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

sadness has settled in at home…the jarring, jolting, inarticulate presence of dread.” 5 The borders of the body getting violated by an invisible, nameless, microbial threat creates a sense of nameless fear, that is indeed very hard to capture. This representational challenge gets dramatically compounded when an individual instance of illness is also part of a global outbreak. But however much these factors exerted their respective and collective impact the disappearance of the pandemic from the literary and cultural accounts was more apparent than real. The traces of the pandemic were strewn everywhere in much of the literature that followed. Core literary forms such as novels, poems; documentaries such as memoir, autobiography, diary entry, archives, medical records, government reports contained the pandemic’s details in factual and fictional forms. Subterranean echoes of the pandemic’s horrors got captured in the symbolic gaps, silences, fragments, atmosphere, and the concrete motifs of corpse, bells, funerals in much modernist literature that came in the immediate aftermath. References to the pandemic became explicit over time and overt, visible representations were produced in the late 1920s and 1930s. As the immediate threat of the pandemic lessened with the passage of time, with the fear of its return receding, the authors could process its meaning better, engaging with explicit imaginative reconstruction of the event, confronting it from the safety of a distance. With the turn of the century, confronting and surviving a similar viral pandemic (SARS/Cov-2), a new interpretive landscape has emerged that has given us fresh insights and new critical paradigms to understand the Spanish Flu’s (un)hidden force both in literature and memory/culture. Lifting the veil of cultural amnesia that mystified a large part of the pandemic memory, authors like Willa Cather, Katherine Ann Porter, William Maxwell, and Thomas Wolfe were the pioneers who presented the pandemic’s fatal invasion in vivid accounts. The textual frameworks of some of these authors have no doubt kept the war narrative as the dominant one, but nonetheless, the pandemic was incorporated as a lethal twin, at times emerging a more potent threat. 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, 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. II. T he S pread and E xtent of the C ontagion The 1918 influenza came in three waves, attracting little attention initially, with the first wave concentrated between the months of spring and summer of the first year. It was wartime and Spain, having less press censorship, was the first country to report cases of the flu leading to the belief that it originated in Spain, getting the nickname Spanish flu. In the first wave tens of thousands died including 5500 British soldiers but beyond a handful of doctors, few people paid importance to the pandemic in these war years. 6 . In 1918 the Times noted: “The man in the street cheerfully anticipated its arrival here…”, reporters confidently wrote it off as “epidemic diseases lose force with each successive visitation.” 7 . The second wave, which was most deadly killing millions, came between September and December 1918, producing “the most vicious type of pneumonia that has ever been seen.” 8 . In August 1918, outbreaks erupted in three port cities on three continents: Freetown, Sierra Leone; Brest, France; and Boston, Massachusetts. 9 In France the flu “swept through the lives so suddenly and with such ferocity that it startled even doctors who served in Gallipoli and Salonika and (had) witnessed (hospital) wards overflowing with amoebic dysentery and malaria cases.” 10 One doctor lamented that watching men “dropping out like flies was worse than “any sight they ever had in France after a battle.” 11 The third and final wave, that came between January and May 1919, was not as vicious as the preceding one, caused significant numbers of deaths until it finally disappeared after a few sporadic outbreaks. Historian John. M. Barry estimated that more than 5% of the world’s population died in the terrible twelve weeks of the second wave. It was the deadliest pandemic in history in terms of numbers, though the Bubonic plague killed a higher percentage of the much smaller existing population. 12 Scientists, then were mystified by the anomaly of targets as fatalities were highest among healthy men and women, between 20 and 40 years of age. Research has now shown that a stronger immune response leading to a cytokine storm led to the lethality of the virus among the younger population. The tragedy of this death toll was deepened by the fact that parents of most young children lay in this age group. 13 In his 1920 report on the flu, George Newman, a chief medical officer in Britain noted about the pandemic, “one of the great historic scourges of our time, a pestilence which affected the wellbeing of millions of men and women and destroyed more human lives in a few months than did the European war in five years.” 14 © 2023 Global Journals Volume XXIII Issue V Version I 64 Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2023 ( ) A The Submerged Scope of the Spanish Flu: Negotiating Representational Challenges in Willa Cather's One of Ours