Pandemic Literature
We speak about the nightmarish imagery: lilacs out of the dead land, a heap of broken images, fear in a handful of dust. About World War One, the Industrial Revolution, modernism. Before long it is time to end the class, a lump in my throat, to thank everyone who’s joined in for their cooperation in using the new technology, for all our discussions in class up until now. It’s only when I’ve logged off that I wonder about a context for the poem that we didn’t discuss: the Spanish flu. The virus and the poem, three years apart. I’d never thought of the connection. Idly, I scroll through JSTOR, find a chapter on The Waste Land in a book by Elizabeth Outka called Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. The miasmic residue of the pandemic experience, it argues, infuses every part of the poem, in ways we have been missing all along. Outka’s autopsy revealing the virus spread through the bronchioles of the poem. Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit. A poem burning with fever. Burning burning burning burning burning / O Lord thou pluckest me out. This fresh new pandemic sending us back towards a residue analysis. The cruellest month looming.
Tara McEvoy on The Road, The Waste Land and the pandemic.