Love in the Time of Corona: Part I
“We need art now more than ever.”
I’m not sure why I’ve put it in quotation marks. I don’t know who said it. I can’t even remember if anyone (physically or virtually present; pre or post COVID-19 lockdown) actually said it to me. Sure, a quick google and hyperlink could solve all my problems and satisfactorily attribute this dislocated statement. But would that really communicate the strange feeling I had when these spectral words first arrived, seemingly from nowhere? Is this something that is actually being said (surely it is), or is it something that, when faced with a new and unprecedented unknown, I long to hear someone saying?
I need art now more than ever. Perhaps that’s where this is all coming from. I’ll be the first to admit that my first thought after Australia’s initial lockdown measures were announced was to reach for my old copy of Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947). I should probably also admit that this was only after finding a news article summarising the measures on my newsfeed alongside Liesl Schillinger’s article, “What We Can Learn (and Should Unlearn) from Albert Camus’s The Plague”. But, regardless of how it arrived, the impulse was still there. Blame it on more or less seven years reading, debating with others, and writing about what books actually do in this world.
I wanted to see whether what had always seemed abstract — a thought experiment, allegory, or philosophical exercise — was now real. And sure enough, what had once seemed like Camus’s remote existential domain was very quickly becoming a new reality. As the Prime Minister’s Sunday evening press conferences — week after week — announced increasingly severe quarantine measures, his now normalised political double-speak came to echo that of an imaginary French Algerian Prefecture.
It was hard to imagine lockdown laws could be any stricter. But now the streets of suburban Brisbane outside my window resemble in their desolation what I’d always pictured far-off Oran to look like. Beyond uncanny, I now wonder whether the fact that Camus’s novelistic world has come to life means that his various moral and ethical arguments are also just as real, no longer the moot of undergrads and their professors in lecture halls and classrooms.
This blog is then an attempt to reconcile two feelings. The first is to sate this sense that I need art now more than ever. The second is to test the limits of this feeling that literature bears some newfound relevance, utility, and/or significance in face of the great uncertainty created by COVID-19. If there were ever a time to measure up any claim made for art and literature, then surely it would be now.
So, please join me weekly as I return to reread a number of books from my past. Some are old favourites, while others are dreaded foes. Yet I suspect that what they all have in common, is an insight rather than an answer to the innumerable questions that we now face in this pandemic. After all, I sadly feel no better prepared to face a pestilence of bubonic plague or coronavirus after rereading Camus, but I can guiltily recognise the desperation of Rambert’s plans for escape in my own fantasies about leaving the house to be outdoors again. Dr Rieux’s stoic solemnity resonates in the brief conversations I’ve had with friends who are now junior doctors, trainee nurses and health professionals suddenly called to the front-line. These weird transferals have left me asking what exactly it is that these books might do for us readers in this time of corona.
Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)
I wanted to start with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s much loved classic, not just because it would provide a killer pun for this blog’s title, but because it is the only book that I can imagine returning to reread regardless of my circumstances. It seemed like a sure bet to start with. But, in saying that, I have since realised that my copy has gone the way of many favourite books and is currently on loan somewhere out there in the world.
Friend, if you are reading this and have my copy, please return it in a social-distancing appropriate manner as soon as you have finished it. Reader, apologies if this first blog relies more on impressions than quotations. I will endeavour to write on a book in my possession next week.
To bring those of you who haven’t read the book up to speed, Marquez’s novel follows the lives of two lovers, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, from the secretive and forbidden romance of their youth through to their eventual reunion over five decades later. In the intervening years, both Florentino and Fermina live completely separate lives in the same fictional Colombian port city. Florentino establishes a career at his uncle’s riverboat company while living a wide-ranging life of promiscuity and fantastical ventures, such as the episode in which he employs a local pearl diver to go out with him in search of sunken Spanish galleons in the city’s harbour.
Meanwhile, in what seems like another world, Fermina eventually marries the respectable and accomplished suitor Dr Juvenal Urbino. In contrast to the romantic Florentino, Juvenal is a pragmatically minded physician and man of public life dedicated to the improvement of public health and works in the city. At his side, Fermina remains part of a devoted, if not sometimes comic and trying, marriage that comes to an abrupt end when Juvenal falls from a ladder trying to retrieve his pet parrot from a tree.
Of course, each character’s life in this novel is wrought in the author’s luxuriously detailed and ornate prose, punctuated with moments of his signature magical realism. If you had to hazard a guess, you’d say that the presence of steamboats and modern medicine at its infancy places the story in the 19th century. But a lack of specificity in anything but the intricate personal and emotional lives of Marquez’s characters is half the pleasure to me. Cholera pandemics, civil wars, huge leaps in technological advancement and other historical events all seem to pass by nearly unnoticed in the background and it is this quality to the novel that first made me think about it in the midst of our own world-changing and historic event.
Marquez plays with an essential thematic tension between the personal and the historical throughout his text. This tension between two ways of engaging, remembering and retelling one’s experience of the world is established from the very beginning by the novel’s title. On the one hand, we have the deeply personal narrative of romantic love, which, despite being a universal concept, is more often than not focalised through the experiences of individuals. Here we might think of the way in which despite the variety and number of his lovers, Florentino’s promiscuity is unable to obliterate the details, circumstances and stories in which he meets these women. Least of all can he forget their names or appearances, the hilarious and sometimes tragic moments of their love making.
On the other hand, we have the objective and empirical frame through which many histories choose to remember significant and broadly impacting events, such as the various cholera epidemics of the 19th century. Wikipedia lists at least five major cholera outbreaks during the 1800s responsible for killing tens of millions of people. Many of these pandemics found their way to South America, and yet their presence in Marquez’s novel, along with the empirical manner of speaking about them in terms of dates and figures, is only background to his character’s narratives.
Such events (we could substitute here any major world historical event such as a World War or moon landing) would have touched upon the personal lives of millions of people. Loved ones would have been lost and many loves would have gone on unrequited because of the sudden and seemingly unstoppable deaths that such pandemics bring about. But quite often this is not the way we collectively remember these events. Especially not those that now rest beyond living memory.
I will return to this tension between the personal and empirically historical in Marquez’s book in a moment, but first I want to point out the way in which I have seen this tug of war play out in our own context. In many ways, it feels as if heading into this current coronavirus pandemic we suffer from a lack of the personal. And by that I mean a lack of living memory about what it is to live through such times, a lack of stories such as Florentino and Fermina’s where, amongst other things, there was still love in the time of cholera.
This purported lack first came to mind when the common metric in the media for our current crisis’s severity became an historical comparison to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. Much the same effect is also achieved by recent comparisons being made between Government responses in the present day and those made during the second World War. The implication is that the current circumstances are unprecedented, never before seen, and for most of us, whether a community member or person in power, plainly beyond our living memory. There is no script. These are uncertain times.
In the face of such uncertainty, we might find ourselves relying upon this kind of empirical historicism identified above as a means of trying to understand and compare our situation to allegedly similar events in the past. Again, Wikipedia is the lode text for such comparisons. I can read in seconds that the Spanish Flu killed anywhere between 17 million to 50 million people worldwide. Some estimates even suggest a number as high as 100 million. I often do the calculations to try and find a model for this sum total that resonates with me, making it seem like more than just a BIG number.
Being conservative those figures equate to 70% of Australia’s population, the entire population of the Netherlands, eight and a half Brisbane’s, my entire high school 6 800 times over. Yet despite this and the many black and white photos online of endless rows of strewn sheets and keeled over bodies in cots, I (rather ashamedly) still feel at a loss trying to conceive of 17 million individual lives, or more accurately, the absence of those lives. I feel that I have a limited access to an understanding of the Spanish flu. Hence, I think, the desire for an antidote in living memory, the personal experience of a pandemic. It feels like this might have been one part of Marquez’s project with a book like Love in the Time of Cholera: to write the personal back into a history, be it of a pandemic or of a nation that has only been remembered in one way.
And beneath this, I think, is another anxiety. What if my personal history of the COVID-19 pandemic is subsumed by an equally-as-statistical history as that of the Spanish flu? Like many of my generation who have found themselves as part of an increasingly casualised workforce, the sensible push to stay home and flatten the curve has translated into a significant reduction of hours, if not unemployment, without any of the benefits normally afforded to permanent employees.
My personal experience of the unfolding economic recession will be different to that of others, but like them it risks being remembered in years to come through a purely empirical narrative, as a record high level of unemployment accompanied by unprecedented levels of government spending. Is this how we will remember the almost existential experience of having one’s life filled with hours one week and emptied out the next? Is this how we will describe to future generations the weird sensation of our potential futures always opening and closing before us? If I think about our current moment for too long in this frame of mind I fall into a strange feeling. I lose sight of myself as history overtakes me.
Of course, the trouble with thinking of the personal as the sole antidote to this kind of misremembering is that personal histories themselves can be thoroughly unreliable, not to mention circumstantial. Recently over coffee I asked my Oma, the oldest person I know, about the Spanish flu. “Oh yes, that was a bad one,” was about all she said she could remember, but Oma, born in the Netherlands in 1930, would have missed the entire pandemic despite surely feeling its effects by at least a decade.
Likewise, in a recent segment on ABC Radio National’s Sunday Extra called “This is my second pandemic and I’m not panicking,” I heard New York writer Clark Whelton, a former speech writer for NYC mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani, describe how his personal experience of the 1957 flu pandemic that killed 1.1 million people was lying sick in a college infirmary for a week while the world went about its usual business. Schools didn’t close. Apparently, the stock market didn’t crash. As Whelton had it, “you rolled the dice, you took your chances; you said your prayers and hoped for the best.” Would I be more self-assured in our current circumstances — separated from friends, family, and loved ones — if I too had already lived through a pandemic?
Whelton thinks this at least might have been the case for both his parents and his own generation. In an article for City Journal appearing before his interview, he reflects that he often will “look back and wonder if an oblivious America faced the 1957 plague with a kind of clueless folly.” Yet, these older generations weren’t clueless. If Whelton’s descriptions are anything to go by it seems like they suffered from a saturation of personal experience with infectious diseases. He relates how his own mother “once showed [him] a list of the contagious diseases she survived before the age of 20. On the list were the usual childhood illnesses, along with deadly afflictions like typhoid fever, pneumonia, diphtheria (which killed her older brother), scarlet fever, and the lethal 1918–19 Spanish flu.”
His own childhood in the 1930s and 40s ran a similar gauntlet through the mumps, measles, chicken pox, but fortunately not polio, into adulthood. How much should we base our own feelings about COVID-19 upon the anecdote of someone who contracted a pandemic disease but was fortunate enough to come out the other side? What about all those who didn’t survive? Are they relegated to a silent history as statistics while a glut of personal histories drowns them out and encourages us into laisse faire immunology?
I don’t think this is what either Whelton or Garcia Marquez, in their separate ways, had in mind. If anything, their works both illustrate for us that our understanding of the past and the present is all the poorer for being entirely framed by one means of understanding over the other. At the end of his interview, Whelton called for rigorous scientific investigation into COVID-19 so that we can properly understand how it compares to past pandemics, those in living memory and not. And the empirical histories of plagues, civil war, and social unrest in Love in the Time of Cholera are not so much banished but diminished in the novel’s narratives in order to make space for the personal. Love may persist at the forefront of each character’s life but it is not the sole force that directs the course of their story. Regardless of how the lens is framed, history carries on in the background and may shape us in ways we don’t yet realise.
Revisiting Love in the Time of Cholera now in the time of corona, I am realising anew how thoroughly contingent our ways of engaging, remembering and retelling our experience of the world are. No doubt as daily infection rates and death tolls continue to rise overseas and at home, while our everyday lives also keep changing in response to government lockdown measures, we too will begin collecting numerous personal and empirical histories of this time. How we eventually come to remember and retell the history of this moment to others will be a constant balancing act between what is living and what has already been laid down: love, cholera, the remembered, and the forgotten.
