As the UK quickly approaches the one-year anniversary of its first Covid-19 lockdown, we have now found ourselves in much the same position as we were in a year ago: stuck inside and looking for ways to fill our time. The novel, and literature in general, has acted for many in the past year as not only a way to pass the day but as a portal of escape, the comfort of different worlds, realities and possibilities enclosed between the pages. Offering reprieve from the post-apocalyptic news that has come to resemble that of a dystopian novel, it is hard to tell if literature depicting the coronavirus pandemic and its hard realities will ever find a place in the popular culture of contemporary audiences. However, as tales as far back as the texts of antiquity demonstrate, literature even in its escapist modes speaks to the future about the hardships of an era, conveying something beyond that of news articles in the historical artefact of collective consciousness.
As March 2020 dawned upon us, society within the UK drew into a halt as we unanimously entered a new era — the infamously coined ‘unprecedented times’. This term dominated headlines and social media sites alike, confirming to us that the world was not prepared for this newly-found global chaos. Pandemic fiction, prior to the tumultuous year of intermittent lockdowns the UK has undergone, remained a subject of literature contained predominantly to the realm of the dystopian genre. Hypothesising a time in which contagious diseases might limit freedoms and cripple the world with fear, it’s now hard, given the very speculative nature of dystopian fiction, to imagine any potential, future coronavirus literature fitting itself amongst a genre of ‘what ifs’.
Through looking back at the literature of the past we as readers find an abundance of precedent for the current state of affairs. Take for example Boccaccio’s Decameron, completed in 1353 in which the tales are written in the aftermath of the Florence Black Death epidemic in 1348, recounting the reader of what life was like in the midst of a deadly disease. However, despite the novella’s bleak context, the tales range from that of romance to comedy to tragedy, depicting an abundance of experience despite the shadowy presence of death. Such a text may allude to the potential framing of future coronavirus literature, an inescapable fact of our time but one in which human capacity for love, humour and hope has continued, and perhaps these are the stories that we will read and tell about this era of global pandemic.
Though escapist fiction may have been where many readers turned during this last year, given the bleak reality of the world just outside our windows, there has been a somewhat surprising upturn in sales of pandemic-related fiction. In 2020, Albert Camus’s La Peste (The Plague) saw its sales triple in Italy with a similar increase occurring in France. Other novels such as Dean Koontz’s The Eye of Darkness has too witnessed a sales upturn, indicating that readerships are finding something akin to comfort in having their reality reflected back to them on the page. If this is the case, then perhaps an immediate place for coronavirus literature within popular culture is not so improbable, perhaps literature in which we can begin to face the pain of the past year is what many are calling for. As these pieces of past literature may offer us a moment of reflection — if not a strange sense of comfort — one question prevails: is coronavirus literature not simply a matter of garnering popularity, but a duty to collective historical record?
In his novel La Peste, Camus poignantly wrote that “being separated from a loved one was the greatest agony of that long period of exile”. With that in mind, as we approach a full year of limited human connection, perhaps it is through coronavirus-related literature that we can begin to open up a dialogue that cannot be achieved through the production and subsequent consumption of escapist fiction at this time. The literary debate over Covid-19 appears to surpass questions of form, definitions of genre and the postulation on whether the world is ready. Covid-19 has changed and reshaped our social, economic and political landscapes; and literature should be no different reflecting whether in implicit or explicit terms the collective consciousness this year has imparted us with.
Novels, poems, short stories, whichever form of expression such coronavirus fictions may take, each must act as a vehicle in our collective deciphering of the hardships of the global pandemic, our record of a moment in history and a testament to the human capacity for hope.
