It's Labour Day, and with Labour Day comes the start of the school year.* Every now and then I look around for courses dealing with my area of interest - I've often thought it might be interesting to study science fiction or
fantasy on a scholarly basis. Over the years I've looked at a wide variety of
courses, but it just never seems to work out for me in terms of time and scheduling.
One of the more intriguing options available in the current year comes from the Langara College English Department:
Apocalypse Now: Literary Narratives of Pandemic. It's an interesting choice for a topic: unlike the more speculative disasters such as global warfare or the
destruction of fossil fuels, humanity has actually experienced at least one pandemic event. In the middle of the 14th century, the Black Death swept
across Europe like a dark curtain, killing uncounted millions of people -
some estimates place the death toll as high as 60% of the population,
if not higher.
I'm quite curious as to how this course approaches pandemics in a literary framework, but sadly, the Langara web site provide no more specific information other than the following:
Students in this course will study prose fiction in a variety of forms
with the goal of improving their strategies for reading and writing
about 20th and 21st century prose. Course themes and content, as
determined by the English Department, may vary each semester. Check the
Registration Guide for details.
As a result, we have to extrapolate - how does one approach pandemic writing from a literary perspective?
Depending on how you define your terms, there would certainly be plenty of grist for the mill. The earliest fictional (as opposed to Biblical) take on a global apocalypse is Mary Shelley's 1826 novel
The Last Man, which tells the tale of an end to the world very much like the near miss of the Black Death. The late 20th Century is thick with novels where a disease of some sort wipes out 99% of the population**:
The Stand,
Oryx and Crake,
I Am Legend,
Earth Abides,
The Last Canadian, and so on. If you broaden your definition of pandemic to include the walking dead (caused by a contagious medical condition transmitted by biting, rather like rabies) the list grows exponentially.
Most of this fiction deals with the immediate aftermath of
disaster: finding food and shelter, seeking allies or companions,
defending against cannibals and raiders, etc. It almost goes without saying that this is a pessimistic literature, a literature of life lived in the present. It's rare that these
stories look very much further down the road than the immediate crisis.***
A rare longer term view of the challenges - and consequences - of attempting to rebuild a broken world can be found in
Some Will Not Die, a 1961 novel by Algis Budrys, which paints a brief multi-generational
picture of the years following the fall of civilization in terms of ends and its justification of the means used to achieve them.
The White Plague, by
Dune author Frank Herbert, presents a very different view of justification.
This 1982 novel is the story of a microbiologist deprived of his family by a bombing in Northern Ireland, and his decision to punish all of the participants in the conflict with a similar loss, now and forever: the eponymous White Plague is fatal only to women. The book concludes with a brilliant description of a journey through the tortured remnants of Ireland by the biologist and the bomber as the plague escapes the bounds of the United Kingdom and begins to infect the entire world.
As it turns out, this display of erudition in the area of apocalypse is fruitless - I don't have the prerequisites which would allow me to take the Langara course. Although, to be honest, I might find it more interesting to take a shot at teaching a class or two than attending them...
- Sid
* Those of you involved in multi-semester education, just work with me here.
** I'd love to add
The Andromeda Strain to this list - I grant you that it's more of a failed pandemic, a pandemic manqué if you will, but the scenes set in the Arizona town which finds the crashed probe so clearly show the horror of an alien disease set loose on Earth.
*** It would be interesting to see an episode of
The Walking Dead set in a future time when Carl is his father's age or older.
