Paper Contagions

Abstract

AbstractOver the weeks of forced self-confinement imposed on us by the pandemic, many of us discovered a sort of thematic library, one which this exceptional and dramatic event seems to have generated by itself: novels, stories, and creative writing more generally that tell of epidemics and quarantines, contagions and pandemics. Newspapers and journals periodically proposed their lists and catalogs, but each of us perfected our personalized lists based on their tastes and interests. Classicists and lovers of ancient literature more generally opted for those lines from the Iliad in which the “evil pestilence” is a divine punishment that the god Apollo inflicts on the Achaens thanks to Agamemnon or those pages in Thuycidides that recount the terrifying plague of Athens during in the Peloponnesian War, an event reprised by Lucretius in Book IV of De Rerum Natura. Alternatively, they turn to Tacitus, Procopius, or even the Biblical book of Numbers. Others more inclined toward modern literature during the lockdown perhaps discovered Daniel Defoe’s masterpiece of 1722, Diary of a Plague Year: here the author of Robinson Crusoe, with a chronicler’s diligence, provides a fictionalized account of the contagion that spread through England in 1665, which he had known as a child. Alternatively, further still, drawn to the forerunners of horror, others perhaps turned the pages of Mary Shelly’s dystopic novel The Last Man, or Edgar Allan Poe’s The Mask of the Red Death. Even fans of the twentieth-century novel did not remain lost for choice: from Gabriel Garcia Marques (Love in the Time of Cholera) to José Saramago (Blindness) and not to mention the great books keep contagions and epidemics in the background. Indeed, of all of these, Albert Camus’s The Plague takes pride of place, an essential remedy for taming the most horrendous and insidious of flagella: the pandemic of Fascists and Nazis. Our little library obviously cannot over skip the contemporary writers if we are to enrich it fully: Stephen King’s The Stand is a clear choice—but then there has also been the inevitable and disturbing reappearance of a title by a commercial author, Dean Koontz, one of whose novels unfolds around an endemic pulmonary disease called “Wuhan-400.” However, the quarantine bestseller has not been a novel at all, but an essay: the incredible, prophetic Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen.