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“Wood for the Coffins Ran Out”: Modernism and the Shadowed Afterlife of the Influenza Pandemic
Abstract
Here’s what we already know—during the First World War, soldiers and civilians often had remarkably different experiences of the war corpse. Dead bodies were omnipresent on the front line and in the trenches, an inescapable constant for the living soldier. As critic Allyson Booth notes, “Trench soldiers . . . inhabited worlds constructed, literally, of corpses.” In Britain and America, however, such corpses were strangely absent; unlike in previous conflicts, bodies were not returned. This dichotomy underscores some of our central assumptions about the differences between the front line and the home front: in the trenches, dead bodies and the ever-present danger of becoming one; at home, the often haunting absence of bodies to mourn, though this mourning occurred in a place of relative safety. These assumptions miss, however, the sudden erosion of these distinctions in 1918, for in the autumn of that year, dead bodies were suddenly everywhere in Britain, in America, and across the globe; some neighborhoods had streets so full of corpses that no one was left alive to bury them. Death came swiftly and with such little warning that mass graves had to be prepared, and as one witness wrote, “Wood for the coffins ran out.” The influenza pandemic of 1918, which stretched its deathly fingers into 1919, was the most lethal plague in human history, killing somewhere between fifty and one hundred million people worldwide in an astonishingly condensed period. Yet despite inflicting five to ten times more causalities than the First World War, the flu was, for a time at least, seemingly forgotten. British and American literature rarely dwells on it, almost no memorials were built to mark its destruction, and until the last ten years, few historians had told its story; it certainly makes few appearances in modernist studies today.
This neglect, however, should not be taken to mean that the pandemic didn’t matter, or didn’t matter to modernism, or even that the flu was actually forgotten. The pandemic was the second great traumatic event of the early twentieth century, and even years later, survivors vividly remembered the experience. Modernist writers and painters themselves suffered from the ravages of the flu: Guillaume Apollinaire died; D. H. Lawrence, H.D., Katherine Anne Porter, and Edvard Munch barely survived; even T. S. Eliot felt his brain was affected by his bout with the illness. Our neglect of the pandemic arises, I argue, not because it was insignificant but because it became the shadowed twin to the war, a disaster as unprecedented in its casualties and in its suffering as the war, yet at times locked into a paradoxical relation with it. Because of the pandemic’s historical position right at the armistice as well as its unusual constellation of symptoms and aftereffects, it alternatively became a suspect rival to the “real” trauma of the Great War and (paradoxically) a loss too great to assimilate. Flu deaths were in part drowned out by war deaths, but also in part subsumed into the vast work of mourning that marks the postwar period and modernism itself. The flu’s shadowed position continues to hide the profound impacts of the pandemic. As scholars of modernism and modernity, however, we should explore the subtle ways the outbreak weaves itself into the fabric of modernism and begin to analyze rather than perpetuate the pervasive postwar evasion of the flu.
My investigation of the pandemic intervenes in two ongoing discussions in modernist studies. First, important recent works on modernism and mourning by critics such as Patricia Rae, Tammy Clewell, and others have explored how modernism is often marked by a refusal of traditional modes of consolation; mourning remains unresolved, in part functioning as a political protest against various aspects of the war. Quite naturally, these analyses of mourning are usually focused on war and political turmoil, certainly central sources of grief in the early twentieth century. The pandemic, however, adds a new dimension to the history of modernist mourning. While individuals certainly grieved over those lost to the flu, there were very few public displays of mourning, and there was little in the way of a conceptual framework or shared rituals or ceremonies, such as those that marked the war...
... Influenza provides a platform for interdisciplinary discourse literature, science, sociology, medicine -and serves as a conceptual framework. [9] As an illness, it erases the collective suffering; as a virus, it offers a degenerate body. "Its figurative role, then, parallels other facets of modernity that cast doubt upon the integrity of units the human subject, the family, the community once considered natural". ...
... "Its figurative role, then, parallels other facets of modernity that cast doubt upon the integrity of units the human subject, the family, the community once considered natural". [9] Personifying Tragedy: Kyrie Ellen Bryant Voigt's booklength sonnet sequence, Kyrie, remains one of the major works about the 1918 influenza pandemic. ...
... A flu death was in many ways more pointless, less understandable, less preventable, than a war death; the very fact that the mass casualties did not fit within familiar structures of war mourning, that they could inspire a wideeyed grief without any redeeming value to accept or reject, suggests that the pandemic helped fuel familiar modernist themes such as the frustrated search for meaning in death, a sense of alienation and fragmentation, and the anxiety over death's sudden and often random strikes. [9] Through literary technique, Voigt assigns significance to everyday objects; in doing so she succeeds in capturing and portraying the individual human experience. Through the evocative use of metaphors and personification, the reader realises that death is costly. ...
The Spanish flu does not have a powerful hold on cultural memory. As an illness, it erases the collective suffering; as a virus, it offers a degenerate body. This essay will explore representations of the 1918 pandemic in poetry by using three poems: Voigt's Kyrie, Eliot's The Wasteland and Williams's Spring and All. The impact of the flu on these three poems not only consists of its material effects, but also resides in its metaphoric potential. Influenza provides an entry into modernist discourses across disciplines literature, science, sociology, medicine that are concerned with reconceptualising bodies of all kinds. The poems discussed in this paper echo the narrative of survivors from both the war and the flu who felt stranded in a state of existence describable as a "living death", a state in which one was not dead, but not quite alive, either. Surrounded by so many who were dying, the living often felt only half alive. The pervasive feeling of being on the threshold of life and death, and of confrontation between life and death, captures this particular historical moment on both literal and metaphorical levels. These poems also serve as contributors to modernist conceptions of the drudgery of everyday life during a pandemic and represent a factual description of what it was like to remain alive in 1919. They capture in their very silences both acknowledged horrors and horrors that remain unspoken.
With the travel writing genre facing a period of recalibration in the post-COVID era, this chapter observes, from a subjective perspective, the influence of travel writing on the craft of a practitioner with expertise in both the professional and academic realms of the form. The chapter then examines the re-thinking that occurs throughout the history of travel writing to make a positive claim for what might be learned from this most recent era of uncertainty.
This article focuses on literature’s potential for healing – both medical and sociopolitical – in times of severe crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Affect is an important literary tool to make people aware of social inequalities, in particular reading or writing short stories with the experience of a simultaneous real-life pandemic. Reading is an embodied act through which the reader enters into a dialogue with both the author and the text. Emotions emerge that are often more deeply stored in memory than the words as such, and that changes our perception of the world. This effect is also encapsulated in Siri Hustvedt’s analysis of reading practices, Sara Ahmed’s affect theory and Rita Felski’s four ways of engaging with texts. I analyse John O’Hara’s short story ‘The Doctor’s Son’ (1935), situated in rural Pennsylvania at the time of the 1918 Influenza, and Victor LaValle’s ‘Recognition’ (2020), resonating with the COVID-19 pandemic in an isolated apartment building in New York City. Both stories question the concept of pandemics as the great levellers by pointing out social injustice due to class and ethnic hierarchies. Taking Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842) and Poe’s emphasis on the preconceived and single effect of fear and subsequent horror caused by the ‘Red/Black Death’, as a starting point, the article presents O’Hara’s story as a manifestation of the medical, social and ethnic phenomena at work in 1918: social distancing, facial masks, closed public institutions, people’s resistance to these measures and medical treatment along ethnic and class lines. LaValle’s ‘Recognition’ allows readers a glimpse into the relationship between an unnamed African American woman, who is also the narrator, and Pilar, a Colombian American woman, who dies of the virus. As part of a contemporary Decameron project, ‘Recognition’ stresses the human need for community, communication and, thus mutual human recognition, giving the dead – whether rich or poor – a name and demanding to undo systemic social inequalities. In that sense, literature can heal the nation.
In this article, we locate a tendency to revert to ‘Western,’ ‘national,’ and/or ‘racial’ times during periods of intense uncertainty or ‘crisis’ when individuals and societies seek to make sense of the present through the past, drawing upon the concept of a ‘time-border.’ We suggest this tendency is a ‘conventional’ pull in temporal thinking that has recurred in modern time cultures. In our own present, this reversion appears to be occurring despite novel approaches to time and periodization in historical research over the past thirty years, prompting a radical reformulation of how historians study the past (in terms of the influence of the global turn or Deep Turn and big history on notions of historical time, or new periodizations of the Anthropocene and posthumanism). This innovative approach to time jostles uneasily against the pull towards ‘conservative,’ linear, and national/racialised time often found in public discourse — highlighting the tension, as well as the reciprocity, between linear and cyclical approaches to time in lived experience and historiography. Throughout the essay, the urgency to reconsider notions of historical time and periodization in view of the coronavirus pandemic is a key theme tying together an analysis of time, periodization, and historiography.
For several decades, the 1918-20 global influenza outbreak has been called "the forgotten pandemic." Although recent scholarly and public interest in the pandemic has complicated the narrative of forgetting, the label has stuck. Highlighting historical evidence of influenza's long-term impact upon survivors, family, and community in Canada, the flu stories presented here, diverse in form and content, verify that a key question in pandemic influenza history is not whether the pandemic was forgotten or remembered, but by whom, and in what ways, it has been suppressed - or foregrounded. By moving beyond the classic epidemic plot line, with beginning, middle, and end, historians can find new methodologies and evidence with which to more fully understand the influenza pandemic's unfolding intersection with colonialism, war, social inequality, and labour struggles in the 20th century.
While the literature suggests that the Spanish Flu—despite the devastation it caused—suffers from social amnesia, this article begs to differ. Building on the multiplicity of manners in which the past maintains itself in the present and specifically focusing on Erll’s distinction between remembrance and knowledge as two poles of collective memory, we shed light on the collective memory of the Spanish Flu in its entirety. First, our analysis recognizes COVID-19 as a catalyst of the remembrance of the Spanish Flu. Second, it suggests that the perceived social amnesia attached to the Spanish Flu stems from overlooking the mark it left on the sphere of knowledge. The article addresses the need to recognize the uniqueness and importance of the knowledge pole in assessing collective memory, and exposes the dynamics and potential relationships shared by the poles.
Traumatic events that happen in the community may profoundly impact people’s lives and work. During such an event, clinicians are not only exposed to their clients’ reactions, but they also share the same external reality on some level, a phenomenon known as shared trauma. This doctoral project resulted in Knitting as Coping: Fiber Arts and Shared Trauma, a training manual for art therapists from heuristic research into the challenges of sharing a traumatic reality. A qualitative study of the experiences of 11 participants who were practicing during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 identified six qualities of fiber arts that may provide therapeutic benefit both to therapists for self-care and to clients who have experienced trauma: rhythmic, grounding, tactile, structured, social, and practical. Fiber arts were highlighted as strategies for creative coping in a shared trauma that, consistent with trauma research, effectively address the needs of clinicians who must function while coping with trauma, establishing feelings of safety, reestablishing grounding and, eventually, being able to create amidst destruction. The results
support findings from trauma-informed therapy, neuroscience, art therapy assessment, and research on the ameliorative experience of flow. The dissertation presents the study results and discusses them in the contexts of the research literature, art therapy discourse, and reflective analysis, and draws implications for future research, policy development, and practice.
Few illness narratives have been published about the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic. This essay links this silence to representational problems posed by mass trauma that happened before response to the Holocaust began our present era of attention to the narrative testimonies of suffering. In a pandemic, the collective replaces the individual as protagonist, and the health of the public takes precedence over the particular and subjective. History turns to statistics. Beginning with Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider, her novella about her experience during the pandemic, and speculating on the entanglement of Virginia Woolf's accounts of influenza with Porter's strategies for recounting her sickness, the essay then examines two 2006 novels—Thomas Mullen's The Last Town on Earth, and Myla Goldberg's Wickett's Remedy—to show how narrative representations of the 1918 flu grapple with recounting the experience of sickness, a struggle repeatedly troped as waking from and remembering a nightmarish sleep. The value of these fictional accounts lies less in their historical accuracy than in the attention they draw to the representational demands that pandemic disease makes as it threatens to overwhelm the narrative medium.
Emotionally arousing events are particularly well remembered. This effect is known to result from the release of stress hormones and activation of beta adrenoceptors in the amygdala. However, the underlying cellular mechanisms are not understood. Small conductance calcium-activated potassium (SK) channels are present at glutamatergic synapses where they limit synaptic transmission and plasticity. Here, we show that beta adrenoceptor activation regulates synaptic SK channels in lateral amygdala pyramidal neurons, through activation of protein kinase A. We show that SK channels are constitutively recycled from the postsynaptic membrane and that activation of beta adrenoceptors removes SK channels from excitatory synapses. This results in enhanced synaptic transmission and plasticity. Our findings demonstrate a novel mechanism by which beta adrenoceptors control synaptic transmission and plasticity, through regulation of SK channel trafficking, and suggest that modulation of synaptic SK channels may contribute to beta adrenoceptor-mediated potentiation of emotional memories.
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism traces the emergence of a fundamentally new way of writing about individual and collective mourning, demonstrating how a refusal of consolation and closure succeeds in promoting a progressive cultural politics crucial for reimaging gender, racial, and sexual subjects.
This article takes up Rita Felski's recent call to modernists to explore how Bruno Latour's latest work on actor-network theory might be adapted for literary studies. It examines two accounts of World War I soldiers who (allegedly) return from the dead in material form: Virginia Woolf's fictional account of Septimus Smith, who is convinced his friend Evans has come back from the dead, and Oliver Lodge's best-selling memoir, Raymond, or Life and Death, which recounts in detail how Lodge believed his dead son sent messages to the family to assure them of his continued material existence. That these moments may be read as obvious signs of delusion or unresolved grief tells us little about the power such images had in the early twentieth century or about how metaphors at a particular historical moment might be read, shaped, disrupted, and made real. A Latourian approach, instead, demands a shift in interpretive practices: rather than reading vertically for a latent meaning that might lie hidden beneath a text, we read horizontally, tracing actively a network of places, times, and objects, a network that offers a new understanding of the interactions between historical contexts and literary studies.
As Katherine Anne Porter's short novel "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" opens, Miranda fitfully endures a vivid nightmare. She sees herself on horseback desperately racing from Death, the pale rider, who has already taken her grandfather, an aunt, a cousin, her "decrepit hound, and [her] silver kitten," and when he reaches her, she realizes that "he is no stranger to [her]" (270). Her nightmare tangles images of life and death with images of remembering and forgetting, and the relationship between survival and memory is a recurring motif in the story. Porter's allusion to the apocalyptic horseman described in Revelation proves to be appropriate because the story takes places during the influenza pandemic of 1918, the greatest public health catastrophe in modern history. The interplay between death and memory in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" gives an aesthetic dimension to the pandemic's horrifying consequences and raises questions about literature as a form of traumatic memory.
In the spring of 2009 fear of a swine flu pandemic and ongoing fear of a potential avian flu pandemic awakened dormant memories of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Global health officials mounted a campaign of contagion preparedness, and many officials still see another human pandemic as inevitable, if not imminent. To mitigate this potential disaster, scientists, epidemiologists, and government officials worldwide are looking to the 1918 pandemic as a worst-case scenario as they develop contingency response plans. Before the emergence of the current virus, however, the 1918 influenza pandemic had largely disappeared from cultural memory. Few references to the 1918 pandemic exist in literature, popular culture, or even in history books, which makes Porter's story an important record of the outbreak.
In the story, Miranda, a reporter for a Denver newspaper, enjoys a whirlwind romance with Adam Barclay, a young Army officer, until she collapses from the virus. Adam nurses her as she comes near to death, and while she recovers, he returns to his unit where he dies from the virus. Porter based "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" on her personal experience as an influenza survivor, and it is the most significant American literary work set during the pandemic. The novella illustrates the varieties of traumatic experience—personal trauma, cultural trauma, historical trauma, and aesthetic trauma. The story takes place in a unique and profound historical context, both because of Porter's personal traumatic experience and because memories of the pandemic have faded.
In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth describes trauma as a "wound of the mind—the breach in the mind's experience of time, self, and the world—[that] is not, like a wound of the body, a simple and healable event, but rather an event that . . . is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor" (4). Most trauma theorists locate trauma's impact in the individual memory, where the unsettling experience disrupts the victim's identity, but when a disruptive event affects a large population simultaneously, a collective trauma occurs. The influenza pandemic of 1918 complicates the distinction between individual trauma and collective trauma. One might stipulate that collective trauma merely consists of numerous individual traumas, but collective trauma amplifies the individual's experience by taxing the network of social resources that ordinarily stabilize the individual victim. Massive events such as wars, natural disasters, and pandemics have different dynamics than personal events such as crime, accidents, and illness. In both individual and collective forms of trauma, the event's impact lies not in the immediate experience but in the survivors' memory of the event. Exploring the distinction between individual trauma and collective trauma leads to an explanation for how and why the pandemic has virtually disappeared from collective memory.
Katherine Anne Porter survived the influenza pandemic of 1918. She worked for The Rocky Mountain News during the outbreak, and she contracted influenza as the epidemic reached its peak in Denver. By that time, all of the hospitals in the city were filled beyond capacity. Her landlady, fearing infection, threatened to have her evicted from...
The idea that trauma causes amnesia by virtue of psychopathological processes such as repression and dissociation has been a fixture of clinical folklore (and popular culture) for more than a century. Repression, suppression, and dissociation are distinguished in conceptual terms, as are "functional" and "psychogenic" amnesia. Modern versions of the trauma-memory argument, involving such concepts as "memory suppression" and the distinction between "hot" and "cool" memory systems, are critically examined. In view of the paucity of evidence that trauma causes amnesia in the first place, laboratory analogs of traumatic amnesia appear to be models in search of a phenomenon in the real world, and theories of traumatic amnesia to be explanations in search of facts.
The Spanish influenza of 1918 has been called a “forgotten pandemic,” lost in the archives amidst records of the Great War, the armistice, and the new era of modernity ushered in by these cataclysmic events. It was not that Spanish flu did not keep pace with the war in terms of destruction of life. Estimates of the flu’s death toll hover around fifty million people in a single year, while World War I was responsible for about eight and a half million casualties.1 It was that the war had such a powerful hold on cultural memory. As Paul Fussell (quoting Vernon Scannell’s poem, “The Great War”) observes in The Great War and Modern Memory, “‘The war that was called Great invades the mind . . .’ and that war detaches itself from its normal location in chronology and its accepted set of causes and effects to become Great in another sense—all-encompassing, all-pervading, both internal and external at once, the essential condition of consciousness in the twentieth century.”2 The “Great Influenza,” it seems, made for a less compelling story. Alfred W. Crosby points out its conspicuous absence from modern history textbooks and from the oeuvres of the great American writers in the 1920s. John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway—none of these authors treated the flu in any detail in their work.3 “It is especially puzzling,” says Crosby dryly, “that among those Americans who let the pandemic slip their minds were many members of that group of supposedly hypersensitive young people who were to create some of the greatest masterpieces of American literature, i.e. ‘the lost generation’ for so many of whom World War I, the other great killer of the era, was the central experience of their lives.”4 In his account, by the end of the decade, the pandemic seemed destined to become a mere footnote in literary history.
In the 1930s, however, a few authors began to look back on 1918 in a different light. Katherine Anne Porter’s short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider is perhaps the best-known fictional account of the epidemic. The story, published in 1939, closely follows an account of Porter’s own illness and recovery during the pandemic, when she was working as a reporter in Denver. William Maxwell’s novel They Came Like Swallows dramatizes the effects of the flu on a Midwestern family. Maxwell was a child in 1918 when his mother died of influenza, and the novel echoes this family history. Finally, John O’Hara, only thirteen years old during the pandemic, published “The Doctor’s Son” in 1935, a short story fictionalizing his own experiences during the flu outbreak. Within a five-year span, then, three fairly major American writers revisited their memories of the Spanish flu through their fiction.5 The “forgotten pandemic” had returned to the literary imagination.
Porter, Maxwell, and O’Hara were better situated than Hemingway’s generation to address the pandemic because of their greater distance from the war. O’Hara and Maxwell were too young to join the military in 1918, and Porter, as a woman, could not enlist as a combatant. While Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Stein were in Europe during the fall of 1918 and could readily assimilate the pandemic’s destruction into the general senselessness and violence of the war, people living an ocean away inevitably experienced the flu as an independent and crucial event. Porter says of her illness, “It just simply divided my life, cut across it like that. So that everything before that was just getting ready, and after that I was in some strange way altered, ready.”6 For Maxwell, too, his mother’s death from influenza and pneumonia marked a major turning point in his life, one that he revisited not only in They Came Like Swallows but in Ancestors: A Family History; So Long, See You Tomorrow; and Time Will Darken It as well.7 Porter, Maxwell, and O’Hara all wrote about the flu in highly autobiographical works, and the importance of the pandemic in their personal histories is surely a factor in their choice of subject matter.
This resurgence of interest...
:World War I has overshadowed the Great Influenza of 1918 so thoroughly in American thought that historian Alfred Crosby has styled it "America's forgotten pandemic." Willa Cather's One of Ours (1922), which recounts the ravages of influenza on American sailors bound for France, raises questions about why the 1918 flu has registered so faintly in the modern American imagination. This absence is clarified by De Man's notion of modernity as a "combined interplay of deliberate forgetting with an action that is also a new origin." Whereas some American modernists sought to sever themselves from the past by emphasizing the historical fissure created by the war and ignoring the historical continuity implied by the pandemic, Cather's investigation of disease as one of the deterministic forces of the twentieth century reveals a modernism which embraces historicity as a way of "diagnosing one's present."
Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War: Women's Narratives of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic
- Fisher J.E.