What We're Reading: COVID-19 Edition

The Spring 2020 semester will be the most difficult experience many professors will ever face in their teaching careers. They are transitioning to online platforms; figuring out how to hold “office hours” when students have returned to homes perhaps hundreds of miles away; mentoring students who are no longer on campus. None of this will be easy. Students are struggling not only with studies and the disruption of their quotidian lives, but are coming to terms, as we all are, with events that will shape us for years. For Generation Z students, this is the first time they have faced events of this magnitude—even the oldest Generation Z students were in preschool on 9/11.

Our liberal arts tradition is replete with histories, novels, films, and visual art about how individuals and societies have confronted catastrophe. Below are suggestions of books, ranging from classical history to American naturalistic fiction to science fiction, that faculty might share with their students in the weeks ahead. Most concern societal, political, and individual responses to a plague. Experiencing such a calamitous event seemed entirely remote just a few weeks ago, perhaps why these books so successfully engage readers’ imagination. The selections below—along with many others, including Albert Camus’ The Plague, Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Salt and Rice—are resources that may assist students in contextualizing this crisis, imagining ways to respond as a community and as individuals, and connecting the current moment with our past.

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (431BC–411BC).

Thucydides’ history of the conflict between Athens and Sparta is a case study in the virtues and failings of different types of regime. Thucydides depicts the praiseworthy aspects of Athenian democracy: men enjoy freedom to live as they wish, position and prestige are earned on merit, and citizens freely rally to defend their country. Thucydides also shows the weaknesses of Athens: when a plague besets Athens, the tendency to allow men to live as they wish leads to the dissolution of public order. Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War has informed scholars’ thinking about democracies from the 17^th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who produced the first English translation, to the contemporary political scientist Graham Allison, who has worried about American foreign policy stepping into the “Thucydides trap.” It is well worth revisiting today for insight about the capacity of our democracy to rise to the COVID-19 crisis though selfless acts and collective strategies.

Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith (1925).

Democracies share certain characteristics across the centuries, but modern democracies also have technocratic features that affect their capacity to meet crises. In the 19^th century, science, methodology, and progress became watchwords for democratic governments, businessmen, and philanthropists. In Arrowsmith, Lewis satirizes the consequences of these developments for the medical community. The protagonist, Martin Arrowsmith, is discontent to be merely a small-town physician and abandons that work and becomes a star medical researcher. He makes a discovery that can save many lives, but he refuses to distribute it widely, opting to follow scientific protocols and test its effectiveness first. Only when tragedy strikes at home does Dr. Arrowsmith reconsider the relative weights of compassion and scientific progress. As our medical agencies, physicians, and lawmakers meet this crisis, there too will be choices to be made about whom to treat, when to roll out experimental treatments, and when to reopen schools and businesses even if this will cost lives—all questions with parallels in this novel. For Arrowsmith and other novels, Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930—the first American to receive this award.

Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722).

While the Peloponnesian War and Arrowsmith address the ability of democracies to rise and meet a crisis, A Journal of the Plague Year gives us the perspective of an individual in such a crisis. The book’s narrator, known only by his initials H.F., describes the Great Plague as it swept through London in 1665. H.F. is a bachelor saddler, and so a member of the emerging middle class, with interests not shaped by family or political considerations, but by what moves him as an individual and shop owner. H.F. observes how local authorities such as the Lord Mayor and aldermen, the College of Physicians, clergy, and other civic institutions helped or failed to check the spread of the plague. It addresses themes of civil society and social resilience, a focus of scholars such as Daniel Aldrich and the Mercatus Center Gulf Coast Recovery Project. Economists analyzing how COVID-19 is upending the economy could catalogue types of economic disruptions from H.F.’s observations: loss of employees, inventory challenges, supply chain disruptions, shifts in shipping and port traffic, and more. Bonus question for literature teachers: while Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, published in 1814, is usually cited as the first historical novel, should A Journal of the Plague Year claim that distinction?

Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter (in three volumes, 1920, 1921, 1922).

Kristin Lavransdatter is set in a period of globalization, where foreign ideas are undermining traditional norms, new trade patterns are vastly increasing the wealth of some, and long-standing notions of political legitimacy are being challenged. The issues are familiar, but the novel is set in 14^th century Renaissance Norway. Christianity is striving to uproot paganism; churchmen are bringing new ideas from universities in Paris and northern Italy; and Kristin’s husband Erlend offers an almost-Machiavellian model of political authority that competes with traditional notions of nobility. The globalization of trade eventually brings the Black Death. Although the novel concludes while the Black Death continues to ravage Europe, it ends on a hopeful note with two central characters walking across untrodden snow with fresh prospects ahead. Undset was only the third woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature when she won it in 1928 for Kristin Lavransdatter, and Tiina Nunnally’s recent translation garnered her numerous accolades, including the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for the third volume. Sure enough, the book counts as a big read—running to over 1,100 pages—but is a fast-paced page-turner.

John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (1951).

The Day of the Triffids presents a worst-case scenario: a catastrophe so dire, wherein most people die and government is replaced by anarchy. The story sets up a cascading series of man-made disasters, including a biological weapon gone out of control. Eventually, families and individuals band together, and each group must decide how it will govern itself. Some organize by strict religious doctrine; others around Darwinist principles to maximize chances for survival though previously heterodox practices such as polygamy; others maintain norms closer to post-war Britain; yet others are paramilitary societies determined to conquer others. A few individuals remain more like bandits outside of any community. We are invited to reconsider the state of nature and social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, and to consider what we would do in the aftermath of an illness much more lethal than COVID-19.

In the weeks and months ahead, we will ask urgent questions about how, as individuals and as communities, to face a crisis that will change the course of our lives. Books and art that can help us contextual these events, inspire us with historical or fiction acts of resourcefulness and bravery, and suggest alternative ways to make our way through can be essential to living up to our highest ideals at this moment.