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.