To have compassion for those who suffer is a human quality which everyone should possess…” Thus begins Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron , written against the backdrop of the Black Death of 1348. It’s an interesting opening, made particularly poignant by the implication that compassion, though a necessary human quality, is not something all humans possess.
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Compassion is linked to empathy, and empathy is central to literature. How can you relate to a work of literature, let alone the voices or characters in it, unless you empathise with others? After all, they are by other people and about other people. It is little wonder then that pandemics have tended to evoke literary and cultural responses, with this one already producing a spate of work, and it’s not even over yet.
In Boccaccio’s footsteps
Months ago, I contributed to Decameron 2020, envisioned by the major Italian writer, Erri de Luca, a collaborative project with writers producing texts that are read out by actors on YouTube. Elsewhere, Michelle Stevens and Clair Whitefield set up a website to showcase pandemic literature. Nigerian-American writer Chimamanda Adichie wrote a moving personal essay for The New Yorker . Arundhati Roy adopted a more political tone in the Financial Times , as did Amartya Sen. Jhumpa Lahiri in Vogue wrote about how words help us heal and connect. I suspect there is hardly a writer who hasn’t written something.
Books and booklets soon followed. In June, I did a series of rewritings of Shakespeare’s sonnets, published as Quarantined Sonnets by Kitaab. Penguin published a slim collection of essays, Intimations, by Zadie Smith. In one essay, Smith notes that “it is possible to penetrate the bubble of privilege and pop it — whereas the suffering bubble is impermeable.” There were anthologies too, like And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again and A Thousand Cranes for India .
Of course, I am leaving out the most significant writings, the scientific ones, because I am focusing on books and articles that, so to say, follow in Boccaccio’s footsteps: texts of a cultural provenance, including books of ideas, like those penned by Bernard-Henri Lévy and Slavoj Žižek. Is it not significant that the two books — from the established Right and Left — largely disappoint?
Žižek’s Pandemic!: Covid-19 Shakes the World argues that the pandemic is a wake-up call, marking the melting of orthodoxies, and the world needs a new form of communism. In contrast, Lévy’s The Virus in the Age of Madness argues that we essentially need to get back to normal quickly and considers calls for change ‘obscene’. Lévy’s book is filled with a loud hollowness, evident if you pose questions such as: “Would calls for change after the Holocaust also be considered obscene?” But Žižek’s book, despite calling for change, also leaves one feeling empty. There seems to be little more than a call in it, sounds already made so often that they are like the waves when you’ve been sailing for some time: you no longer really hear them. Both books contain too many words, too many ready answers. Despite their erudition, the extracts I could bear to read reminded me of Twitter.
I also feel a degree of disappointment when I read the literary essays. Many of them are personal, sensitive musings, with a gesture or two indicating that the fallout won’t be equally shared. A few, like Arundhati Roy’s ‘The Pandemic is a Portal’, talk of the sufferings of migrant workers, but I was still left with a sense of déja vu. Perhaps her conclusion that COVID-19 “has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt” is an indication of our failures as a generation. The very rich, including in India, grew their fortunes by 25% in 2020, even as at least 250 million people became unemployed.
Wait for the best
It is obvious that the profusion of pandemic writing is not simply the index of a world fighting a virus. It is also an index of the capacity to be secluded and indulge in creative activities in relative safety. In that sense, it is an index of privilege. This relative safety is unlikely to enable us to engage with full complexity — let alone come up with answers that will apply to the millions who are not safe, never have been and never will be safe. This is why I, for one, am still waiting for significant literature to emerge from this pandemic.
Perhaps it will come after the event. Literature takes time. That is the difference between computing and contemplation. Perhaps significant literature will come from those who walked miles to reach ‘home’, or lost jobs or had their homes repossessed, if (like Manoranjan Byapari) they ever get the chance to write. Perhaps it will come when we, the relatively safe, begin to meet the millions who could not retract their heads, like we did, into the carapace of a lockdown.
Or, perhaps, it will come tangentially. Shakespeare’s King Lear , most scholars say, was written during the plague. King Lear is not about the plague, and yet it is the most angry and despairing of Shakespeare’s plays, castigating not just the powerful, but also questioning if “the Gods are just.” It contains what one critic has called the “bleakest pentameter” in English: “Never, never, never, never, never.” This is Lear, no longer king, lamenting over his lifeless daughter, who might not, should not, have died.
The writer is an Indian novelist and academic who teaches in Denmark.
