Elizabeth Outka (Photo by Trip Pollard)
In October 2019, Elizabeth Outka, a professor of English at the University of Richmond, published “Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature," in which she tracks the imprint of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic through the short stories and novels that followed in its wake.
Outka also assisted in the creation of the 2019 “Pandemic" exhibit at The Valentine, which examined Richmond’s response to mass disease.
Image courtesy Elizabeth Outka
Toward the end of “Viral Modernism,” Outka notes, “As I write this … dramatic cuts are being proposed in the United States to some of the very programs that might prevent or respond” to an outbreak. She observes, too, that public attention or support for such programs spikes and falls according to the news.
Richmond magazine: How weird is all this for you?
Elizabeth Outka: So weird, and not in a good way. I much prefer pandemics in a theoretical mode. Today is unsettling and strangely familiar. I’ve been living in this world where I’ve been tracing the aftereffects of this terrible pandemic in 1918. This isn’t the same disease — it unfolded differently for many reasons — however, the emotions and sensory detail are eerily similar.
RM: It's November 1918, and Richmond’s been shut down for about two months due to the influenza. City officials and public and private medical authorities and practitioners debate about when to reopen public spaces. On Nov. 9, city health director Roy Flanagan — who, while at this brother’s death bed, is pressured by city theater owners to lift the ban — goes before Richmond’s administrative board that desperately wants cover in granting permission for resuming business. Board member Graham Hobson objects, citing 500 calls from those who want the closures sustained and if not, he warns of a “public calamity.” Flanagan expects at least 25 pneumonia deaths during the upcoming winter months. And here’s a resonating quote: "If this board waits until it is entirely safe to open up the city, my reply is that it will never be perfectly safe in the winter."
And then come the end-of-war victory celebrations, and after Nov. 11, people get sick again with a second wave. Any of this sound familiar?
Outka: Extremely familiar. The public health issues in the middle of a pandemic and the resulting economic chaos cause a great deal of misery and suffering. It’s always going to be a balancing act. The challenge becomes: How you do work out that calculation? This is something that should be discussed and fretted over because it’s difficult to get right. When we reopen … is not a black-and-white decision. It shouldn’t be a matter of keep everything closed or open up everything. We need to come up with other solutions. Getting to these decisions would involve effective testing and tracking.
I’m hopeful for ways to make effective policy changes and organizing resources to deal with the next pandemic, which is assuredly coming. COVID-19 can allow us a critical reassessment of response systems, and of the things that worked and the things that do not. I’m hopeful we’ll be aware of emerging disease and form quick field response teams. Pandemic readiness needs to move up to the top of our budget. [It's] hard to convince people that we need to be better prepared for whatever is next — which, sadly, could be deadlier.
RM: “Viral Modernism” details how in 1918-1919, the complicated way the Great War blanketed or shadowed the simultaneous influenza epidemic that killed perhaps 10 times more people than the conflict. These are dual cataclysms with nearly incomprehensible destruction and death. Though today’s problems are numerous, a World War isn’t shoving aside the pandemic. Any clue as to what excuses will be made in people forgetting this go ’round?
Outka: People didn’t forget the influenza, the culture forgot. Some of that comes from the healthy need to push past grief and loss and to find some kind of normalcy. COVID-19 is different from past outbreaks in this country. Part of what is scary about all of this is that we don’t know where we are in the story. Right after 9/11 we didn’t know where we were, either. Now we don’t know whether we’re in the first wave and worse is coming, or is this the worst of it and things will get better?
I think, too, that one of the things we’re seeing with COVID-19 is the disruptions to our rituals of mourning. You can’t say goodbye. The 1918 pandemic had this, too. How, then, do you deal with that kind of loss that is submerged and doesn’t get any kind of story? It becomes ghostly, it haunts us.
RM: Is there a danger that this pandemic, too, will fade from vivid public memory — like 1918-1920 — and that we might slouch back into complacency?
Outka: I think there’s always a danger. People are scared, and they don’t want to be scared. There’s no law that says pandemics come along every 100 years. I wish there were. We’d be better prepared that way. We can’t say, “This is our pandemic, and now we’ve had it and we’re done.” That would be a very big mistake.
Climate issues are a huge factor — I say this as an English professor and not a climatologist — but many of the factors driving climate change are also contributing to how we’re going to be left much, much more exposed to a wider range of viruses. Like many big problems, the causes and solutions are intertwined.
RM: One of the big differences between 1918-1920 and 2020 is our ability to instantaneously react, whether by television in a produced sense, or through social media. Could you speculate on what might define how the culture processes these current events?
Outka: Yeats, Eliot and [Virginia] Woolf [“Mrs. Dalloway”] are within several years of the pandemic. Yeats begins “The Second Coming” within a few weeks of his pregnant wife making a rare recovery. The covert accounts give us an atmospheric presence. Even today, with our ability to immediately get the art out, what’s produced now will be necessarily different than what comes out 15 years out when we’ve processed some of the grief and loss. Eliot, Yeats and these writers, they were concerned about what the body becomes amid this viral storm, and then what’s the aftermath of what the body experiences. The art that comes from that, even though we have this instantaneous artistic reaction, will change and shift over time.
RM: There’s this genuinely surreal scene you tell us about with the burial of the poet Apollinaire, who dies of the influenza, and the experience of Blaise Cendrars in the cemetery as a direct influence on the film “J’accuse,” and its soldiers, dead but not dead — undead — rising from their graves. That scene is on YouTube, and it’s crazy how it looks like a retro “Walking Dead.” Zombies have been lurching through our culture for the better part of a century, getting more gruesome and strangely closer to our circumstances, and now, here we are. So, my most serious and concluding question: You think this event will finally bury zombies?
Outka: [Laughs] No. I think every decade needs its zombies. Zombies are handy symbols and personal signifiers, and so they keep coming back, as it were, but their meanings change. Monsters will always be there as long as we have things we’re afraid of. “J’accuse” is eerie because there is the guilt the townspeople feel, that they stayed behind, that they died of illness — and they step toward the undead, the townspeople themselves act like zombies. Their infection is that the pandemic was a punishment for the war and guilt for the people who didn’t go to the front. Zombies will always be with us.
Elizabeth Outka will be featured his summer in an episode of the PBS documentary series "Future of America’s Past."
