Revisiting the Past: Interrogating the Unexplored History of the 1918 Pandemic

Abstract

The 1918 Pandemic that came as the lethal twin of the Great War in its concluding year, has often been called “the forgotten pandemic”, suppressed underneath the grand narrative of the War, the Armistice; lost in the archives amidst the records of the other big historical event. Although in scope and magnitude of its mortality it was almost five times more than the casualties recorded from the war. Yet the 1918 Pandemic, much like the Bubonic plague or the Black Death of the 14th century, remains formally underrepresented in literature and culture. This cultural reserve surrounding the pandemic of 1918 is attributable to quite a few reasons. The most major one being the pandemic’s origin, extent, epidemiology and cure, that remained unknown for a very long time. Reflecting the limits of medical science it was like a ‘great shadow cast upon the medical profession’ that stood as a paralysing example of the Western intellectual tradition that was based on the Enlightenment models of knowledge and progress.

The next most important reason behind this cultural silencing of the pandemic is the war that had a far more powerful hold on the cultural memory with its destructive and global visibility, as unlike the influenza pandemic, which did not leave deformities in the form of maimed and crippled survivors who would serve as haunting reminders of the disease. Paul Fussell observes in The Great War and Modern Memory: ‘The war that was called great invades the mind…all-encompassing, all-pervading, both internal and external at once, the essential condition of consciousness is the 20th century.” (Fussell, 312)

The ‘Great Influenza’ compared to it seemed to make for a less compelling narrative. The medical historian Alfred Crosby, often credited with the first systematic study of the Pandemic, points out the conspicuous absence of this cataclysmic event not only from written histories and memories but also from the literary oeuvres of the major writers of that time. The cultural-historical engagement of the decades that followed has been with processing the vast and contradictory legacy bequeathed by the great war in its visible corporal destruction and astonishing hermeneutics of creative oeuvre. So, the 1918 pandemic probably had to wait its turn to come into popular and critical focus only after the first world war’s problematic cultural legacy was fully confronted and catalogued.

The next reason why the Western society preferred to push back the pandemic to the margins of their collective (un)consciousness is the inevitable and painful element of trauma associated with it. This cultural denial finds an explanation in the works of contemporary psychiatrists like Cathy Caruth and Judith Herman, both of whom draws on Freud’s work on repression and trauma, producing convincing paradigms to analyse and understand the cultural amnesia surrounding the 1918 pandemic.

Given our postmodern appetite for re-creating and re-interpreting the anti-canon, the marginalized and the forgotten, it is timely than ever before to retrace the repressed remnants of the 1918 pandemic and re-construct the still-unknown facts about this deadly pandemic. Now that we have reached the centennial of this apocalypse, and find ourselves plunged into a similar phenomenon; we, the ubiquitous pandemic generation of 2020, ought to critically re-engage ourselves with the diverse aspects of the Pandemic in an attempt to analyse the synchronic and diachronic scientific and cultural variables that it has generated in the last century.

This article will study the 1918 pandemic as a Contagion Narrative, engaging with the intriguing legacy of this near-forgotten historical disaster, beginning with its origin, extent and epidemiology reflecting on its complex causal network. This paper will analyse the multiple reasons underlying its cultural denial and the politics behind its partial representation in literature, language and culture. The final critical concern of this study will be to note the changing socio-economic conditions or that which had to be realigned to bring back the Pandemic into popular and critical consciousness, and also discuss the historical-scientific value engendered by this destabilising experience. This paper will draw on the observations of a host of scientific, cultural and literary historians in an attempt to find a critical paradigm to study the above mentioned factors and also understand the contemporary Global context that is experiencing a fatal return of a new virus- SARS-COV2 as a ‘naturecultural’ (Haraway) phenomena, forcing us to re-think accepted notions of empiricism and aesthetics.