As the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has swept the globe, throwing economies across the world into chaos, locking down millions of people, changing human interaction as we know it, people have looked to history to ascertain what those who came before us have done in the face of similar crises. One of the prominent places they’ve looked is to the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, arguably the most recent global health emergency of this kind. In her 2009 article, “Overwhelming the Medium: Fiction and the Trauma of Pandemic Influenza in 1918,” Catherine Belling discusses what she sees as a glaring gap in literary accounts of global experience, and questions the mysterious silence that has swallowed this catastrophe. Her analysis is particularly interesting in the face of our present coronavirus outbreak, and widespread quarantine measures. I want to briefly reflect on how the differences in context between the 1918 Pandemic and the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic illustrate some differences, and similarities, in the way that society is coping with these traumatic events.
While it might seem obvious that the century between these two events has brought about some dramatic changes in the way society operates, I want to begin by looking at a shared struggle. Belling argues that one of key difficulties experienced by those caught in a pandemic is the lack of an easy narrative structure. She writes,
The non-human perpetrators of disease escape us, and what remains is immense loss, loss in itself, the "real" without plot. The First World War gave the West a lesson in the bleak meanings of human cruelty and destruction; the pandemic caused more physical damage but seemed to convey no meaning at all, overshadowed by the story of war, with its enemies, its weapons of mass destruction, its battles, and its jubilant armistice (56).
She argues that the war, and our ability to mold a narrative from it, helped people to speak about it and process it, in ways that were harder in the case of a pandemic. While global mass communication changes everything about the way knowledge about the COVID-19 outbreak has circulated, through this lens I also am able to see the clear struggle for narrative that we seek to find in the midst of the chaos.
Some seek to find it through American mythology. I see this in the protestors who are currently holding rallies at state capital buildings, or the private residences of government officials. These people attempt to frame the pandemic in a larger story of Americans fighting to protect their freedom against attack, by sickness, by government, by any other perceived entity that they can transform into a villain.
Some seek to find it by pitting nation against nation. The recurring efforts to blame China, without first gathering sufficient information to make an educated judgement about the origins of the virus, are stories that fan flames of fear and prejudice. Tying the source of this virus to the perceived barbarism of foreign cultures fits nicely into a narrative of American superiority. We also see this being promoted through rhetoric that specifically ties immigration to the spread of the virus and a threat to American jobs.
Just like previous generations, Americans desperately desire to be able to frame their current experiences into a coherent narrative, and the ambiguity of a virus does not easily coalesce into something that can be understood in those terms.
But while the impossibility of understanding the crisis, in narrative terms, led it to be drowned out by wartime stories in the early 20th century, life in 2020 America has no such distraction. Because of this, and other factors, the written memorabilia that will come to represent the COVID-19 outbreak will dwarf that produced by the 1918 Pandemic.
Globalization, the internet, mass media, and social media, are ensuring that the experiences of COVID-19 victims are documented, along with the stories of those caring for them, those practicing social distancing, or those self-quarantining. Belling argues that written work dealing with the 1918 Pandemic, or with sickness in general, requires an appropriate medium for communicating those experiences, and an understanding of the shortcomings every medium entails. She writes, “Our medium, the means by which we tell, is inherent in the sense we make of reality. Our memories, histories, and testimonies are all text, and testimony… To trace the literary representation of an event like the pandemic is finally not to learn about the pandemic but to learn about the limits of representation” (77). Though Belling uses this framework to look at fictional accounts of influenza, I want to look at modern texts being produced through this same framework.
When considering the different mediums being used to document the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic, I want to point out several interesting things about the types of texts being produced during this time, and how they embody the pandemic experience. I think these texts tell us a lot about the ways 21st century Americans are attempting to process their trauma, as well the places that our society look for comfort. I’m going to look at two kinds of “texts” being produced: memes and funny videos.
Anyone with any presence on social media is familiar with memes, and a significant number of coronavirus memes have been circulating since we became aware of the virus. Palmer Haasch, of Insider, recently posted an article titled “How coronavirus memes have traced the timeline of the pandemic, from panic to the new normal.” Her analysis helpfully summarizes some of the prominent trends that have characterized social media experience over the last several months. But why are people turning to memes to process this collective experience?
I believe that memes are an effective response to the virus and quarantine for a couple reasons. First, there is often an element of absurdity to memes. As we, as a society, attempt to process and experience something that is unheard of in modern American life, people are struggling with fear, with uncertainty, and with something we do not know how to fit into our previous conceptions of life. The absurdity of memes captures this in a way that language along cannot. Scott Wark in his essay, “The Meme in Excess of its Instance,” writes, “The meme is always more than a particular instance because it has a double character. To function as a meme, media must express an organising syntax. The meme-instance is also, always, a member of a meme-series”. Additionally, Matt Applegate and Jamie Cohen, in their article “Communicating Graphically: Mimesis, Visual Language, and Commodification as Culture,” write that memes, like emojis, “rely on the connection between text and image as they augment our capacity for verbal communication on digital platforms” (87). These features of memes allow for the sometimes nonsensical combination of ideas, feelings, and connotations, that also provide a container for the knowledge and feelings of the viewer. Their multivocality presents the viewer with an opportunity to interact with the feelings of others within the internet community in a way that transcends language and invites viewer participation in the meaning making experience. I believe that coronavirus memes are sometimes evoking a powerful sense of catharsis, as people are able to see, recognize, and relate to the feelings of others in a way that would be more difficult to capture in words.
As with memes, people have also been using funny videos to cope with the coronavirus. These videos often rely on cultural knowledge to provide emotional support and information to viewers. In the face of fear and uncertainty, people are turning to humor to help process their feelings and bring a sense of security to their lives. Some examples of this are the Disney character song parodies that have gone viral, and John Krasinski’s weekly youtube videos. As people watch these, they not only feel relief and joy, but also are able to picture themselves in a larger cultural moment. Participating in these viral exchanges has the capacity to create a bond that many people are lacking in this period of social-isolation.
Ultimately, these memes and videos reveal a new level of reliance on these new types of communication, as we use them to process a collective kind of trauma. They reveal a drive for connection and cultural belonging, in the midst of crisis. While this drive has likely existed in other eras and contexts, the global nature of internet communication is creating a unique opportunity to showcase what these reactions have the capacity to create. Experiencing a pandemic in 2020 is remarkably different than experiencing one in 1918. For many who might typically disparage social media culture, I hope that this perspective might help us to think differently about how global internet communication is adapting to fill a social need in these chaotic times.
Works Cited:
Applegate, Matt and Jamie Cohen. "Communicating Graphically: Mimesis, Visual Language, and Commodification as Culture."Cultural Politics, vol. 13 no. 1, 2017, p. 81-100.
Belling, Catherine. "Overwhelming the Medium: Fiction and the Trauma of Pandemic Influenza in 1918."Literature and Medicine, vol. 28 no. 1, 2009, p. 55-81.
Haasch, Palmer. "How coronavirus memes have traced the timeline of the pandemic, from panic to the new normal." Insider. April 20, 2020. Accessed April 24, 2020.
Wark, Scott. 2015. "The Meme Is Excess of Its Instance."Transmediale Blog. September 30, transmedialeblog.wordpress.com/2015/09/30/scott-wark-the-meme-in-excess-of-its-instance/. Accessed April 24, 2020