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

literature, its spectral and pervasive presence cannot be elided or denied. And now, that we have just crossed its centennial, living through, and witnessing its power to repeat itself, re-evaluating its cultural/literary remnants carries a special urgency. And this attempt of bringing the pandemic in the focus of literary scholarship would require a significant reframing of some our critical/ theoretical assumptions about the role of illness and anxiety, death and mourning, corpse and consolation, violence, and visibility. As stated in the structural premise this part of the study will concentrate on one inter-war text, Willa Cather’s One of Ours (1922), appreciating and understanding its relevance from multiple standpoints. Placed as it is in the thick of the World War I this novel captures the situation caught in the double bind of the war and the pandemic, ambient upon each other in their respective quotients of damage and impact. Both, in literary accounts and within history, the pandemic’s sudden arrival disrupted the dominant narrative of the war, which for a substantive part of the first half of the twentieth century remained the major determining and structuring agent. But the pandemic’s stealthy yet steady invasion precipitated the crisis, dramatically re-framing its setting, actors, action, and evaluation. Victims and enemies were recast, setting of the battle re-located. The actor’s role and significance got drastically re-defined as the male soldiers’ heroic participation in the war-front was rendered complicated and usurped by the female warriors (doctors, nurses, caregivers) services in the home-front. It is this moment of transition, when the war in all its grandeur gets overlapped by a second(ary) threat, that this novel encapsulates and this paper seeks to analyse. During analysis, the aim of this paper will be to establish three central facets of the pandemic’s representational possibilities. First, the novel incorporates within its narrative arc the two gigantic historical tragedies enabling a complex dynamic between them. Second, the text with its explicit detailing of the damaged and mutilated bodies, the death-bed scenes and corpses, the bodily pain, granted a visibility and legitimization to the pandemic victims, which for larger political reasons were repressed and silenced to make room for the valiant war martyrs whose deaths were deemed as supreme sacrifice carrying a gravity of meaning and purpose. And third, how Cather’s text weaves in the intangible registers of pain, fear, guilt, blame within its narrative atmosphere, subtly yet surely evoking an invisible miasmic menace. The narrative resurrection of so much havoc wreaked in by the two coeval events posed an immense representational challenge no doubt; but Cather overcame this by deftly combining her own embedded experience of the pandemic and the war, and her artistic prowess, forging a fruitful melange of history and story. One of Ours (1922) by Willa Cather is one of the earliest accounts of the interwar period that explores the tangle of the war and the pandemic, whose language and plot iterates and emphasizes the war’s overlordship over the viral outbreak. Cather’s own experience of both the events inspires her artistic vision and forms the basis of this novel, which she wrote as a tribute to her cousin who died fighting in the frontline. Cather, no doubt, viewed the war as a noble conflict as evidenced in her letter written to the mother of this cousin on the Armistice Day: “…brave boys…who went so far to fight for an ideal…God’s soldiers, with a glorious part in whatever the afterlife may be.” An aside in the same letter read: “This is not meant to be a letter - I have so many letters to write to friends who have been bereaved by this terrible scourge of influenza- but I must send you a ‘greeting’ on this great day when old things are passing away forever.” 29 Her tone clearly suggests that soldiers have died for higher cause, whereas flu deaths are pitiful, the former deserves greeting, the latter, only consolation. She drew some of her material from a first- hand account written by an army doctor, Dr. Frederic C. Sweeney, who treated Cather when she caught the influenza in 1919, and also lent her his diary describing his grim experiences on a war transport ship during the pandemic.” 30 Her other sources include the many interviews that she conducted with soldiers who survived the war and the flu - as she notes in a letter, “the sick ones often talked like men in a dream, softly remembering dead lives.” 31 The novel follows the life and adventures of Claude Wheeler, a young farmer from Nebraska, whose personal life was frustrating, caught up in a sexless marriage. He enlists himself in the army with the belief that it would impart both meaning and purpose to his life. Steeped in a romantic view of war, which was rather common in those days, he dies with his faith intact, fighting in the war. The novel’s plot is divided into two main sections; the first part concerning Claude’s early life trapped in a loveless marriage, and the second part deals with how he redeems himself from the situation by becoming a combatant in France, earning martyrdom through his final act. It is in between these two sections that the ravage of the pandemic is presented in detail, as the ship, the fictional “Anchises” containing Claude and other soldiers in its journey to the war site, is turned into a floating hospital almost overnight. Such military transport, which took place mainly through ships, provided the most conducive environment for the virus to spread. As “Anchises” is about to set sail Cather ominously notes: “every inch of the deck was covered by a boot. The whole superstructure was coated with brown uniforms; they clung the boat’s davits, the winches, the railings, the ventilators, like bees in a swarm.” 32 No sooner than the influenza virus struck, that the 2500 soldiers aboard, fell one after another, transforming the ship into an appalling death bed scenario. The able-bodied soldiers reduced into emasculated and pathetic versions of their former © 2023 Global Journals Volume XXIII Issue V Version I 66 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