What’s Covid done to us? Only art can explain
A moratorium on the virus sounds fun, but culture must explore the pandemic, says Ewan Morrison
In the first months of 2021, as we surpassed two million Covid deaths worldwide, numerous popular articles predicted that once the pandemic is over, we will enter a second Roaring Twenties. So the coming decade will be one of hedonism, escapism, sex, booze and parties. We will be discarding our lockdown memories as we throw our face masks away and head for the newly opened pubs and clubs. Our cultural gatekeepers, too, have been telling us artists: give us escapism, the public don’t want to be reminded of our misery, cheer us up, make us forget.
If this is true then it is also rather sad. Not only would a coming decade of hedonism dishonour the dead, but the idea that we enter wilfully into a period of forgetting paints a bleak picture of humanity.
This artistic erasure has happened before. After the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-19, in which 50 million died, there was a significant reluctance to memorialise it. As Art in America magazine has pointed out: “Images of the Spanish flu itself are almost completely nonexistent in art outside of medical illustration.”
There are two portraits by Edvard Munch painted in recovery from flu, both made in 1919, after two of his contemporaries, Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, succumbed to the virus. There also remains a portrait Schiele made of his wife, Edith, on the day before she died of Spanish flu. Schiele himself died only three days later, aged 28. This is the sum total of paintings that have been passed down to us from the 1918 pandemic.
In fiction, too, the record is sparse. The novel One of Ours (1922), by Willa Cather, is the first and last depiction of the pandemic for almost a generation. In 2017, the writer Laura Spinne wrote: “There is no cenotaph, no monument in London or Moscow, or Washington DC. The Spanish flu is remembered personally, not collectively.” So why did this period of cultural history fail to manifest? And if this omission was deliberate, what was to blame?
First, there was the rise of Modernism. From 1920 onwards, the idea of wiping the slate clean with a “tabula rasa” emerged with the Modernists. This was typified in Le Corbusier designs for a new Paris ( Plan Voisin, 1925) in which he planned to destroy two square miles of historic Paris and replace it with modernist tower-blocks, his “machines for living”. Modernists,
After the Spanish flu epidemic there was a reluctance to memorialise it
like the Bauhaus, the Soviet Constructivists, the Italian Futurists and the British Vorticists, depicted the pre-1918 years of war, plague, overcrowding and contamination as symbols of the imperialist structures they wanted to tear down.
Bauhaus furniture and architecture, such as that of Marcel Bruer (1902-81), was even created in direct reaction against the pandemic. Bruer’s “minimalist pieces were made of hygienic wood & tubular steel… to facilitate cleaning”. Out went the heavy, ornate Victorian furniture with its contamination by viruses, dust and the dated values of Empire, and instead a radically new utopian “International Style” was invented.
The Modernists, and the many Communists among them, consigned the memory of the 1918 pandemic to the pyre of progress.In literature, modernism took hold with Pound, Shaw, Stein, Wolfe, Joyce, Proust, HD and DH Lawrence, and they too swept away social values and language structures.
The second reason for the historical erasure of the 1918 pandemic was hedonism. This was the Roaring Twenties, with its exuberant explosions of wealth and decadence. As F Scott Fitzgerald said: “The parties were bigger, the pace was faster… the buildings were higher, the morals were looser, and the liquor was cheaper.” The Roaring Twenties was like a party with hangover amnesia, erasing the time that came before it.
But there was also the fact that the pandemic was eclipsed by the memorialisation of the First World War. In a 2014 paper, Elizabeth Outka, associate professor of English at the University of Richmond, in America, noted that “the two tragedies” of the First World War were “entangled… into a single tragedy”. The flu dead, she claimed, were counted among the war dead, and infectious disease had been a leading cause of death among armed forces during the war.
Now, in 2021, there are calls for a reborn Modernism to wipe the historical slate clean once again. This is “The Great Reset”, proposed by the World Economic Forum, and voiced in unison by an alarming number of world leaders. Its creator, Klaus Shwabe, represents the recovery after Covid as a “unique window of opportunity… [for global leaders] to reflect, reimagine and reset our world” with a utopian plan to create a “greener, smarter, fairer world”. All of this echoes the idealistic projects of Le Corbusier and the Communists from the Twenties with their universalist beliefs in “blank slate” solutions for all the world. Have we learnt nothing?
So it has fallen to artists to save our memories. In terms of culture made so far that addresses the pandemic, there is the play Bubble – a “tender tale of love under lockdown”, by James Graham. There is also Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight’s film Locked Down, about a struggling marriage, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Anne Hathaway. It would be a great shame if this kind of cultural production ceased as soon as the pandemic is declared over.
The crisis has forced us to explore so much about ourselves; the horrors, but also the unexpected versatility of people inventing solutions together. There have been upheavals in work and in family structures – in divorce, cohabitation and child rearing. The modern family has been forced (with “support bubbles”) into new formations. Generations have been either pushed together or further apart.
Then there are the vast changes in travel, in the meaning of national borders, the impact on places of worship; the questioning of the idea of globalisation and of “a career”. I’ve seen formerly career-driven people give up their ambitions and commit to delivering food to old people. I know of millennial couples who were postponing having kids for economic reasons suddenly decide to try for a baby, because of Covid.
And these personal questions we’ve had to grapple with: what is it like to home school three kids? What is it like to slowly go bankrupt or to keep (an illegal) romantic affair alive during lockdown? How does it feel to lose someone and not get to say goodbye?
All of this should be the subject of our art and our fiction right now. We should not be wishing the next year away, killing time, using culture as escapism. We have a social and moral duty to leave a record of all these powerful changes for future generations. We can’t leave a chasm in culture like the one that occurred around the pandemic of 1918. If we fail to learn from the past – as the Spanish philosopher George Santayana once said – then we are doomed to repeat it.