Global Journal of Human-Social Science, A: Arts and Humanities, Volume 23 Issue 5

The Submerged Scope of the Spanish Flu: Negotiating Representational Challenges in Willa Cather's One of Ours Sharmistha Das Abstract- The pandemic of 1918, or more famously the Spanish flu remains a dark and disruptive phenomenon, a scour ge in the face of time an d history. But what makes it most intriguing is its own oxymoronic entity-its own absent- presence, an experience that was simultaneously ubiquitous and hidden. Such exclusion, when understood as deliberate, remains at the heart of discourses of power and domination. Human civilization is rife with many such practices; be it indiscriminate exploitation of the environment, or the discrimination on grounds of race, caste, colour, gender, sexuality, et al- all based on a systemic delegitimization of “discarded negatives” (Butler). Representation, when empowered with a disruptive force that can push through state sanctioned borders and mainstream interpretive constructs, can emerge as alternative frames that can “see” through the suppressed. Lifting the veil of the archival dust ambient upon long forgotten stories will enable us to excavate narrative possibilities from all that has been silenced, granting them a voice that is long due. This article will be structured into two cluster of materials: the first part will briefly document the extent and spread of the contagion, tracing its evolution from a miasmic atmospheric entity, shifting in waves, towards becoming a horrifying, visible reality. And the second part will analyse the text of Willa Cather’s, One of Ours (1922), which probably best represents the intriguing overlap of the two coeval events, voicing the milieu’s collective bias and prejudice, while retaining an authorial objectivity and distinctness of vision. Keywords: pandemic, repressed, cultural memory, epidemiology, trauma, representation, narrative. I. I ntroduction he 1918-1919 influenza pandemic globally killed between 50 and 100 million people, and the United States suffered more deaths in the pandemic than in World War I, World War II, and the conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq- combined. Ireland lost 23,000 people, surpassing the 5000 deaths that happened in the more famous political-civil uprising between 1916 and 1923. In Britain out of 10 million people that caught the flu, at least 2,28000 died, making it “the greatest disease holocaust …the Britain has ever witnessed.” 1 But in spite of the millions of flu deaths, the influenza pandemic makes few (or passing) appearances in British, Irish, and American literature of the period, and did not count as part of history in ways the war casualties did. Now when we read into factors (micro and macro) responsible behind such erasure, examining the conspicuous historical and literary silencing of this phenomenon, we must admittedly confess our part in age-long traditions that relegate disease and illness to a disgraceful, even sinful origin, where the consequent deaths are a fatalistic and inevitable outcome. The same tradition that reifies military deaths as valiant and masculine constructs plague and pandemics as feminine and cowardly forms of death. Consequently, the last era’s viral catastrophe got omitted and drowned since its arrival, completely submerged under the overwhelming dimension and scope of the world war, which blocked and overshadowed the viral devastation with its domineering, praise-worthy, and visible constructs. Other factors lying at the heart of such erasures may be broadly categorized in two aspects; first, the spectral quality of the viral attack where the microscopic enemy invades the realm of the affective, the atmospheric, and the sensory, whose experiences get infused into memory as traumatic fragments. Some theorists have argued that a traumatic event exists in a different memory centre of the brain, becoming unreported and unrepresentable because not fully recorded; while some have dismissed this characterization as unsupported by scientific evidence. 2 Contemporary psychiatrist, Judith Herman, in her critical study Trauma and Recovery notes: “The knowledge of horrible events periodically intrudes into public awareness but is rarely retained for long…denial, depression, and dissociation operate on a social as well as individual level.” 3 The 1918 influenza pandemic was a mammoth historical trauma whose details were amorphous and disturbing for cultural and literary historians to engage with. Second, it is the general difficulty of representing illness that led to the mass suppression of the flu pandemic in the post-war years. Critics like Priscilla Wald and Rita Charon have offered compelling accounts of how illness may be translated into narratives but also how difficult illness maybe to represent. 4 The diffuse quality of illness creates an ineffable horror, as Charon notes, “pain, suffering, worry, anguish, and the sense of something not being right are conditions very difficult, if not impossible, to put into words.” It arouses a feeling “that something of value has abandoned the family, that a deep and nameless T Volume XXIII Issue V Version I 63 Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2023 ( ) A © 2023 Global Journals Author: Assistant Professor, HOD, PG Dept of English, Taki Govt. College, West Bengal, Affiliated to West Bengal State University, India. e-mail: sharmisthaa25@gmail.com