Introduction to Fictions of Survival

In his seminar entitled “The Relationship between Psychosomatic Symptoms and Latent Psychotic States,” Herbert Rosenfeld (2019: 24) argues that “mental conflict, especially early confusional conditions (which are particularly intolerable for the infantile ego), tend to be split and projected, evacuated into the body or internal organs, in such a fashion as to cause hypochondria or psychosomatic illness, or sometimes a combination of the two.” Rosenfeld proceeds to call these split and projected bits “psychotic islands” that house “uncontrollable destructive impulses, anxieties and associated defenses” (42). Although these islands create distress as they “take root in certain bodily organs — the chest, gastrointestinal area, uterus, skin, or other parts of the body” (42) — they also have a protective function, helping to parameterize emotional pain and to isolate agony to a specific, physical site.Reading Rosenfeld's work during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the nourishing company of a virtual reading group, got me thinking about the psychosomatic complexities of COVID-19 — that is, of the acute intersection of life-threatening symptoms and life-altering fears, anxieties, and gaps in understanding. But it also got me thinking about a social, national, and indeed biopolitical process whereby psychotic islands took root in each of us, or at least many of us, as a consequence of various failures to connect the dots between COVID-19 and other epidemics and to connect people in ongoing communities of mutual care and support. It was as if the governmental failure to contain the virus meant that each of us had to contain it within ourselves, whether by actually contracting the virus, as most of us proceeded to do, or taking it upon ourselves, individually, to ward off both its immediate and long-term threats. Wear your mask. Get your vaccine. Get your booster. Keep your six-foot distance. Get a test. Quarantine for ten or even fifteen days following infection or known exposure. All these imperatives (promulgated and resourced inconsistently, at best), once internalized, no doubt helped a lot of people manage their fears, but they also made public health the function of an individual “responsibility” inattentive both to concurrent crises and to dramatically differential degrees of access to capital, health care, housing, and so on (all crises in their own right).Such a containment strategy blocks recognition of what John Nguyet Erni and Ted Striphas (2021: 212) see as “the multiplicity of the COVID-19 pandemic.” For Erni and Striphas, COVID cannot be disentangled from the rise of authoritarianism globally, from “broader attacks on democratic processes,” from the “senseless murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and scores of other Black persons at the hands of U.S. law enforcement,” and from “the deadly insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021” (212). It also cannot be separated from the myriad forms of environmental destruction that make viral pandemics more likely and more deadly for those forcibly situated in sites of ongoing attrition and abandonment. What I glean from their work, and from the work and activism of so many global activists and scholars of race and disability, is that there is something both personally and politically psychotic about conceiving of COVID-19 as a singular pandemic best managed, in a neoliberal vein, from within our individual islands of relative privilege and volition.One admittedly minor way to counteract this islanding effect and to forge some archipelagos of experience is through the creative arts. With the assistance of a grant from the British Academy, in December 2022 I assembled some academics working in literary studies and theory to consider the question of what aesthetic responses to other pandemics can teach us about comprehending and surviving COVID-19. Our symposium, hosted by the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh, was called “Fictions of Survival: Pandemic Literatures and Our Present Times,” and across two days, in a socially distanced and overly air-conditioned lecture hall, we discussed our individual presentations and reflected more broadly, in question-and-answer sessions that ran overtime, on how weird and disorienting the preceding two years had been. I suspect other academics have experienced a blurring of symposium and group therapy in the immediate aftermath of quarantine and lockdowns, but what I was most struck by in the presentations was how each of the contributors interpreted my call to connect COVID-19 to other pandemics in precisely the multiplicitous manner endorsed by Erni and Striphas. I had imagined, I admit fully, a series of presentations that would set COVID-19 in relation to HIV/AIDS, the great influenza epidemic, scarlet fever, the black death, and so on, and while folks did focus on some of those, the larger emphasis was on pandemics/epidemics conceived broadly and on the epistemological and epidemiological ruptures generated by persistent and pernicious forms of inequality spanning social, political, economic, and ecological scales.Lorenzo Servitje documents a long history of pandemic fictions while narrowing in on an epidemic that quite frequently escapes notice — the emergence of bacterial infections resistant to antibiotic treatment. In conversation with the short story “Ayanda,” he considers how the increasing antibiotic resistance found in bacterial agents causing urinary tract infections magnifies existing and systemic injustices in the global provision of medical care. Also thinking alongside a contemporary text preoccupied with matters of slow and invisible violence, Sam Le Butt reframes the film Princess Mononoke as an “ecocritical pandemic narrative” whose attention to suprahuman worlds enables it to imagine kinship in nonanthropocentric terms. And remaining with contemporary cultural production, while also harking back to Mary Shelley's The Last Man and Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, John Owen Havard meditates on how Hanya Yanagihara's novel To Paradise frames pandemic response, both personal and political, as fundamentally a matter of reimagining the relationship between subjectivity and time within a landscape of compulsory consumption.Two contributors keep their eyes looking further back in the history of pandemics and their literary responses. In a reading of L. T. Meade's late nineteenth-century novel The Medicine Lady, Katarina Gephardt shows how literature can not only thematize pandemics and their treatments in historically relevant ways — in this case, tuberculosis — but also problematize the narratives of medical and scientific progress that far too often paper over mixed and uneven results, including further physical damage. And Kari Nixon, in an analysis of Bram Stoker's infrequently studied The Lair of the White Worm, probes an Edwardian challenge to pastoralizing narratives of British modernity. In her reading, the novel unleashes various challenges to an extractivist colonialism whose ecological devastation is a source of short-term superiority but also long-term susceptibility.My own work in queer studies has centered on the relays between COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS. Here I consider some of the challenges HIV/AIDS posed to narrative form in the 1980s, and I argue that Andrew Holleran's short story “Friends at Evening” responds to those pressures with an intergeneric hybridity inclusive of lists, lines of poetry, and essayistic echoes. I am joined in this period by Gabriel Duckels, who reads M. E. Kerr's adolescent novel Night Kites as performing a kind of “AIDS-work” too often dismissed by scholars preoccupied with its sentimental style and familial focus. For both Duckels and me, pandemics and epidemics necessitate a more expansive understanding of what literary genres can and cannot do.This special focus section concludes with two pieces engaged directly with COVID-19’s imbrication with contemporary political crises. Ellie Byrne examines Ali Smith's four-volume Seasonal quartet, and specifically its final installment, to connect the viral pandemic to the political pandemic of Brexit and to understand how literature can slow pandemics down — or at least slow our processing down — in order to situate them within longer histories of social, political, and economic struggle. And in a piece bridging the personal and the philosophical, Anna Carastathis reflects on her barely legal perambulations during the COVID lockdowns in Athens, Greece, on which she viewed a variety of antiauthoritarian posters, including graffiti, that both invoked social justice causes elsewhere and replicated the very ethnonationalist logics and lexicons frustrating those causes’ success.Whether we got off of our psychotic islands is an empirical question I am unprepared to answer here. But as we start to see more contemporary literature and artwork taking the COVID-19 pandemic as a central premise and animating theme, I am more convinced than ever that humanities scholarship has much to teach us, and always has, about what it means, and how it feels, to live in pandemic(s) times.