Why read a plague novel during a plague?
Writing for the New Yorker, Jill Lepore tells us that “[e]very plague novel is a parable” told through stories set within the walls of a quarantine and set among a ragged band of survivors. If you read enough plague novels, the common elements of their storylines that serve up the parable become obvious and include: initial reluctance to accept the hazards of the virus until it’s run amok; the charlatans who sell snake oil cures; the vulnerable pay the earliest and harshest prices; the best and worst emerges in people; and ultimately what’s important must be identified among the ruins before there’s nothing left to save. Surely some of this rings true to you IRL during the COVID-19 pandemic today?
You get all that and more in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. The novel opens during a production of King Lear, a play written by Shakespeare during an outbreak of the bubonic plague. We follow the transmission of the virus, the Georgia Flu, as it fans out from that performance until civilization has collapsed. We settle in with a group of people in quarantine: the grounded passengers in the Severn City Airport, ironically protected earlier by a quarantine warning sign at the airport entrance which kept virus carriers at bay. And we accompany the Travelling Symphony, a medieval like Shakespearean troupe made up of actors and musicians, as it winds its way through a series of small, reconstituted communities along the Great Lakes.
Mandel did not set out to write a plague novel but rather wanted to create and explore a world without technology. Station Eleven is nonetheless very much a parable. As Mandel shared during our conversation on the @Risk podcast, everyone reads the same words but always a different book. With that in mind, rather than declare what that parable definitively is, I will instead say that for me Station Eleven is a parable about identifying fundamental purpose and the dangers created by a vacuum of purpose. Rereading Station Eleven during the COVID-19 pandemic only reinforced that for me.
The Georgia Flu is so efficient at transmitting and ending the lives of its hosts that much of the governance dithering is bypassed in favour of fairly swift collapse and the book predominantly centers on the after times. The story jumps from the time of the outbreak to twenty years hence to focus on a world that is a shadow of its former self. It is in this context of overwhelming loss that many of Station Eleven’s characters discover what’s important beyond mere survival. For example, one survivor holed up in the Severn City Airport, adopts the vocation of his presumed dead partner to become a “curator” of pre-Georgia Flu artifacts transforming the defunct airport into a Museum of Civilization. Snow globes, laptops, credit cards, a pair of stiletto heels, all of these mundane objects take on new importance and are made beautiful on display in the former Skyline Lounge. The Museum becomes a beacon — a gathering place — to the scattered and disconnected survivors of the Georgia Flu. The former control tower of the airport cum museum takes on a new role as well, as a perch from which to survey the possible future. Once a place of transit and transience, the airport becomes an anchor of remembrance and a vantage point from where a freshly imagined future can be viewed.
When the hazards of a deadly virus abound it’s easy to define your purpose as simply not getting it. As of November 29 2020, COVID-19 has taken close to 1,450,000 lives and infected close to 62 million people, according to the WHO’s situation report. COVID-19 is mercifully not nearly as deadly as the fictional Georgia Flu. Nevertheless, businesses have gone bankrupt, marriages have fallen apart, and too many people have tragically lost their lives. But perhaps this isn’t you. If COVID isn’t banging on your door every day as it does if you are ill with it, are a resident of a long-term care facility or if you are a clinician on the frontlines, everything may look the same during this pandemic but feel very different.
Our civilization hasn’t and won’t collapse though many of the small businesses we previously frequented may not be there when we next go to visit. The planes haven’t stopped but they aren’t flying as frequently as they used to and may never be as widely accessible as prior to COVID-19. Whether working inside or outside of the home, you may not find the same enrichment from your work, if you ever did. We are being asked to stay home and to limit our outside contacts, which seems like a small task, as this great German public service message pokes fun at, but as the months wear on, it becomes increasingly more difficult to find the will to keep at it. We are engaged in many of the same tasks but the satisfaction derived from them isn’t up to par. Your day may not look that different but you bear the weight of difference every day. We are asking a tiny number of little things to do a lot of heavy lifting. Despite a proliferation of prophets, it’s hard to gain a clear-eyed vision of the upcoming year and what it all may mean.
Finding our purpose in this mixed up muddled up world is a murky undertaking. It likely can’t be the same as it was or at least it cannot be carried out in the same way. Successfully navigating your life that is askew but neither falling apart nor transformed demands doing it for something more than just for public health compliance reasons. Waiting for the return of the past is a miserable and impossible task as society is likely permanently changed by the pandemic. Though you may not have the added juice of adrenaline brought on by crisis to help you do it, find your purpose you must, like the ragged group of survivors does in every plague novel. Not only can purpose provide reinvigorated meaning to staying home but it also can provide much needed context for the numerous risk-based COVID decisions you are having to make on a daily basis. Your couch may not be transformed into a talisman and describing it as beautiful may be a stretch but finding purpose can help us get through this long COVID winter when working to simply not get COVID-19 won’t.
Why read a plague novel during a plague? A little too on the nose, you say? That’s fair but perhaps it’s precisely the prescription for what’s ailing you. If a plague novel doesn’t trigger anxiety or bring up too much loss for you, it is otherwise a safe way to get into the mindset of a disaster without experiencing one, to consider your own purpose through the lives of fictional characters, and to reflect on your fundamental comforts and how you will work to treasure the ones missing from your life today once they return. You might also find renewed outrage and urgency over the persistent inequities that every real and fictional pandemic lays bare. This winter will be long. It will be longer if we only think of it as something to be endured, to get beyond.
As the mantra (taken from a Star Trek Voyager episode) on the side of one of the Travelling Symphony wagons says: survival is insufficient. Our mere acts of survival can take on new meaning and joy when taken with a sense of purpose, when they are but one step in a larger plan towards a better tomorrow. We don’t need to build museums in remembrance of our collapsed civilization but we do need to find beauty and purpose in our daily lives and a plague novel might help you do just that.
