The seemingly unending misery caused by the pandemic might remind us of the despair of the German philosopher Theodor Adorno who after the Holocaust declared that “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” and added that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But neither have the disasters ended nor has literature ceased to wrestle with them.
Two books often mentioned in the context of the current pandemic are The Plague (1947/48) by Albert Camus and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985/1988) by Gabriel García Márquez. But literature’s ‘tryst’ with the pandemics has a much longer history. Geoffrey Chaucer, one of the earliest writers in English, wrote The Canterbury Tales sometime in the 14th century. A tale included in it, titled “The Pardoner’s Tale”, is not only set in the times of the plague but Chaucer uses the plague to symbolically represent moral death. The Canterbury Tales itself was perhaps influenced by Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353) which deals more directly with the physical, psychological, and spiritual effects of the plague on the people of Florence. Then in the 18th century, Daniel Defoe published A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). But it is not just the ‘classics’ that engaged with natural or human-made catastrophes. The familiar nursery rhyme, “Ring-a-ring o’ roses” has many versions and many interpretations. But in more recent times, the rhyme is understood as a description of the Great Plague of 1665 in England:
Ring-a-ring o’ roses, (a rosy rash, a symptom of the plague)
A pocket full of posies, (herbs carried as protection and to ward off the smell)
A-tishoo! A-tishoo! (sneezing, coughing) OR Ashes! Ashes! (cremation, burning of houses)
We all fall down (death)
The present COVID-19 pandemic is often being compared to the influenza pandemic of a century ago, the Spanish flu of 1918-19, which killed millions of people, particularly the young, all over the world. What made it worse was that it broke out soon after the First World War which had already caused unprecedented destruction and death. One of the people who caught the flu during the pandemic was TS Eliot. He felt oppressed by the constant worry about his health, his home life, and was concerned that his mind had been affected by the illness. Then, in The Waste Land (1922), he turned these personal worries, the sense of uncertainty, and the constant fear of death into an atmosphere that captured the essence of the senselessness and the absurdity of the postwar-post-pandemic era.
One of the horrors of the pandemic is that the enemy is invisible, that the threat is all around us but we cannot see it. Everyone is suspect and everything is a potential danger. The human body suddenly becomes utterly vulnerable and porous. It is this sense of terror from an unknown source that WB Yeats captures in his well-known poem, “The Second Coming” (1920). There are, of course, many sources of the chaos and horror that the poem describes—war, revolution, Ireland’s political violence, and so on. But, the fear of a threat from an unknown, unseen source that the poem expresses, and Yeats’ description of ‘mere anarchy’, and ‘innocence being drowned by a blood-dimmed tide,’ have a personal aspect. Yeats composed the poem in the midst of the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic after witnessing his pregnant wife’s battle with the virus and her close encounter with death during the pandemic. One of the reasons why The Waste Land or “The Second Coming” are still remembered long after the specific issues they dealt with are no longer topical, is the writers’ ability to transform the personal into a universal experience.
Amitav Ghosh recently said that there is likely to be “a huge wave of novels about the pandemic.” While fiction may follow, some novelists have readily responded through non-fiction. Arundhati Roy’s “The Pandemic is a Portal” is an insightful essay on the present crisis facing the world. Another celebrated novelist, Zadie Smith’s series of essays in Intimations are deeply personal and profoundly moving. Closer home, surgeons Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed, writing together as ‘Kalpish Ratna’, combine science and history with a human story in Crown of Thorns: The Coronavirus and Us. Not surprisingly, the poets seem to have captured the spirit of the times far more intuitively. K Satchidanandan and Nishi Chawla have brought together more than a hundred poets from all over the world in their collection Singing in the Dark: A Global Anthology of Poetry Under Lockdown.
However, it is of course not enough to write about a topical issue, for, as Gertrude Stein told Ernest Hemingway, “remarks are not literature.” A writer must have the ability to turn an abstract phenomenon into a concrete, lived experience, and the art to make the reader see, in the words of William Blake, ‘a world in a grain of sand’. In his foreword (titled “Certificate of Merit”) to the Telugu poet Sri Sri’s magnum opus Mahaprasthanam (1950), the writer-philosopher (Gudipati Venkata) Chalam contrasts the ‘Romantic’ poet Devulapalli Krishnasastri and the ‘Revolutionary’ poet Sri Sri: while the former could make the world feel his pain, the latter felt the whole world’s suffering as his own. It remains to be seen how many of the current and forthcoming literary works about the pandemic will stand the test of time, and how many of the writers have the art to transform a topical issue into a timeless classic.
(The author teaches literature at BITS Pilani, Hyderabad)