Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature by Elizabeth Outka (review).

Abstract

Reviewed by: Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature by Elizabeth Outka Bridget English (bio) Elizabeth Outka. Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 344 pp. Paperback, $35.00. The eerily prescient publication of Viral Modernism—a book that interrogates the conspicuous absence of direct references to the pandemic of 1918 in British and American interwar literature—mere months before the outbreak of COVID-19 could be read as a fortuitous coincidence. But as Elizabeth Outka warns in her chilling coda, scientists and researchers have been telling us for years that "we are not ready for the next severe global pandemic, which—as they also remind us—is most assuredly coming" (254). Outka could not have known as she wrote those words how soon the COVID pandemic would overwhelm the world. However, this book is not simply a precursor to the scholarship on the history of pandemics and their literary manifestations that will undoubtedly follow the present pandemic: it is instead part of a substantial subfield of health humanities scholarship that emerged in the early 2000s and focuses on historical and literary accounts of the 1918 flu pandemic. The question that underlies much of this scholarship is why, despite the fact that the flu killed between 50 and 100 million people, it is not directly referenced in the literature of that period. Viral Modernism succeeds in remapping modernist studies by placing the pandemic at its center, a move that requires a reframing of certain assumptions about this period, such as why the lives lost in war were more grievable than those lost to illness.1 Outka's point is that the pandemic dead were ungrievable because they could not be made meaningful through the guise of sacrificial death, and therefore were not politically useful. Viral Modernism provides a crucial frame for [End Page 191] literary and cultural studies more widely by reading modernist texts and films through two inventive tropes: "miasma" and "viral resurrection." The first of these, miasma, focuses on the "spectral realities" of the pandemic's "absent presence" in novels like Mrs. Dalloway or poems like "The Second Coming" (5-6). "Viral resurrection" describes the embodied illness apparent in the resurfaced corpses, zombies, and disfigured bodies of literature and culture in this period, which highlight the pandemic's lasting effects on survivors who often experienced a feeling of living death. Outka's larger point here is that analyzing an experience of illness that is "simultaneously widespread and hidden" offers a model for the recuperation of voices that have been ignored because "the viral, dust-like form at the heart of the story was itself invisible and silent" (37). Viral Modernism is effectively divided into an introductory chapter and three parts: one focused on the realist novels of Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, Thomas Wolfe, and William Maxwell; the second concentrated on major modernist writers Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and W. B. Yeats; and a final chapter addressing the pandemic in popular culture, examining spiritualism, proto-zombies, and the return of the dead in the work of Arthur Conan Doyle, H. P. Lovecraft, and Abel Gance's film J'accuse. Outka's choice of largely canonical authors might initially seem predictable, but she offers surprisingly original insights into well-known texts such as The Waste Land, with famous lines such as "I had not thought death had undone so many" becoming suddenly more haunting when read as a reference to flu victims. The introductory section displays Outka's meticulous research on the lived experiences of survivors of the virus and points to her ethical commitment to interrogating the human tendency to describe illness by using metaphors. Viral Modernism opens with a striking list of modernist writers whose lives were deeply impacted by the flu. Some, like Porter and D. H. Lawrence, became so ill that they barely survived, while others, like Woolf, turned her own experiences into a reflection on illness. Eliot worried about the effects the flu would have on his brain, while Yeats agonized over the condition of his pregnant wife, who also had a near-fatal encounter with the virus. Individually these references provide interesting anecdotes; together...