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Overwhelming the Medium Fiction and the Trauma of Pandemic
Influenza in 1918
Catherine Belling
Literature and Medicine, Volume 28, Number 1, Spring 2009,
pp. 55-81 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/lm.0.0046
For additional information about this article
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lm/summary/v028/28.1.belling.html
55Catherine Belling
Literature and Medicine 28, no. 1 (Spring 2009) 55–81
© 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
Overwhelming the Medium:
Fiction and the Trauma of
Pandemic Influenza in 1918
Catherine Belling
Anguish verged on overwhelming the very medium that carried it,
perhaps causing the air to bleed black ash or gray dust.
Myla Goldberg,
Wickett’s Remedy
The brain does funny things when it’s in fever mode. . . .
Sarah Jio,
I. Representing Pandemic
In Myla Goldberg’s 2006 historical novel, Wickett’s Remedy, a
Boston family learns in the fall of 1918 that its eldest son has died
hospital—where she has just learned of her little nephew’s death from
-
ily’s grieving. She knows such suffering is being replicated throughout
the city, and she imagines that the air itself must be damaged by the
weight of so much pain. Air, the medium that carries voices, seems
to bleed ash, or dust, the fallout not of a single damaged body but
of a kind of holocaust.
A profound cultural and ethical aspect of all major epidemics
(and other mass disasters) is the loss of access to personal narratives.
The collective replaces the individual as protagonist, and the health
of the public takes precedence over that of the individual, producing
a reductionism that elides the particular and the subjective. There is
56
a paradox in the multiplication of personal catastrophe throughout a
proportional to its extent or its incidence. The imagination can inhabit
the meaning of a single human calamity, but multiply it across an
entire population, and the mind is overwhelmed. As Stalin is said
to have observed (and the irony of this attribution is apt), “a single
pandemic, cannot be recounted as a meaningful story. They can only
be counted, reduced to statistics, and trusted to speak for themselves.
How can one write pathography in a pandemic?1
One must tell either a small fraction of the story, by implication
that language itself cannot carry the burden. Historians revert to sta-
or autobiographical) of the 1918–1919 pandemic by those who were
there, especially compared to the wealth of literature that emerged
from World War I.2
Perhaps the differences between disease and war give us reasons
we might still have elicited its stories directly. The non-human perpe-
trators of disease escape us, and what remains is immense loss, loss
a lesson in the bleak meanings of human cruelty and destruction; the
pandemic caused more physical damage but seemed to convey no
meaning at all, overshadowed by the story of war, with its enemies,
its weapons of mass destruction, its battles, and its jubilant armistice.
-
ease was a daily fact of life. Before worldwide mass media, the global
scale of the pandemic would not have been immediately available to
there be a more banal trauma?
The medium that carries and communicates the burdens and
lessons of past suffering is narrative. Suffering must be reconstituted
within a story told by a narrator who can inhabit and convey the
experience of the sufferer. Without narration, our accounting of the
past transmits suffering only abstractly, as inexpressible inference or as
deceptively simple, abstract numerical data. The narration of suffering
is demanding, for it requires both factual information—from personal
or public historical records—and the particular, subjective embodiment
57Catherine Belling
of facts that produces the meaning we call memory. Narration falters
when multitudes of subjects are affected at once by painful events that
disrupt the secure frameworks of normality against which individual
suffering is usually measured, making the right stories, those thick with
the 1918 pandemic may not only have been due to selective memory’s
normal erasure. There may also have been a refusal or inability to
describe a trauma that might still have haunted its survivors. Perhaps
Victor C. Vaughn, a doctor, describes one vivid “memory pic-
faces soon wear a bluish cast; a distressing cough brings up blood-
stained sputum. In the morning the dead bodies are stacked about
the morgue like cord wood. This picture was painted on my memory
3 But this is all he tells. The harms of hu-
man inventiveness—like war—must be assiduously recounted, but the
-
ing 1918 in his chronicle, Vaughan simply says “I am not going into
the remotest corners, taking toll of the most robust, sparing neither
4
Both his medicine and his narrative surrender before an enemy that
has escaped the rules of human war.
Why should it matter that the stories Vaughn and others might
from being heard, or to teach us by telling. Yet suddenly, and probably
by survivors. We live in a culture of memoirs and pathographies, of
confession and testimony, truth and reconciliation. But in 1918, things
were different. The story of the self was seldom told in public—or
at all, especially if it involved private bodily suffering. In contrast,
5
Its beginning was marked by the crisis in history’s ability to bear
with the Holocaust, but comparisons concerning witnessing and re-
membering mass suffering might be of value. In both cases, suffering
58
extended beyond any individual or family, yet its felt effects can be
conveyed through only one story, one teller, one testimony at a time.
The purpose of testimony, Mary Marshall Clark tells us, is to instill
6 The
goal shared by video testimony, oral history, and narrative medicine
is, Clark argues, to combat indifference—which is a kind of forgetful-
ness, a kind of silence.
Intolerant of the surrender to silence that seems central to the
how it was, or might have been, and what it meant to those who
experienced suffering we cannot experience or witness for ourselves.
Eighty years after the 1918 pandemic, for example, Thomas Mullen
publishes a novel titled The Last Town on Earth. His readers respond
these stories are all stories never told. These readers, says Mullen, tell
him that The Last Town on Earth “reminded them of a great-aunt or
a great-grandfather who lost a spouse or parents or children to the
-
ries always end with some variation of the line: ‘but she never talked
7 Mullen observes “a wall of silence surrounding survivors’
-
8 He
9 Mullen believes, then,
when memory itself fails.
threatening bodily manifestations, it also diminishes the patient’s ability
that some illnesses seem actively to insist on being narrated: “Critical
illnesses demand to be written about, acknowledged, and understood,
provoking those who experience them to testify, that is, to bear witness
10 Such
a threat to meaning) that their meaning must be extracted and com-
municated. But what if the cultural context discourages the discussion
of private suffering, and the biological context bewilders the brain
with fever? What if the social-epidemiological context is so saturated
59Catherine Belling
with cases of the same illness that the particular instance seems, even
take on the sick role when everyone is sick? Why would one recount
an illness when everybody knows about it already—and then, all too
soon, nobody is interested? In the absence of pathographies composed
such as Goldberg’s and Mullen’s novels tell us anything about the
hoped his novel would: as an antidote to our collective amnesia. What
pandemic’s resistance to being recalled and recounted. The social context
can be reconstructed and described, with its cities reduced to chaos,
its make-shift hospitals and exhausted nurses and proliferation of the
dead—but the details of the illness experience itself, of the sick mind
for example, with accounts of trench warfare or descriptions of being
-
tion is worthless here. Instead, in textual gaps, evidence of writers’
-
counts can illuminate the real horror that data too-readily conceal in
the transformation of tragedy into statistics.
who were alive at the time. The best known of these is Katherine Anne
Porter’s novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider.11 The second group consists of
pandemic. I look closely at two, Thomas Mullen’s The Last Town on
Earth and Myla Goldberg’s Wickett’s Remedy. Both were published in
2006, their reception framed explicitly by renewed interest in the 1918
the next great pandemic. I have chosen these three texts for extensive
analysis because, as a group, they enable me to trace strategies used
by writers to respond to the particular challenges pandemic suffering
poses to narrative. Porter’s novel is read as a kind of memoir; Mul-
len’s and Goldberg’s works both present themselves as reminders. In
examining them I show that, in its inadequate struggle to contain and
carries traces, the ash and dust, but not the vivid blood, of a trauma
that is now almost impossible to apprehend.
60
helps to look more widely at a particular motif that keeps recurring in
the writer’s concession that the experience is almost inexpressible by a
retrospective narrator. The sleep from which characters awaken is either
absence and silence or a disjointed nightmare of illness in which mind,
body, and external reality have come apart. As described—recuperated—
by the recovered mind, sleep resists representation and the concomitant
act of witnessing, and to this extent resembles—or even constitutes—
the trauma, which, as Geoffrey Hartman puts it, has been “registered
by the psyche.12
as much about the writing as about the illness.
My aunt put her hand on my forehead and got up from the table
and took me upstairs and put me to bed because I had a high
fever. And I think what happened was that I slept and slept and
slept and slept. William Maxwell,
Inuenza 1918 Transcript
Parker . . . couldn’t believe the state of the world when he woke
-
cept how bad things had gotten around the world while I’d been
The Thin White Line
narratology, since illness threatens and disrupts embodied experience,
13 The diseased body, perhaps especially in acute response
to overwhelming viral infection, does not have much time for the
mind that watches its inward events and tries to record them. Perhaps
61Catherine Belling
the trope of sleep. The subject retreats from the chaotic world (which
includes his or her body) into a differently embodied private chaos
that is very hard to describe. This chaos is present in the three texts
I am examining, but to get a fuller sense of its prevalence and its
characteristics, I begin with a wider selection of literary representations
The Thin White Line
1918
The Thin White Line
work, he collapses in the street and spends “the next two weeks uncon-
14
pandemic in the 21st century, the 2012 disease and its effects are mod-
eled explicitly on the 1918–1919 pandemic (an H1N1 virus)—an early
15
by the distortion of time, loss of contact with external reality, and
an inability to recall the acute period of illness. This sense of minds
under siege is also evident in a very different pandemic story, Horton
1918, set in small-town Texas. (The play was written in
Horace Robedaux, on his own father. Horace comes home sick and
16 The delirium that quickly follows is unambiguous.
17 and by the time
the doctor arrives, he is having auditory hallucinations, asking “Can
18 Horace collapses in his wife’s arms, and his loss
The illness itself takes place while Horace is asleep, between
the two acts, comprising a literal intermission or lacuna in the story
of the play. Act Two opens ten days later when Horace wakes up in
62
scene, for his memory has been distorted: “I kept dreaming that you
told me the baby was dead. . . . It was the fever. I know I must have
19 It
was not a dream, though, and the baby has died, and now his wife
has to break the news again: “It wasn’t a dream, Horace. She died a
20
for the audience, as for Horace, the experience of illness itself cannot
be retrieved. This gap is, of course, partly due to the limitations of
realist drama, which necessarily represents only what can be external-
delirious do not make effective dramatic protagonists, not least because
their experience is inherently surreal, demanding a different kind of
To retreat into a form of sleep offers a way for both patient and
were largely elided by the disease’s seemingly innocuous name and
its more familiar seasonal incarnations. Margaret Humphreys points
out that cultural panic responses tend to be proportionate neither to
the lethality nor to the likelihood of an infection, but to the “putrid-
smallpox and cholera, which induce panic, she lists the benignly
21 In his history of
the pandemic, John Barry repeatedly reminds us that this was “only
22—but as he lists its ghastly impact on bodies, his refrain
quickly becomes ironic.
rely on remaining medical documentation. A physician in Mullen’s The
Last Town on Earth
the military cantonment outside Boston. The letter is dated September
20, 1918, and is clearly modeled on an actual one written on Septem-
from his signature). The letter was found decades later by a Scottish
doctor, N.R. Grist, and published in the British Medical Journal.23 It is
referred to in most accounts of the pandemic, suggesting how few like
63Catherine Belling
it remain. According to Mullen’s lightly adapted version of the letter,
the “symptoms rivaled the breadth of the epidemic in their horror.
Even if only a few people had suffered this disease, it still would
24 These symptoms include
with a particular kind of horror as threatening even the racial identity
of the patient. Although Mullen does not quote the letter directly, his
description closely approximates Roy’s actual document: “Victims be-
came cyanotic, starved of oxygen—parts or all of their bodies turned
blue, sometimes such a dark hue that the corpses of white men were
25
The visible external effects of the disease would have been only
contracted it had already seen its effects played out on the bodies of
The Last Town on Earth -
len’s vivid description of the disease’s clinical effects also reveals his
effort to convey the patient’s subjective experience:
him was blood that had been coughed there or perhaps wiped by
pillow and blood on the sheets, and his entire jaw looked as if
he had dipped it in reddish black ink. His eyes were white and
been sucked into the space behind them. There was blood on the
small table beside the bed, an old portrait of a stern father and
expressionless mother and three young sons in suit coats and shorts,
blood on its lower left-hand corner and blood in the center, where
he must have brushed against it one last time.26
This violent scene is visible to the doctor, and to the reader through
horrible, unclosed eyes saw last was the portrait, presumably of his
family. His blood marks a dying effort to maintain contact with a
reality outside himself.
waking from fever mean waking to a new world, but for many it
64
Porter, it quite possibly meant waking as a writer. But for most, the
would be to write nonsense, to write less a diseased body than an
unhinged mind. Perhaps this meant that even witnesses who could
vividly describe injuries to the body (like those caused by the war)
would have found themselves incapable of representing to others the
-
afraid of writing outside the conventions of realistic description, might
At the time of the pandemic, a new kind of literary writing
was in fact emerging. Modernism was a reaction against the era of
the realist novel. Although the timing was not quite right, modernism
gave the disease, if not the pandemic, its language. Virginia Woolf de-
“I am
of the disease?27 In 1926, when Woolf published this essay, the world
certainly had changed. Her interest, though, was not in how disease
changes the world, but in how it changes the mind’s grasp of the
world. The subjective experience of being ill affects both perception
and the ability to describe the experience. The medium mutates under
28 A week later,
29 Her mother had died of
The distortion it imposed on her view of reality was both liberating
and debilitating for her work, providing insight and despair: “What
30 It was possibly the freedom of modernist prose as Woolf and
other writers of her time developed it—where narration tracks subjec-
one in which the narration is sustained throughout most of the patient’s
delirium: Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter.
65Catherine Belling
III. Remembering
. . . the chief reason for the lack of attention paid to [Pale Horse,
Pale Rider], outside of literature seminars, may simply be that it is
about a person undergoing a traumatic experience as the result of
Alfred W. Crosby,
America’s Forgotten Pandemic
The dedication page in Alfred Crosby’s history of the pandemic
only survivor, as if by writing about it she assured that she would
survive the trauma in a way nobody else could. Porter was twenty-
had been set in type, and her father had planned her funeral.31 Twenty
years later, she published Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a novella in which her
At the center of Pale Horse, Pale Rider, narrated in the third-person,
but entirely from Miranda’s point of view, is a sustained account of
her illness, explicitly tracing the disease’s assault on consciousness,
memory, and the medium of language itself. As soon as Miranda falls
ill, her (and our) hold on external reality becomes tenuous, becomes
must wake from time lost to illness: “I think I have been asleep all
32 Porter does her
best to take us with her into that terrible sleep.
-
ably embedded in the corporeal experiences of fever and infection.
from the limits of rationality: “I wish I were in the cold mountains
. . . and all about her rose the measured ranges of the Rockies . . .
chilling her to the bone with their sharp breath. Oh, no, I must have
33
She sees a sailing ship in a jungle, “moored near by, with a gang-
34 Bed and
jungle coexist, and Miranda is able to leave her sick body: “Without
surprise, watching from her pillow, she saw herself run swiftly down
this gangplank to the slanting deck, and standing there, she leaned on
66
the rail and waved gaily to herself in bed, and the slender ship spread
35 This surreal escape from
the sickbed might suggest why the bedridden body itself would have
been hard for a patient to describe.
and tries to throw her out of the building, and Adam, the young
and elsewhere:
The air trembled with the shattering scream and the hoarse bellow
of voices all crying together. . . . There was her door half open,
Adam standing with his hand on the knob, and Miss Hobbe with
her face all out of shape with terror was crying shrilly, “I tell you,
they must come for her now, or I’ll put her on the sidewalk . .
. . I tell you, this is a plague, a plague, my God, and I’ve got a
36
It is apparently true that Porter’s landlady tried to evict her for fear of
contagion. Is Miranda’s version a reporting of Porter’s exact memory, or
did she learn of the event later and incorporate it into her re-imagining?
Miranda’s sense of temporal orientation is increasingly distorted:
of memory and hope pulling taut backwards and forwards holding her
upright between them. There was only this one moment and it was a
37 Yet the reader is deprived of this moment even as the
text struggles to capture it; the past tense reminds us that the narrator
is not in the midst of delirium but is describing it from a later, more
rational, vantage point. Even this most vivid account is, necessarily,
mediated by retrospect. When Miranda is taken to hospital, the nar-
rative breaks off, a space on the page marking the interim in which
38
in the hospital, but is unable to communicate. She says to a doctor,
horror she heard herself babbling nonsense, knowing it was nonsense
39 Our access, like
her remembered experience, slips in and out of focus.
Porter articulates the division between delirious self and detached
self even as this dissociation moves beyond the imagined corporeality
of the self watched in its real bed: “Her mind, split in two, acknowl-
edged and denied what she saw in one instant, for across an abyss of
67Catherine Belling
complaining darkness her reasoning coherent self watched the strange
40 She cannot judge the reality or meaning
of what her sick self knows. Porter marks this struggle as an effort
to represent, to hold onto language: “Oblivion, thought Miranda, her
mind feeling among her memories of words she had been taught to
describe the unseen, the unknowable, is a whirlpool of gray water
41 As she approaches this oblivion,
it has no attributes. Silenced she sank easily through deeps under
deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of
life, knowing herself to be blind, deaf, speechless, no longer aware of
the members of her own body, entirely withdrawn from all human
42 She
not a human, linguistic being.
Porter gives us a vivid account of an illness we know she ex-
account, whether she meant us to or not. But this cannot mean that
she has simply recorded, as a self-witness, her own unmediated expe-
rience. We all learn our discourses, even down to the voice in which
we offer our most private testimonies. By Porter’s own account, her
experiencing mind was hardly more present in the diseased body or
in the external reality of the pandemic than we can be now. Where
43
In a biocultural dialectic, prompted by the virus, texts and illnesses
construct each other, and Pale Horse, Pale Rider reveals that process
and thus enacts several layers of memory, not only of being ill but
also earlier memories, of reading about being ill. We may suspect that
Porter’s account is informed as much by Woolf’s description of fever
as it is by Porter’s memory of her own.
Geoffrey Hartman has pointed out that the “literary construction
of memory is obviously not a literal retrieval but a statement of a
44
reveal experience, reproduce the subjective habitation of the past—and
material. Instead, it works by displacing the inexpressible into the
texture of writing, onto the voice. Hartman continues,
68
. . . [i]t relates to the negative moment in experience, to what in
experience has not been, or cannot be, adequately experienced. That
moment is now expressed, or made known, in its negativity; the
(epistemophilia) which is driven by images (scopophilia). Trauma
symbolic process in general, as something other than an enhanced
imaging or vicarious repetition of a prior (non)experience.45
-
the means by which she would remember it on awakening?
In 1918, Woolf had not yet published her major work (Mrs Dal-
loway The Voyage Out, was published
sticky pool, and a wave seemed to bear her up and down with it;
she had ceased to have any will of her own; she lay on the top of
was replaced by the side of a mountain. Her body became a drift of
melting snow, above which her knees rose in huge peaked mountains
46 Perhaps Woolf provided Porter with the modernist
voice she needed for articulating the inexpressible. Just as Miranda
-
47 Just as
of the bed and her mind driven to some remote corner of her body,
48 As Miranda becomes
presence of her lover, Terence, “the greatest effort, because he forced
her to join mind to body in the desire to remember something. She
did not wish to remember; it troubled her when people tried to disturb
49
When Miranda begins to recover (which Woolf’s Rachel does not
do), she awakens to the material of her diseased body, for which Porter
69Catherine Belling
now has simpler, clearer words: “Pain returned, a terrible compelling
she opened her eyes and saw pale light through a coarse white cloth
50
Miranda re-inhabit it and, unwillingly, return to the troubled eloquence
of being once more fully human, motivated no longer only by that
earlier, inarticulate, will to live. Miranda’s survival makes her an oc-
casion for celebration by those who cared for her, but she does not
share their sense of victory: “She struggled to cry out . . . but heard
only incoherent sounds of animal suffering. She saw doctor and nurse
glance at each other . . . their eyes alive with knowledgeable pride.
51 Her body
52 and her return
to the living is unwanted, not least because she learns that Adam
whole human conviction and custom of society, [that had] conspired
put in order her disordered mind, and to set her once more safely in
53
The world had changed while she was sick, and on waking,
ability to make sense of living in the world. We will never know
or whether it might be special to viral infection compared with other
the 1918 pandemic had particularly severe and insidious effects on the
brain, and that mental illness was a common complication.54 The return
and sinisterly different world, apprehended with a mind oddly divided.
on the biological particularities of this H1N1 infection, but we cannot
know for sure, any more than we can know how much of Porter’s
on her words.
The last words of Porter’s story point convincingly to the silence
of those who went through the disease and recovered: “No more war,
70
heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets,
the dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there would be time for ev-
55 This time, for most, will not be used for recollecting the
plague that had left such damage behind. Porter herself was a rare
exception, Pale Horse, Pale Rider a possibly unique narration that al-
of that experience.
IV. Reminding
how the country should prepare for and respond to a pandemic of
New York Times, August 26, 2004
Perhaps we have awakened too late to the consequences of indif-
online Pandemic Inuenza Storybook. A few of the stories are told by
narrators who were alive at the time, but most are second-hand ac-
counts by children or grandchildren who heard about the pandemic
from relatives now dead. The distance shows. These stories are strangely
inert, often listing the names and relationships of those who got sick
and those who died, names of people the tellers never met. In only a
few places does the truth of the pandemic seem to come to life. One
example: Ethel Hubble-Harter was alive during the pandemic. She was
eight months old when both her parents became ill:
My parents told me that one morning mother had gone to the
kitchen for something and I was left in the room in my baby bed
with my father next to the wood stove for warmth. I woke up cry-
ing and my father, delirious and confused from a high fever, ran
over and grabbed me up thinking I was a wild cat screaming and
attacking his family. He had just lifted me over his head to throw
from him. The family survived and I’m thankful that mother had
enough strength that day to save me, too. 56
71Catherine Belling
We have no more than this—a chilling glimpse of a mind made danger-
ously opaque by disease. The narrator does not herself remember the
incident, at least not in a way she can tell about it, and her parents
traces of horrors we can never apprehend fully.
But what are these stories for? What kind of testimony are
they meant to provide? Perhaps the most notable characteristic of
primarily as a record of the pandemic nor as a way for its survivors
and descendants to bear witness. Instead it is intended to remind us,
now, of something we cannot remember in order to prepare us for
a future we cannot adequately predict. This mixing of tenses is clear
in a quotation from the collection’s introduction by Julie Gerberding,
told so eloquently . . . serve as a sobering reminder of the devastating
57 The stories are meant to
remind us not of the 1918 pandemic but, in what is intended to be
an emotionally compelling way, of the instructions given us by public
58
Pandemic Inu-
enza Storybook, both wrestle with the problem of reminding us about
in a different way with the problem of recounting the experience of
-
ingly multiplied incidence, and both state explicitly their intention to
try and remedy our historical amnesia.
In The Last Town on Earth, Mullen describes the efforts of the
-
tion. The plan fails, and quarantining the outside world proves to be
profoundly harmful. Goldberg’s Wickett’s Remedy recounts the experiences
in her family die in the pandemic. She becomes a nurse, and assists in
to have volunteered for the experiments. Plot particulars of both novels
are based on the historical record. Commonwealth resembles the town
of Gunnison, Colorado, which succeeded in protecting itself from the
72
based on those carried out by the U.S. Public Health Service on Gal-
lops Island in Boston Harbor. These recorded events provide contexts
and plot for the accounts, establishing the pathological social matrices
most vividly conveyed is sixteen-year-old Philip Worthy, a young man
involved in the shooting of a soldier who attempts to breach the town’s
cordon sanitaire. Because of his contact with this soldier, Philip is put in
distortion of memory:
. . . something kept him from rising. It certainly wasn’t the pleas-
antness of his dreams; indeed, he’d suffered from nightmares . . .
[He] stayed in bed because the outside world seemed so much less
welcoming than he’d expected. . . . it felt like he’d walked into some
altered rendition of his life, painted by a malevolent artist intent
some other plague had descended upon the town while Philip was
away, robbing everything of its warmth and casting a sinister hue
on every familiar sight.59
As in Porter’s account, the virus itself seems to distort perception.
in which he keeps returning to “an overcrowded car so hot from the
press of bodies that he felt the sweat pool . . . in his armpits and
groin. . . . He was standing in the car . . . , but when he opened his
eyes he saw he was actually lying down in his bed. He closed his
eyes again and things made more sense: his legs ached and his foot
throbbed because he was in this dark train car, his toes occasionally
60 Mullen shows the mind looking for stories, or invent-
Philip does experience odd moments of lucidity, but even these
are experienced in the context of the train ride, as if it has become
his new reality, the site of a battle between psyche and soma:
73Catherine Belling
alive while in this siege. Just as the town had been under siege
from all sides. Now the same scenario was playing itself out, but
of Commonwealth was his mind. He needed to protect his mind
from his body. If his mind could stay healthy, if he could properly
quarantine it, then maybe his body would give up this gruesome
was already losing his mind—his brain had already fallen victim to
61
Mullen makes the body/mind division explicit. Philip becomes a mi-
crocosm of the town of Commonwealth, his body inhabited by his
the body, its infectibility and its vulnerability to temptation—the dis-
ease has in fact been brought into Commonwealth by men sneaking
to the next town to visit the brothel—cannot be contained by the will
of the mind.
time, ten days later, both he and the world appear changed: “He
seemed to be remembering how to talk, his tongue awkward, his
62
had passed with no reliable record except disturbing dreams, con-
63
Miranda, Philip has no reliable record of the time of his illness. And,
a dangerous inattention, a kind of irresponsibility that is potentially
lethal for those one loves. The problem with pandemics is that the
individual patient is never the only patient, never the center of at-
tention in a story about one special illness, never the only one who
needs to be cared for and to be heard, and never the subject of the
most powerful stories. The most powerful stories are the ones never
told, for their narrators are dead.
74
V. Restoring the Medium
so-called facts, because despite the impossibility of accessing truth,
it is perhaps possible to get ever closer to truth by exploring the
subtleties and ambiguities of its representation. Maia Saj Schmidt,
I wanted to address how we forget things, how we replace facts
with interpretation . . . the frailty of memory, both individual and
collective. Myla Goldberg,
Goldberg disavows any intention to link her account of 1918 to
the events of 2004 in an interview that begins, “Myla Goldberg wants
to set the record straight. She began writing her latest novel, Wickett’s
Remedy
64 Instrumentalism, she feels, must be
rejected. In a different interview, Goldberg gives her reason: “I wrote
65
of conveying that experience, making the reader aware that this 1918
is imagined and that the imagining is conditional. We know from the
start that Goldberg’s story is as much about memory and voice as it
are coming to associate with the pandemic, Goldberg focuses insistently
on her medium: narrative. Where both Goldberg and Mullen describe
pulmonary congestion as a creature inhabiting the lungs, Goldberg links
this entity to language itself. Mullen’s Philip feels “something inside
his chest, something large and waxy and heavy, something that had
66 but Goldberg’s narrator shows how a patient is
given a horrible new voice by the disease even as it also renders her
(the patient, but not the narrator) inarticulate: “thick, labored speech
75Catherine Belling
rose in intensity to become the voice of sickness itself. It was as if a
67
Goldberg’s multivocal text channels a range of perspectives on
the pandemic. Each chapter ends with a series of documents—letters,
-
lel counter-narrative, or metanarrative, told in the collective second-
illuminates the novel’s central narration by a text printed literally in
its margins. If the usual or conventional medium of univocal narration
is overwhelmed by the multiplicity and the feverish forgetfulness of
the pandemic, then Goldberg creates in her writing a different kind
of medium, quite literally a clairvoyant medium that can transmit the
voices of the dead, a medium that is able to recount knowledge never
put it, “Our collective knowledge is surpassed only by Our collective amnesia,
which encompasses millions of moments lived and subsequently forgotten68
-
sible for the reader to forget the noisy clamor of pandemic, where so
many different voices are competing with such urgency to be heard
of meaning or understanding.
I will attempt show how Goldberg’s technique works in just one
the sickroom where her brother, Malachy, his wife, Alice, and their
children are all in bed: “the air was dense with the smells of fever
sweat, phlegm, and unwashed sheets and seemed, by its very thick-
ness, responsible for the prostration of its inhabitants. Whether sickness
alone or a combination of poor health and poor light contributed to
69
Alice is lying in an awkward position and imagines that her “original
intention in lying on her side had been to watch over her children,
70 The mother is too
sick even to see her own children, and when Alice’s own mother tries
71
notices in Alice the same dissociation of mind and body captured by
Porter and by Mullen: Alice accidentally hits her head against the bed
76
Alice’s face betrayed nothing. Sickness had turned her into a spectator
72 She may feel pain, but sickness has rendered her
on an observer would be the same.
73 Again, the pandemic
exerts its distraction on the human interchanges that usually mark our
response to the risk of disease. There is no secure network of care in
tenuous to survive exposure to the air, but incontrovertible within the
itself, is for most people both absolute and inexpressible.
Alice dies, and Goldberg’s medium offers us Alice’s posthumous
recollection of being ill. Paradoxically, though, we learn little more than
Alice remembers
only feeling awfully tired and deciding to lie down.74 The rest, even for The
in a grimace, her eyebrows raised in astonishment. She looked neither
75
“Jennie Feeney is certain her daughter looked beautiful76—but they also tell
us that “Jennie Feeney remembers blessed little of that terrible day.”77 Our
Goldberg’s use of a supposedly dispassionate third-person narrator.
Rather than giving us the whole story, the many voices of the text
simply draw our attention to the paradox of such representation: the
more they say, the more they remind us of how little they can tell.
This is perhaps most true in the case of six-year-old Brian’s postmortem
that a nurse had been with him when he died. What Brian remembers
is “a lady with bird wings on either side of her head. He thought she was
an angel, but once he could not breathe anymore he realized she was nothing
at all78
death renders redemptive meaning pitifully obsolete.
In The Forgotten Pandemic, Alfred Crosby asks (and tries to tell)
“what happened, not to statistics, but to people and families and
it consists of thousands of separate stories. Shall we therefore examine
79 Crosby decides to tell the
77Catherine Belling
stories of the cities, because there is more data about them than about
how the pandemic unfolded in rural areas. He cannot claim to tell
the whole story. But then who can? Two reviews of Goldberg’s novel
reviewer, the vivid account of a part is enough to convey the whole:
about one poignant and beautifully observed corner of it, in which
80
researched attempt to capture the broad sweep of an epidemic is
to select: to single out, from a mass of events and individuals, the
representative few who will engage our emotions and come to stand
81
or reconstruct, but rather to ask how we recall and reconstruct, how
even those who were there cannot remember exactly or retell without
distortion, and how the meaning of events lies less in what happened
than in how they are reinvented—retold, in stories, in texts—later on.
Our medium, the means by which we tell, is inherent in the sense we
make of reality. Our memories, histories, and testimonies are all text,
The more that is told, the more we are made conscious of remaining
on the edge of a silence. How much remains that can never be told
82 To trace the literary representation of an event like the
the limits of representation. What we cannot remember, even though
we have proof and data and records, becomes the sleep of history, a
NOTES
How to Have Theory in an Epidemic.
2. See, for example, Barry, The Great Inuenza: The Epic Story of the Deadli-
est Plague in History
literary canon includes the writing of poets like Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and
Robert Graves, to name only a few. It is beyond the scope of this essay to compare
the two bodies of writing, but two factors are likely to have led to the particular
effect of the war which was qualitatively different from previous experience (where
78
epidemics were a fairly familiar experience, albeit never on the same global scale),
and the longer period over which the war would have been experienced by an
individual, producing more complex plot lines than the rapid descent into incoher-
3. Vaughan, A Doctor’s Memories, 383–4.
4. Ibid., 432.
267. 7. Mullen, The Last Town on Earth, 399.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 400.
11. Others include William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows and Wallace
The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943).
-
The Thin White Line, 64.
15. Ibid., 195 n. 4. Similarly, an illustration for the section describing the
virus as seen in a negative-stained transmission electron micrograph collected from
a footnote disclosing that the picture, a “public domain image captured from the
his imaginary pandemic.
1918, 138.
17. Ibid., 140.
18. Ibid., 143.
19. Ibid., 149.
20. Ibid.
22. Barry, 231, 232, 236, 241.
24. Mullen, 129.
25. Ibid. Roy writes, “Two hours after admission they have the Mahogany
spots over the cheek bones, and a few hours later you can begin to see the Cy-
anosis extending from their ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard
to distinguish the coloured men from the white. It is only a matter of a few hours
-
so dark one could not easily if they were Caucasian or Negro. They looked almost
from which he quotes directly on p. 187.
26. Mullen, 218.
28. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 163.
29. Ibid., 165.
30. Ibid., 9.
Katherine Anne Porter, 63.
79Catherine Belling
32. Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, 229.
33. Ibid., 231.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 232.
36. Ibid., ellipsis in original.
37. Ibid., 241.
38. Ibid., 242.
39. Ibid., 245.
40. Ibid., 251. Rita Charon gives a vivid clinical account of the interactions
Narrative Medicine,
90. 41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 252.
43. Cunningham, introduction to The Voyage Out, xv.
44. Hartman, 540.
45. Ibid.
46. Woolf, The Voyage Out, 404.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 404–405.
50. Porter, 255.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 247.
53. Ibid., 259–60.
54. There certainly is evidence that the 1918 virus could affect the brain
long-term memory, but this may have been something more. A famous study of
one hundred patients admitted to the Boston Psychopathic Hospital in 1919 who
-
(240)—and evidence of ongoing neurological and psychiatric effects after the fever
then mental collapse, stupor, and long term dementia (378); “toxic involvement of
55. Porter, 264.
Pandemic Inuenza Storybook.
Pandemic Inuenza Storybook, Introduction.
59. Mullen, 219.
60. Ibid., 332.
61. Ibid., 334.
62. Ibid., 354.
63. Ibid., 355.
H1.
80
66. Mullen, 332–333.
67. Goldberg, 133.
68. Ibid., 178. Italics in original.
69. Ibid., 129–130.
70. Ibid., 130.
71. Ibid., 131.
72. Ibid., 132.
73. Ibid., 166.
74. Ibid., 133.
75. Ibid., 145.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid., 146.
78. Ibid., 161.
79. Crosby, The Forgotten Pandemic, 66.
The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 138.
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Pandemic Inuenza Storybook: Personal Recollections from
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Clark, Mary Marshall. “Holocaust Video Testimony, Oral History, and Narrative
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