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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature by Elizabeth Outka James Fitz Gerald Elizabeth Outka. Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. Columbia UP, 2019. vii + 326 pp. Elizabeth Outka begins Viral Modernism with an important and, given our own pandemic present, strikingly relevant question: “why does the deadly 1918–1919 influenza pandemic seem to make so few appearances in British, Irish, and American literature of the period?” (1). Until Outka, critics have largely left questions concerning the flu pandemic not just unanswered but unasked. Despite killing more than 50 million people worldwide—the US suffered more deaths in the pandemic than in World War I, World War II, and the imperial conflicts of Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined—the Great Flu Pandemic has been consistently overshadowed by the Great War in modernist scholarship. A “conspicuous literary and critical silence” (2), Outka argues, has given many the impression that the 1918–19 outbreak had little, if any, impact on modernism, modernity, or the interwar period in Anglo American culture. Viral Modernism breaks this silence by positioning such canonical authors as Willa Cather, Thomas Wolfe, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and W. B. Yeats within what Outka calls “a literary pandemic paradigm” (3). Not only does this paradigm help the book challenge long-held assumptions about seemingly familiar texts, forcing readers to rethink the metaphors of modernism beyond the trenches of the First World War, but it also theorizes a new way of understanding the literary-cultural significance of mass illness, suffering, and death, elaborating the methods and mechanisms through which iconic texts have articulated “the rippling and hard-to-capture effects that an invading virus produces within the physical body and in the body politic.” The book makes ambitious claims about the explanatory power of literature in the context of disease emergence, drawing heavily on and challenging the pandemic’s relative absence within the medical and health humanities, trauma studies, and modernist literary studies. Scholars in these fields have traditionally centered the impact of human-based violence when discussing cultural production of the period, focusing on World War I and all the death, destruction, and disillusionment it left behind, without accounting sufficiently for the pandemic. Outka argues that this erasure reflects broader problems in the masculinist conception of history that still dominates research on modernist literature. Scholars too often have emphasized “male contests of strength and power” such as the war at the expense of the pandemic, missing out on the ways in which millions of flu deaths might alter “assumptions about death and sacrifice; shifting enemies, threats, and targets; and [might change] the calculus of risk [End Page 593] and blame between the home front and the front line” (2). While World War I certainly influenced the core tenets of alienation and iconoclasm associated with modernist literature, Outka wages that the pandemic, too, informed realms of experience typically overlooked in modernist scholarship. The book provides new interpretive strategies for apprehending the sensory, atmospheric, and affective forces of the pandemic in texts that have long been analyzed against the backdrop of social dissolution—just not the viral kind that Outka stresses in her expansive yet meticulously researched study. Part 1 addresses the apparent absence of the pandemic in modernist literature, highlighting novels that break through and defy the silence surrounding the outbreak. Outka illustrates, through comparative readings of Cather (One of Ours) and Katherine Anne Porter (Pale Horse and Pale Rider), as well as Wolfe (Look Homeward Angel) and William Maxwell (They Came Like Swallows), that interwar literature did indeed grapple with the pandemic, both overtly and at length. Outka foregrounds novels that first appeared years, sometimes even decades, after the initial outbreak, exposing the enduring challenges of representation the pandemic produced for many writers. This “pandemic realism,” as Outka terms it, resulted from the “miasmic world the virus created” and features in countless “deathbed scenes, damaged bodies, and depictions of airborne menace [blurring the] distinctions between life and death” (40–41). Pandemic realism remains the conceptual anchor for the book, even and especially after it shifts away from such explicit treatments of viral tragedy and onto texts rarely discussed in the light of the outbreak...