Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature by Elizabeth Outka (review)

What is especially striking about Viral Modernism is its timeliness. Nothing could be more relevant to contemporary readers and scholars than a study of the cultural effects of a global health crisis. Surprisingly little work has been done to read literary modernism in light of the 1918 influenza pandemic which killed between 50 and 100 million people and left many survivors physically and psychologically damaged. Thoroughly researched and clearly written, Elizabeth Outka's book fills this scholarly gap and convincingly shows the ways that the pandemic haunts the literature of modernism and at the same time is rarely mentioned in the major works of the period. This absence is the mystery which launches the book. Outka accounts for it by arguing that the epidemic was largely overshadowed by the suffering, trauma, and loss of the Great War, which conformed more easily to established discursive modes of mourning and social critique. The pandemic, by contrast, presented no clear enemy or theater of battle and was widely experienced as an event of meaningless loss.

However, if the pandemic was mostly displaced or overshadowed by literary representations of the war, Outka also finds it haunting those same representations of death, physical anguish, and delirium. Outka's discussions of high modernist texts, such as Mrs. Dalloway, The Waste Land, and Yeats's "The Second Coming," therefore stop short of insisting that any of these texts are "about" the influenza. She often acknowledges that wartime violence and its aftermaths remain the most explicit concerns of these texts, but she suggests that the literary representations of delirium and hallucination that have long been regarded as markers of postwar trauma can be reframed in a more literal way as fever-induced symptoms of the 1918 influenza. While this may not radically alter our sense of the affective registers of these works, it can refresh our sense of what may be at stake for the many voices of anguish that populate the works of Woolf, Eliot, and Yeats. The experiences of flu-ravaged bodies are foregrounded in Outka's readings of these major figures. She writes, "I offer a sensory and affective history of the pandemic—the forgotten, sights, sounds, smells, tastes, sensations, and emotions it produced in victims and witnesses." (7) Viral Modernism thoroughly demonstrates the ways that the experimental fiction and poetry of the era constitutes a rich record of the phenomenology of illness, and Outka is a well-informed guide through that literary and historical archive.

Perhaps even more striking than the rereadings of these familiar texts of high modernism are the chapters that open and close the book. Here, Outka discusses lesser known works of realist fiction that more directly tell the story of the pandemic. Willa Cather's One of Ours (1922) and Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) work to emplot the epidemic in ways that differ from the comparative plotlessness of more avant-garde works while also deploying sequences of hallucinatory delirum that we might expect from Mrs. Dalloway or Ulysses. In Outka's analysis, the narrativization of realist fiction both answers a need to make the pandemic understandable while obscuring the senselessness of the mass deaths that were often experienced as shorn of meaning. While some efforts to reconstitute meaning often rendered the pandemic as a subplot of the Great War, Porter's novel asserts its status as a singular global tragedy with its own forms of drama that part ways with wartime tragedy. Look Homeward, Angel (1929) by Thomas Wolfe and William Maxwell's They Came Like Swallows (1937) detach the pandemic even further from the war and locate its scene of suffering and loss in domestic spaces. Outka offers keen insights into the ways that "sexist assumptions about what counts as history" shaped both initial responses to these novels and ongoing critical accounts of the period in which military—and therefore often masculine—experiences of violence, trauma, and death have often overshadowed more domestic scenes of...