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Viral Modernism. The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature

Sara Sermini
Bibliographical reference

Elizabeth Outka, Viral Modernism. The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature, New York: Columbia University Press, 2020, 326 pp. ISBN 9780231185752, $ 35.00.

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1The question behind Elizabeth Outka’s essay, Viral Modernism, is extremely topical: what are the effects of pandemic diseases on literature? The author examines in particular the effects of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic on Modernism, reversing the critical gaze that tends to consider the consequences of the war to be more relevant and impactful in the shaping of modernist literature. “We are trained in modernism to see the trauma of war but not the trauma of the pandemic” (4), writes the author, at the same time highlighting the impressive data of influenza deaths. Despite the tragic numbers, the influenza pandemic seems to be absent from the British, Irish and American Literature. Is it really so? The author unexpectedly but convincingly detects viral traces everywhere in the literature considered, pointing out that they are evanescent traces: the way the disease is written is in fact reticence and pandemic imagery can be found “in gaps, silences, atmospheres, fragments, and hidden bodies” (2). The pandemic is therefore a hidden theme that pervades the texts that Outka examines by considering specifically the repetition of two peculiar tropes: the ‘miasma’, namely the pervading absent presence of an uncontrollable, invisible contagion; and the so-called ‘viral resurrection’, that is the spreading of images related to dead returning, to resurrections caused by the same death-giving fecundity of the virus, to the emergence of zombies and spectral entities.

2In the first part entitled Pandemic Realism: Making an atmosphere visible the author analyses in particular four works which explicitly recount the experience of pandemic flu in wartime: on the one hand Willa Cather’s One of Ours (1922) and Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), which permit to clarify both differences and overlapping between the narratives of war and that of pestilence; on the other hand, Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows (1937), which focus on the domestic and daily experience of the pandemic.

3After studying the realistic representations of the pandemic, which provide a set of diagnostic tools for interpreting the peculiar pandemic atmosphere, in the second part Outka directs her gaze towards three very famous works representing the modernist movement, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925), The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot (1922), and The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats (1919), reconsidering them through the lens of pandemic imagery. Although the central theme of these texts is not the pandemic and, in some cases, no mention is even made of the viral tragedy, all these works are pervaded by an atmosphere of death similar to that outlined in the first part of the essay. But the point is not just the narration of an atmosphere: the virus in fact is able to influence the language and the style. In the case of Virginia Wolf, the experience of pandemic crafts “a sentence structure capacious enough to travel from the body to the outer world, a narrative perspective that could move as nimbly among bodies as virus, a plot defined less by linear timelines and more by temporal and experiential fluidity and a structure that could express the delirious, hallucinatory reality that infused the culture” (141). In Eliot’s The Waste Land, the effects of the pandemic result in fragmented writing, “as the aftermath of a proliferating viral catastrophe”, in which the plurality of voices alternates with the silence of the disease, or embodies the chaos as in the case of Yeats’ poem. Through Woolf, Eliot and Yeats’ works, Outka reframes the notion of Modernism as a movement deeply influenced by pandemic: illness is studied as a mechanism capable of shaping a pervasive aesthetic of absence, loss, silence, emptiness and ineffability.

4In the third part, the author investigates the spread in popular culture of two traditions closely linked to the idea of the resurrection of bodies: spiritualism and zombies. She claims that, although the critics overlooked it, they were both responses to the trauma of the pandemic. In this part, not only literary works (such as those by Arthur Conan Doyle or H.P. Lovecraft) but also cinematographic (cf. in particular the film J’accuse by Abel Gance) and photographic works are considered to demonstrate how spiritualism and zombies constitute two very different versions of the death resurrection which permitted to tackle and rework the traumatic consequences of a collective tragedy.

5By mapping the presence of the pandemic in interwar literature and culture, Outka asks a fundamental question: how can the critics’ silence be justified? The search for the reasons why a greater importance is attached to the trauma caused by the war than to that caused by the disease is an essential component of this important essay: “A death in battle could be seen as courageous (though plenty of soldiers and writers pushed against this idea), but a death from influenza?” (22). To die of flu in wartime is “humiliating”. Starting from Judith Butler’s study Frames of War, the author underlines that dying from an illness is not considered as a heroic death in agreement with “a long tradition that aligns illness with seemingly less valiant, more feminine forms of death” (2). If this is the first cause of the little or no consideration given to the disease by both literature and literary criticism, there is another, previous cause. It concerns a matter that literature mostly lays aside, because it is a cultural taboo: taking up the challenge of representing disease and vulnerability. The question underlying the essay is again borrowed from Butler’s thought on vulnerability: “what counts as a livable life and a grievable death?”. In current times, while we are experiencing a new pandemic, Outka’s essay invites us to reflect on how the literature will metabolize the disease and whether it will be able this time to shamelessly and openly accept the challenge of narrating vulnerability, instead of removing it from the collective memory.

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References

Electronic reference

Sara Sermini, “Viral Modernism. The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature ”Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas [Online], 18 | 2020, Online since 31 December 2020, connection on 04 December 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jihi/2099

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