Historians and epidemics

This is an interesting book about the plague from 541 to 570 AD. The effects of the plague were similar in some ways to COVID.

The quote says that pandemics seem to follow a story line. Arguably the reverse is also true, that stories evolved from the public interest in news about pandemics. Now we watch movies like Contagion or Twelve Monkeys, about fictional pandemics.

Soon after this we followed COVID as a series of stories, embellished by pundits, that dramatized the pandemic’s effects. Real video of people fighting about masks and vaccination replaced the action shots in movies.

A similar thing is happening in Ukraine. People watch “war porn” of tanks being blown up, soldiers being shot on GoPros, grenades dropped on them in trenches from drones with live color footage. After this we will go back to dramatizations of the war by Hollywood, then eventually back to fictional war stories.

Much of this started with televising the Gulf War, people could watch it live or switch to war movies on other channels. It is hard to tell, in retrospect, which was the greater fiction.

Stories probably evolved from current events. The structure of a story also would have come from a new threat and how good people were being hurt. The climax was the Deux ex Machina, when a new idea or technology overcame the danger.

This was a device in Greek plays, at the climax a god would be dropped down by rope in a chair or “machine” to save the day with miraculous powers.

“Charles Rosenberg claimed that epidemics follow a “dramaturgic form”: they “start in a moment in time, proceed on a stage limited in space and duration, following a plot line of increasing and revelatory tensions, move to a crisis of individual and collective character, then drift toward closure.”