At the beginning of the novel Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf describes Clarissa Dalloway stepping out on a beautiful June day, revelling in the noise and bustle of London streets. I re-read Woolf's novel in April, tracing Clarissa's steps as she walked to Bond Street and shopped for flowers. I felt nostalgic for the street life so vividly depicted. While I was virtually walking through the London of Woolf's impressionistic prose, news bulletins flashed up images of empty streets and roads deadened by the lockdown. The hallucinations of the shell-shocked, former soldier Septimus Smith, who sat in the park near to where Clarissa Dalloway walked, seemed more real. Even in a busy part of south London, where I lived at the time, the streets were eerily quiet. Only the noise of the emergency services broke the stillness, with helicopters buzzing above and sirens on the roads around us. Children's paintings of rainbows for the NHS started to appear in the windows of my own house and then other houses around us. I wondered whether faded rainbows would be one of the main things we would remember of this period in our lives.
In Viral Modernism, Elizabeth Outka asks why the deadly 1918–20 influenza pandemic left few traces in literature and culture? Pointing to the enormous death toll—at least 228 000 died in Britain alone—Outka outlines the usual narrative of a Europe convulsed by World War 1, with influenza considered yet another catastrophic tragedy. In the USA, influenza had a more profound effect, but was rarely marked in cultural memory. Outka uses Judith Butler's concept of grievability in Frames of War (2010) contending that this absence was politically motivated. Butler uses the term grievability to describe how lives are grieved but underlines that, particularly in war, some lives are deemed, usually by the State, more worthy of grief than others. The more grievable lives of those who died in warfare are usually male; their deaths were used for political ends—for example, to further a narrative of nationalism. Influenza deaths could not be spun into so-called stories of victory. Instead, Outka argues that you can read traces of the pandemic in interwar novels by Willa Cather, Thomas Wolfe, and others, as well as in the zombies and spiritualism of popular culture.
Traces can also be read in the texts of so-called high modernism, such as TS Eliot's The Waste Land and Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. Outka connects Mrs Dalloway with Woolf's 1926 essay On Being Ill and Woolf's own recurring bouts of influenza, including one in 1919. We are told by Woolf that Clarissa Dalloway has had influenza; her weak heart and white hair are recognised after effects. Outka makes a strong case that Mrs Dalloway is “a novel of influenza, though it is rarely read as such” by showing glimpses of the influenza's so-called intangible presence. Septimus Smith's war and Clarissa Dalloway's influenza experience merge in the novel, like the spirit photographs of the same period, to depict a city haunted by the recent dead.
In a recent blogpost, Outka contends that narratives about grievability are currently being shaped in the response to COVID-19. For example, the people in at risk groups were presented by government and the media (Outka refers principally to the situation in the USA) as being expendable and prompted responses from people in those groups pointing out how damaging and cruel such dismissals are. She draws parallels in the high mortality from influenza and COVID-19 of poor, Black, and immigrant people in urban spaces. 100 years ago the African American writer and activist WEB DuBois pointed to an index of social conditions of overcrowding, poor nutrition, slum housing, and poverty to explain these statistics. The list of victims and causes are depressingly similar. Outka argues that “these statistics [are] tied to a government or culture's pre-existing frame in which certain groups have already been deemed ungrievable.” This, in addition to police brutality and institutional racism, makes the Black Lives Matter movement crucial.
Influenza deaths in Ireland were four times higher than those from political violence between the Easter Rising in 1916 and the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923 but much less re-remembered. Emma Donoghue's new novel The Pull of the Stars is set in a maternity and fever ward in Dublin at the height of the influenza epidemic. Donoghue is unsparing in depicting the misery of influenza, although she makes the disease just another unforgiving and unfair trial amongst the many that impact women. Donoghue finished her first draft in March 2020, just as COVID-19 hit the UK and Ireland, and rushed to finish further edits as the parallels between the pandemics became clear. To remember the empty streets, the sick, the dead, and those that care for them, we need to re-remember the influenza pandemic. We should question the narratives that remember some profound events and not others. Donoghue's and Outka's books are good places to start.
