Camus, Roth, Covid-19: the dangers of forgetting

Pandemic literature (and there is a sprawling canon of it) tells us much about the past so that we can learn for our future, but we have been poor students. We should have been better prepared for Covid-19, and even merely scratching the surface of pandemic literature by examining Albert Camus’s The Plague and Phillip Roth’s Nemesis is very revealing. Despite the remarkable heterogeneity of our world, there are some things about disease that are shared globally, and many things that are recorded in literature are pertinent to the current pandemic situation. Remembering past pandemics is vital to dealing with future ones. This article argues that documentation of pandemics offers important reminders of epidemiology but also about how race, class, gender, and sexuality are involved both in the representation and in the movement of disease. Fiction gives us the chance to revise our thinking both about our relationship with microbes and about how we imagine a balance between individual liberties and social responsibility. These matters seemed to many of us entirely novel concerns brought out by the novel coronavirus. In reality, they are not novel and have long been the concerns of pandemic literature. There are great dangers in forgetting this.