lat Man (1826). Set in a futuristic Britain between the years 2070 and 2100, the novel – which
was made into a movie in 2008 – details the life of Lionel Verney, who becomes the “last man”
following a devastating global plague. Shelley’s novel dwells on the values of friendship, and
concludes with Verney accompanied on his wanderings by a sheep dog (a reminder that pets may
be a source of comfort and stability in times of crisis). This novel is particularly scathing on the
topic of institutional responses to the plague. It satirises revolutionary utopianism and the
infighting that breaks out among surviving groups, before these also succumb.
In King’s The Stand, a bioengineered super flu named “Project Blue” leaks out of an
American military base. Pandemonium ensues. King recently stated on Twitter that COVID-19 is
certainly not as serious as his fictional pandemic, urging top take reasonable precautions. Similarly, in his 2016 novel Fever, South African author Deon Meyer details the apocalyptic
fallout of a weaponised, bioengineered virus that results in enclaves of survivors besieging one
another for resources.
In Severance (2018), Ling Ma provides a contemporary take on the Zombie novel as the
fictional ‘Shen Fever’ renders people repetitive automatons until their deaths. In a thinly veiled
metaphor for the capitalist cog-in-the-machine, the protagonist Candace drifts daily into her
place of work in a future New York that is slowly falling apart. She eventually joins a survival
group, assimilating culturally and morally to their violent attitudes towards the Zombies,
‘embodying the atomisation of late-capitalist humans in a society stripped to its bones’, as
reviewer Jiyang Fang suggests. The word ‘Pandemic’ comes from the Greek pan meaning ‘all’ and demos ‘the people’
and the word is commonly taken to refer to a widespread epidemic of contagious disease
throughout the whole of a country or one or more continents at the same time. Nevertheless in
over past two decades, the term has not been failed to be defined by many modern medical texts.
There have been significant pandemics recorded in human history, and the pandemic related
crises have caused enormous negative impacts on health, economics, and even national security
in the world. However the term ‘pandemic’ has a long history, it is still not been defined by
many medical texts, and the conception is still changing. But there are some key features of a
pandemic, including wide geographic extension, disease movement, novelty, severity, high
attack rates and explosiveness, minimal population immunity, infectiousness and contagiousness,
which help us to understand what pandemic are. The negative impacts of pandemic are serious.
Pandemics have infected millions of people, causing widespread serious illness in a large
population and thousands of death. It represents a serious threat not only to the population of the
world, but also to its economy. The impact of economic loss can result in instability of the
economy, which is through direct costs, long term burden, and indirect costs. The social impacts
of pandemics were severe, include travel was strictly limited, and schools closing, markets and
sporting were closed. All these are a likely reality should a pandemic with true potential for high
morbidity and mortality emerges. A security threat of pandemic influenza as is not a recent
phenomenon. Global security is threatened from pandemics, in terms of lives and economic
stability.
Toji 18
Throughout centuries, illness, death and fear resulting from pandemics and epidemics
have played a major role in the history of humankind. In additional to historical records of these
events, we have at our disposal many fictional books that portray narratives on human despair,
sorrow, and grief originating from the authoritative force of social transformation brought about
by infectious diseases. Major pandemics documented in these works, by way of fear, have
shaped human emotions and fostered radical change in cultural beliefs. For centuries, people
considered human illnesses as phenomena caused by the supernatural or religious realms. In
medieval Europe, the disastrous spread of the black plague through urban and remote rural
settings exacerbated existential threats and precipitated a sociological transition from the middle
ages to the Renaissance. A growing secular community emerged from the pandemic, as people
searched for a new understanding of the natural world.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), the Colombian Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel
Garcia Marquez tells the story of a plague insomnia that infested the Buendia family in the town
of Macondo. As time went by, all family members lost their memory and lost track of their
identity and they recovered their stories as told by a Gypsy that visited town over the years. In
this tale, Garcia Marquez illustrates that storytelling in our collective memories supports the
pillars of our human essences. The great literature of plagues, pestilences, and pandemics reveals
that we are bound to each other, to life in general, and to the wild forces of the natural world.
Many collected of plagues contain fictional narratives of uncertainty that triggered social
disruption, demographic transition, and civil unrest. As it have mentioned earlier, in A Journal of
the Year of the Plague (1720), Daniel Defoe tells us about the social destruction elicited by the
spread of the Black Plague in London’s parishes in 1665. The works such as The last Man
Standing (1826) by Mary Shelley, The Masque of the Red Death (1842) by Edgar Allen Poe and The Plague (1947) by Albert Camus challenges human existence by depicting an apocalyptic
scenario of the annihilation of the human race by a pandemic and also portrays the long lasting
political change and social calamities triggered by a major pandemic. The fiction text Blindness
(1995) by the Portuguese Nobel Prize laureate Jose Saramago chronicles an epidemic of
blindness as a parable to the ruthlessness of political authoritarianism of the Twentieth century. The stories of plagues also remind us those social hierarchies, racial differences, and
wealth determines peoples’ ability to shield from the ravages of pandemics. Across the ages,
plague and death often disproportionately reach socially disenfranchised populations due to their
underlying vulnerabilities linked to inequalities. Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (1353) is
set during the Black Plague in the Middle Ages. Seven women and three men escaping from the
plague in a secluded rich villa in the outskirts of Florence, and take turns as storytellers for ten
days.
Similarly, according to Defoe, in order to try to escape plague, wealthy Londoners risked
the lives of their servants by sending them to the streets for supplies. The record of fictional tales
in these texts provides a sociological and historical framework to contextualize the events
surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic, by revealing deeply entrenched fault lines in societies that
predispose many people to health disparities. The present pandemic offers a unique opportunity
to forge a new narrative of social justice. With sufficient collective moral courage, future
generations may have their disposal literary accounts emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic that
documents a transformation of the cruelties and violence of modern civilization towards a new
human trajectory dominated by overwhelming acts of kindness. Human history has survived many moments of crisis and natural calamity. Pandemics are
one such natural calamity and they are not new in the history of mankind. Many a times they are
referred in many works of literature and sometimes they have given birth to several well-known works of literature. There are many books which referred and in some cases came into existence
as a result of a pandemic.
A very early record of such a pandemic could be found in The History
of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides (460-400BC), where he refers to the typhoid fever that
took over the Athenian army during the war making them weak. Apart from typhoid fever,
measles and smallpox, plague occupies a very prominent place in the history of pandemics
around the world. There are references of Antonine Plague (165-180 A.D), that came to the
Italian peninsula with the soldiers. In Rome an outbreak of Cyprian Plague (251-266 A.D.) was
recorded. Bubonic plague or the Justinian Plague (541-750 A.D.) started in Egypt and reached
Constantinople killing a huge number of people. A Byzantine chronicler, Procopius has recorded
this pandemic and has talked about the massive number of lives it claimed.
It is the 14th century plague pandemic in Europe which has given this disease such a
prominence not only in the history of pandemics but also in the history of literature. Many
scholars believe that the disease originated among the sailors and was spread by them all over the
continent. There are many paintings depicting the impact of the disease in various parts of
Europe. The outbreak of influenza or the Spanish Flu in the year 1918 was also mentioned in
many works of literature. In the novel entitled Twilight in Delhi by Ahmed Ali, the author says,
“Delhi became a city of the dead” (Ali 6). Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore in his Bengali
poem Puratan Bhritya has referred to the outbreak of small pox. The outbreak of small pox is
also referred in the work of Malayalam writer Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s Thottiyude Makann highlights the story of the human emotions and moments of crisis. Just like the pandemic of
plague, cholera also occupies a very prominent place as long as pandemic in literature is
concerned. In all the works related to pandemics depicts the people are dying of cholera and
To how the disease had an impact in the social life of the common people and these books talk about
the impact of a pandemic in the society and social relationships.
It is believed that with the European sailors many infectious diseases spread and killed
massive number of people in various continents. For instance it is believed that it was the
European colonizers which brought infectious diseases like plague and so on in Canada killing a
huge number of indigenous populations and reducing the human resources of many communities
to a large extent. We do not really know how far these stories are true, as it is a historical trend to
hold a particular nation or community responsible for the cause of pandemic. For instance
Roman Emperor Marcus Aurellius blamed Christians for the outbreak of small pox in his empire.
Similarly during the consecutive outbreaks of plague in Europe brought accusations against the
Jews of poisoning the wells. Also during 1980s KGB held the United States of America
responsible for the outbreak of AIDS around the world. The story of blaming each other using
pandemic as a medium is thus very old. It seems to be an old trick to claim the top seat of the
power hierarchy. But on a positive note, pandemics gave birth to the works of literature that
captured the moments of human emotions at the time of a mass crisis. These works of literature
help us to find a sense of life when we lead a quarantined life. We have got literature that made
powerful statements against the illegal impositions by the authority on the common mass using
pandemic as a symbol of protest. These books attach us back to people and life when we actually
get detached from each other. Life and human co-existence appears to be precious in true sense
in these works of literature. Thomas Mann and Camus are less interested in plague itself than in using it to make
existential points. The plague in Death in Venice is an avatar of death in general, the terrible
mystery, the pale horse; it is something that strips away vanity and reveals unpalatable truths. In
Mann’s novella, it is the catalyst for Von Aschenbach’s humiliating descent into clownish self- destruction. At the same time, the pages dealing with the cholera epidemic are vigorous and
apposite. The hotels in Venice empty swiftly, despite official protestations that there is nothing to
worry about. It’s a young English travel agent who finally cuts through the official flannel. The
doubts he raises about administrative competence and probity are ones that in due course we will
all be obliged to consider. That is, he continued in an undertone and with some feeling, ‘the
official explanation, which the authorities here have seen fit to stick to. Camus is the real odd
one out. The Plague is often read as an allegory of the French experience under occupation, but
right now there seems nothing allegorical about it: the hero, Dr Rieux, seems like a naturalistic
depiction of a frontline care-worker forced into impossible decisions over who gets a ventilator.
At other historical moments, the constant reflection on the meaning of the plague could
seem heavy-handed – Gallic, not in a good way – but in 2020 it’s like reading The Crucible
while your elderly parent is on trial for witchcraft. For long stretches, you forget any notion of
allegory and simply wonder how Camus could have got it so right: from the panic buying of
peppermints that people think will be a prophylactic, to the high mortality rate in the municipal
jail, to the exhausted healthcare workers, and the terrible monotony of quarantine, something
with which we are only just beginning to get acquainted. And then, of course, the plague ends.
That is the actual good news that these books bring. The epidemic always passes. The majority
of people survive. Thucydides himself had it and recovered. “I shall simply tell it as it happened”
(Thucydides 3), he promises of the plague that ravaged fifth-century Athens, and describe the
features of the disease which will give anyone who studies them some prior knowledge to enable
recognition should it ever strike again. Should it ever strike again is the phrase that awakens our
sense of hubris. For all the talk of an unprecedented crisis, we are living through something with
many precedents. There was particularly high mortality among doctors because of their particular exposure, Thucydides wrote 2,500 years ago in a sentence that could appear in
tomorrow’s paper. We have assumed that deadly epidemics belonged to a phase of history that
was behind us, as quaint and irrelevant as candlelight and milking your own cows. When the
number of fatalities finally peaks and dwindles, Defoe’s citizens pull up their windows and shout
to each other to share the news. Camus’s Oran is liberated; its citizens struggle to make sense of
what has happened to them. Back in fifth-century Athens, the Peloponnesian war continues.
Whether society changes for the better or worse or simply stays the same, is what we will find
out.
Less than a century after the Black Death descended into Europe and killed 75 million people—as much as 60 percent of the population (90% in some places) dead in the five years after 1347—an anonymous Alsatian engraver with the fantastic appellation of ‘Master of the Playing Cards’ saw fit to depict St. Sebastian: the patron saint of plague victims. Making his name, literally, from the series of playing cards he produced at the moment when the pastime first became popular in Germany, the engraver decorated his suits with bears and wolves, lions and birds, flowers and wood roses. The Master of Playing Cards largest engraving, however, was the aforementioned depiction of the unfortunate third-century martyr who suffered by order of the Emperor Diocletian. A violent image, but even several generations after the worst of the Black Death, and Sebastian still resonated with the populace, who remembered that “To many Europeans, the pestilence seemed to be the punishment of a wrathful Creator” (5) as John Kelly notes in The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of all Time. The cult of Sebastian had grown in the years between the Black Death and the engraving, and during that interim the ancient martyr had become associated with plague victims. His suffering reminded people of their own lot—the sense that more hardship was inevitable, that the appearance of purpled buboes looked like arrows pulled from Sebastian’s eviscerated flesh after his attempted execution, and most of all the indiscrimination of which portion of bruised skin would be arrow-pierced seeming as random as who should die from plague. Produced roughly around 1440, when any direct memory of the greatest bubonic plague had long-since passed (even while smaller reoccurrences occurred for centuries), the Master of the Playing Cards presents a serene Sebastian, tied to a short tree while four archers pummel him with said arrows. Unlike more popular depictions of the saint, such as Andrea Mantegna’s painting made only four decades later, or El Greco and Peter Paul Reubens’s explicitly lithe and beautiful Sebastians made in respectively the 16th and 17th centuries, the engraver gives us a calm, almost bemused, martyr. He has an accepting smile on his face. Two arrows protrude from his puckered flesh. More are clearly coming. Sebastian didn’t just become associated with the plague as a means of saintly intercession, but also because in his narrative there was the possibility of metaphor to make sense of the senseless. Medical historian Roy Porter writes in Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul that the “Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century and subsequent outbreaks…had, of course, cast a long, dark shadow, and their aftermath was the culture of the Dance of Death, the worm-corrupted cadaver, the skull and crossbones and the charnel house” (17). All of said accoutrement, which endures even today from the cackling skulls of Halloween to the pirates’ flag, serve to if not make pandemic comprehensible, then to at least tame it a bit. Faced with calamity, this is what the stories told and the images made were intended to do. Religion supplied the largest storehouse of ready-made narrative with which to tell stories, even while the death toll increasingly made traditional belief untenable. John Hatcher writes in The Black Death: A Personal History that many lost “faith in their religion and…[abandoned] themselves to fate” (15), where fatality is as unpredictable as where an arrow will land. A different narrative, though not unrelated, was depicted 40 years later. Made by the Swedish painter Albertus Pictor, and applied to the white walls of the rustic Täby Church north of Stockholm, the mural presents what appears to be a wealthy merchant playing a (losing) game of chess against Death. Skeletal and grinning, Death appears with the same boney twisted smile that is underneath the mask of every human face, the embodiment and reminder of everyone’s ultimate destination. Famously the inspiration for director Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal, Pictor’s picture is a haunting memento mori, a very human evocation of the desperate flailing against the inevitable. Both pictures tell stories about the plague, about the lengths we will go to survive. They convey how in pandemic predictability disappears; they are narratives about the failure of narratives themselves. What both of them court are Brother Fate and his twin Sister Despair. The wages of fortune are the subject of which cards you’re dealt and the tension of strategy and luck when you avoid having your bishop or rook taken. Life may be a game, but none of us are master players and sometimes we were dealt a very bad hand.
There has always been literature of pandemic because there have always been pandemics.
What marks the literature of plague, pestilence, and pandemic is a commitment to try and forge if
not some sense of explanation, than at least a sense of meaning out of the raw experience of
panic, horror, and despair. Narrative is an attempt to stave off meaninglessness and in the void of
the pandemic, literature serves the purpose of trying, however desperately, to stop the bleeding.
Pandemic literature exists not just to analyze the reasons for the pestilence—that may not even
be its primary purpose. Rather the telling of stories is a reminder that sense still exists
somewhere, that if there is not meaning outside of the quarantine zone there’s at least meaning
within our invented stories. Literature is reclamation against that which illness represents—that
the world is not our own. Illness sees no social stratification—it comes for bishop and
authoritarian theocrat, king and germaphobic president alike. The final theme of the literature of
pandemic, born from the awareness that this world is not ours alone, is that we can’t avert our
eyes from the truth, no matter how cankered and ugly it may be in the interim. Something can be
both true and senseless. The presence of disease is evidence of that. Explorations of lethal infectious diseases are a part of a long literary tradition. Pandemic themed fiction invites readers to reflect on human behavior and vulnerability, and to examine our
responses to the fear of contagion. These anxieties raise ethical concerns when fear causes moral
impoverishment, resulting in the rise of greed, corruption, irrationality, and selfishness. At a
broader scale, the dehumanizing aspects of epidemics can lead to political anarchy and social
disintegration. Literature offers us an opportunity to reflect on mortality, justice, and redemption,
and to rethink societal structures. Several authors and writers have wondered on the reason for
the growing interest in so-called pandemic literature – and more generally pandemic fiction –
which we have witnessed since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Reading stories that
talk about pandemics or big disasters, can help to build a narrative, a sense, in a moment of
strong destabilization: the stories, the fiction, have a form, and a resolution, somehow. There are
different models of pandemic stories, and in many of them, the contagion and the pandemic are a
symptom of something different, something more profound. But let us try to go even deeper. In
an insightful article on the New York Times, Orhan Pamuk, who is writing of a historical novel
set during the bubonic plague pandemic in 1901, addresses what centuries of pandemic novels
can teach us. First of all, Pamuk notes several similarities between the current COVID-19
pandemic and the historical plague and cholera epidemics, but in particular; “Throughout human
and literary history what makes pandemics alike is not mere commonality of germs and viruses
but that our initial responses were always the same” (35).
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