Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature by Elizabeth Outka

Abstract

Elizabeth Outka’s new book was published in October 2019. The timing has since proven grim. Published a century after the influenza pandemic of 1918–19, Viral Modernism makes the first sustained study of how interwar writers reckoned with the physical ravages, atmospheric fears, mass death, social destruction, and psychic agony the flu wrought. At the core of the book, Outka offers graceful readings of pandemic traces in three canonical modernist works: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), and W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (1919). In true modernist style, her readings make new again Woolf’s narrative texture, Eliot’s fragments, and Yeats’s violence. This central account of “pandemic modernism” alone would constitute a major contribution, since it runs counter to a prevailing assumption that with the notable exception of, say, Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), influenza somehow vanished from the interwar literary record (99). But Outka goes still further. She frames her book as a “modernist mystery” (1) in which she both investigates how the flu came to “drop off the cultural radar” (21) and “brings a marginalized tragedy to the heart of Anglophone modernism” (34). To read her persuasive book during the COVID-19 emergency—and since it ought to become a mainstay of modernist studies, literature and medicine, and the broader health humanities, to read the book in years to come—is to be doubly dumbfounded that the influenza pandemic managed almost entirely to evade the gaze of modernist scholars for so long. At least Viral Modernism rewards the wait.In the mystery of the influenza pandemic’s apparent disappearance from literary modernism, the prime suspect is the First World War. The flu struck in three waves between the spring of 1918 and the spring of 1919; the deadliest wave, the second, crested in the fall of 1918, and thus in historical, biological, and rhetorical lockstep with the war’s end. Outka echoes historians of influenza who stress that this gruesome timing meant the war both hastened the spread of the virus and precluded public recognition of the at least 50 million and likely more than 100 million persons who died of it (255n1). Training a literary critic’s eye on contemporaneous news coverage, testimonies of flu survivors, and other primary materials whose language registers how the war “overshadowed, blocked, and incorporated the viral outbreak” (22), Outka’s introductory chapter begins to sharpen accumulated understandings of how the flu went missing. She lays out, for example, how insidious “gendered associations” of war with masculinity and illness with femininity “contributed to the war’s dominance and to the way the war became the ‘real’ story in both the literature and the culture.” Meanwhile “the pandemic, with its mix of female and male victims who succumbed, [became] a deflating sequel” (24). This crucial point speaks to the ethical imperatives of Outka’s call for a “radical reframing of our basic assumptions about the period” (35), chief among them the sense of the war as the single rather than “a paired event of mass death” (3) in the early twentieth century.The word “reframing” is not idle. It rather points to Outka’s adaptation of Judith Butler’s influential concept of “grievability” to the literary history of the pandemic. Briefly, in her Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), Butler describes how governments and institutions produce discourses that justify war and violence by constructing only some lives as real, valuable, and therefore “grievable.” As an example, Outka cites World War I itself, “where . . . deaths of both civilians and soldiers of different races and ethnicities were valued—and grieved— unequally by the state” (36). At the same time, Outka argues, “the war itself acted as a frame for the era in ways that continue to obscure the victims of the pandemic, making those lives, in a sense, less grievable than the lives lost in the war.” Insofar as modernist studies neglects the pandemic, the field perpetuates the historical overshadowing of the influenza dead by the war dead and of disease violence by state-sanctioned violence: “When we fail to read for illness in general and the 1918 pandemic in particular, we reify how military conflict has come to define history . . . and we take part in long traditions that align illness with seemingly less valiant, more feminine forms of death” (2).Viral Modernism comprises three parts. “Pandemic Realism” (part 1) addresses four US fictions that depict the flu directly and, in all but one case, from the retrospective remove of at least a decade: Willa Cather’s One of Ours (1922), Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life (1929), William Maxwell’s They Came like Swallows (1937), and Pale Horse, Pale Rider. “Pandemic Modernism” (part 2) rewinds in time to tease out the more diffuse presence of pandemic influenza in the forms and styles of Woolf’s, Eliot’s, and Yeats’s modernist classics. Finally, a briefer third part reads the resurgent spiritualist fad and the emergence of zombie figures in 1920s Anglo-American popular culture as, respectively, comforting and cathartic literalizations of the tropes of “viral resurrection”—of fevered hallucinations, viral infection and spread, traumatic flashback, and death-in-life suffering—that Outka tracks throughout Viral Modernism. Across all three parts, a “sensory and affective” (8) historicism informs meticulous close readings. This supple approach takes in the medical-scientific and statistical public health aspects of the pandemic but prioritizes how influenza felt, smelled, tasted, and sounded. Outka is after the embodied experience of the flu and the shared “atmosphere” and “climate” that it created in its rapid spread and left in its wake. Her airy descriptive lexicon cannily encompasses both the threat of airborne, invisible contagion and the felt qualities of “an experience that is simultaneously widespread and hidden” (37).Part 1 strikes a welcome balance between close analysis of and pattern recognition across the flu fictions of Cather and Porter (chap. 2) and Maxwell and Wolfe (chap. 3). Shared features include plot structures that stage the difficulty of representing illness generally and influenza specifically, depictions of “the miasmic world the virus created” (40), and tropes of viral resurrection. Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider garners the most extensive reading in part 1. Outka argues that the challenge of representing the psychological and physical effects of influenza propelled Porter’s stylistic shifts back and forth between realist prose about wartime Denver and modernist, “hallucinatory prose display[ing] how the virus disrupts the body, along with borders, time, and space” (66). She also unpacks how the novella’s plot and pacing—from the protagonist’s creeping awareness of illness through her sudden and terrifying experience of influenza and finally to her learning, belatedly, of her soldier boyfriend’s death of it—crystallize how “the war-pandemic collision” (73) subordinated the flu’s plainly pointless deaths to the war’s ostensibly sacrificial ones. Chapter 3 concentrates on how Wolfe’s and Maxwell’s domestic novels register the war but do not center on it, so that “when the pandemic arrives, it becomes the defining, disrupting, centralized event, its costs revealed by the shattering of the earlier world it displaces” (76). Outka’s reading of Maxwell’s They Came like Swallows, the only work to narrate a woman’s death from the flu, is especially moving. The novel “suggests the devastating cost of parental loss during the pandemic” and employs multiple narrative points of view to depict “the insidious contagion guilt [that] could be particularly damaging for children and spouses who felt responsible for a parent’s death” (88).What Outka ultimately asserts of Maxwell’s and Wolfe’s novels could apply to her entire set of flu texts: “The very singularity of these stories compared to the known statistics of the deaths hints at the millions of stories we do not have, the legions of silenced voices where the experience was too damaging to make the telling possible” (95–96) —including and especially in the US context that part 1 addresses, the voices of people of color and of immigrants. Despite the “scarcity of direct literary responses written at the time,” Outka is confident, that as “literary scholars with expertise across more regions, cultures, and languages” seek out subtler literary expressions of the pandemic, “a richer literary history of [it] will emerge” (35). Viral Modernism will be a vital resource in this collective effort. At the same time, Outka’s reflections on the race and class exclusions endemic to the “overt pandemic works” (40) she analyzes can also inspire a closer look at the racial politics of those works. Cather’s One of Ours, for example, gets somewhat short shrift in part 1. But while critics might debate the novel’s vantage on the influenza and the war in its final two books, its overall arc ties both events to the historical consolidation of various European ethnicities into a dominant American whiteness in the early twentieth century.In contrast to what their titles might imply, parts 1 and 2 of Viral Modernism do not rely unthinkingly on the worn binary of old-fashioned realism versus innovative modernism. Instead, the treatment of late-1920s and 1930s novels expressly about influenza in part 1 fashions a “literary pandemic lens” (100) through which part 2 looks to find earlier and more obliquely influenza-inflected texts. Chapters on Mrs Dalloway (chap. 4), The Waste Land (chap. 5), and Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (chap. 6) see these works registering “more immediate traumatic fragments—the sensory and emotional pieces that have yet to be formed into a coherent story” (99) of the pandemic. This modernist trio evinces a felt “sense of global menace, of a coming apocalypse or waste land that involves a form of mass death tied to—but distinct from—the more visible violence of the war” (101). Part 2, then, aims to reconstitute literary high modernism as a response not only to a disillusioned postwar moment, but also to a disorienting post-pandemic atmosphere.Together with Outka’s sensitivity as a literary analyst and her thorough knowledge of modernism, her focus on the irresolvable qualities of influenza makes her readings of Mrs Dalloway, The Waste Land, and “The Second Coming” revelatory. The guiding claim of part 2 is that if we embrace the model of “reading for the pandemic” (31), then “modernist literary techniques emerge as aesthetic tools suited both to representing a hard-to-depict viral threat and to obscuring it” (100). It’s impossible to do justice to the many instances when Outka makes good on this argument without straining to make the pandemic into a skeleton key for interpretation. Her chapters on Woolf, Eliot, and Yeats are replete with compelling examples of how these writers thread bodily, social, and atmospheric effects of the pandemic into works many scholars of twentieth-century literature probably think we know well. I often felt like I was rediscovering these works, and most powerfully in Outka’s analyses of Woolf’s characterization, Eliot’s fragments, and Yeats’s violence.At the opening of part 2, Outka stipulates that “modernist shifts at the level of character—the borderless qualities of identity, the radical subjectivity of perception—are . . . suited for representing bodies infiltrated at the cellular level and the sense of dissolution this infiltration could produce” (100). Chapter 4 fleshes out the point by reading Clarissa Dalloway, who had influenza, and Septimus Smith, who fought in the war, as twinned survivors of the two mass death events of the early twentieth century; in the last third of the chapter, Outka revalues the traumatic past that structures Septimus’s present, arguing that he “embodies” not a single trauma but rather “the multiple traumas of the moment, his body and his perceptions a swirling mix of the violence of war and illness” (131). I was especially compelled by this chapter’s view of Clarissa. Like Outka, I can’t believe that I had never fully considered Clarissa’s illness as the novel gradually recalls it in dialogue, memory, stream of consciousness, and her experience of her body. But Outka refocuses critical attention not simply on the fact that Clarissa has survived influenza but on how Woolf depicts the “long-term aftereffects” (101) of the pandemic on her and on London. In one of many sharp moments of analysis, Outka reads a passage in which Clarissa, thinking of her illness, imagines the afterlife as “a diffuse kind of survival, one based in blending and continuity, as if the particles of the self might continue on in the very streets of London.” Outka’s pandemic lens allows us to see that Clarissa “envisions precisely how the pandemic virus moved” and “transforms contagion, recasting it as a kind of immortality for the self, an anti-flu miasma that connects rather than infects” (123).I’ll never again read the cityscape of Mrs Dalloway or the atmospheric effects of The Waste Land—the wind blowing, fog hovering, and air breathing through the poem—as separable from the post-pandemic climate of contagion as Viral Modernism reconstructs it. Where Eliot’s “ubiquitous fragments” are “so often imagined as the aftermath of a bomb” (166), Outka finds that they also create “a record of the sensory experiences of acute infection” (145) and of the pandemic’s aftermath, when the residue “of a proliferating viral catastrophe” still circulated “both in the body and in the air” (166). Outka’s detailed overhaul of The Waste Land begins at the beginning. She finds the poem’s famous opening lines crowded with “death-in-life pairings” of viral resurrection, of “agonized uncertain movement between life and death” (159). And she reveals the poem as a whole to be shot through with “images of erasure and of voicelessness,” with silences that paradoxically bespeak “the cultural position of the pandemic, brooding just below the surface but struggling to be heard amid all the noises of modern life and modern warfare” (165). The pandemic lens finally “grants more than additional context” to The Waste Land: “It reveals how an experience may be everywhere, changing perceptions, language, memories, and the body, yet remain encoded, diffuse, and out of sight, part of a seemingly naturalized climate” (166). The fragments shored up in The Waste Land form a broken elegy “to the unmemorialized” (166), even as they register “the breakdown of communication in the face of so much suffering” (145).The challenge of reading for the pandemic in “The Second Coming” owes to the general historical emphasis on the war at the expense of illness and to the specific “parameters of critical discussions surrounding [Yeats] and violence” (168). Those parameters overwhelmingly privilege political and revolutionary violence. In chapter 6, Outka reimagines “The Second Coming” as a poem of “viral violence” and asserts “illness-based destruction . . . as a powerful, overlooked force in the pantheon of Yeatsean violence.” The evidence for this reimagining includes the neglected biographical experience of George Yeats, the poet’s wife, whose near death from influenza Outka sees transposed into imagery resonant with a “pregnancy-centered horror flick” (172) at the end of “The Second Coming”; revisions across drafts of the poem that “stripped the violence of its human agency” (173); and comparative readings that distinguish the “human-initiated destruction” (182) of “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” “Easter 1916,” and “Leda and the Swan” from the agentless, passive-voiced violence in the first stanza and the fruitless search for meaning after that violence in the second stanza of “The Second Coming.”Owing in part to the fixed lines of Yeats criticism and even more to how persuasive Viral Modernism is, the Yeats chapter was, for me, the hardest in which not to think of some roads this terrific book might have taken and which it will surely inspire other scholars to take. Outka acknowledges at various points that politics—and, at one point, that biopolitics—affect the spread of disease and the distribution of a pandemic’s destruction. Now that she has, in a generous spirit, corrected the mistaken impression that the influenza pandemic disappeared from Anglophone modernist literature, we can begin to assess the pandemic’s political dimensions in more detail. Outka recovers the 1918–19 influenza pandemic as a crucial catalyst of modernist aesthetics. Her book helps to adjust the frame of modernist studies to include experiences of illness. It models how to seek out lost voices and experiences of the pandemic and, as Outka puts it, of “other vast phenomena that are undeniably present, like systemic discrimination or environmental damage, but that are often hidden” (37). Equal parts compassionate and incisive throughout, Viral Modernism is a major achievement.