Post-Crisis Fiction and the Future of Literature

Millions have been infected, countless routines have been disrupted, and many thousands of lives sadly cut short. The Covid-19 pandemic is inarguably one of the most significant and dreadful events in the lives of most of us. It may seem sometimes that it is impossible to imagine a way out, and the world can seem full of uncertainty and fear. These sorts of huge, tragic events are fortunately fairly rare in modern times, but when they happen, they leave an immeasurable impact on society.

In the aftermath of such events, there is often a flourishing of literature which attempts to deal with the impact of that event. Authors attempt to understand what was lost, what was changed, and what this disaster meant to them personally. For the sake of this article, this genre of fiction could be called ‘Post-Crisis Fiction’.

But knowing this, how can we know where the world of literature might take us after the coronavirus pandemic is over? In order to predict this, we must understand the forms in which this ‘Post-Crisis’ (PC) literature can take.

For me, PC literature can take four main forms; these are the dully named (because I’m bad at naming things) Symbolic, Historical-Allegorical, Humanistic and Alternate History subgenres.

Humanistic

The first subgenre is the Humanistic. These are works which explore the human side of traumatic events, viewing them not through a symbolic or historical viewpoint, but in a naturalistic way through the eyes of those who were there. Those eyes may be fictional or biographical, but ultimately the primary goal of the work is to express an extremely personal view of the crisis. 

Many of these works are written by those who directly experienced these events, who often turn to writing fiction as a means of expressing and understanding those experiences for catharsis.

A notable example of this subgenre is All Quiet on the Western Front, in which the author, war veteran Erich Maria Remarque translated his World War One experiences into one of the greatest novels about the tragedies of war ever written. Another may be Slaughterhouse Five, in which Kurt Vonnegut’s experiences as a prisoner of war, being locked in (you guessed it) a slaughterhouse during the bombing of Dresden, were transformed into the (sci-fi-infused) traumas of his protagonist, Billy Pilgrim.

Yet this style of fiction doesn’t necessarily need to be written by the victims. Some may be by those who were too young to have directly experienced the crisis firsthand, but who wish to explore their ancestors' struggles. Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, set in London in the year 1665, was in fact published sixty years later. 

More than just a novel, Defoe also incorporated plague statistics

The author himself had only been five years old at the time of the novel’s setting. However Defoe incorporates extensive research into the events of the plague into his fiction, portraying them through the eyes of his protagonist ‘H.F.’- thought by academics to be a fictionalised version of his uncle, Henry Foe. Through this, Defoe explores the human cost on Londoners of a pandemic which was only then just fading from living memory.

This branch of PC fiction is important because it ensures that the human face of disaster is not forgotten, giving a deeply personal look at the challenges, suffering and triumphs of the people caught in the heart of the storm.

Historical-Allegorical

The second category of Post-Crisis fiction is the Historical-Allegorical. In addition to being a good name for a psychedelic rock band, these are the works which attempt to draw parallels between the crisis and events of the past by updating important literary works for modern audiences. In adapting such works to modern times, the author shows us eternal truths about the state of human nature and our vulnerabilities.

This subgenre has many illustrious examples, such as the musical Rent, which updates Puccini’s acclaimed opera La Boheme from tuberculosis-ridden 1830s Paris to the height of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Likewise, Francis Ford Coppola translated the horrors (the horrors) of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s damning indictment of European colonialism in Africa to the Vietnam War in Apocalypse Now.

One of a long tradition of updating fiction for modern times.

This sub-genre can be especially powerful, as the popularity of those aforementioned works show, with many of the best examples standing independently of their source. However, by the same token, the symbolism of updating a work for a more modern crisis can be missed by audiences not familiar with the source material. Because of this, they also run an unusually high risk of obscuring the work that it was adapted from. 

Despite this, this subgenre does valuable work in reminding us that although from the inside, calamities such as coronavirus or war or economic depression can seem eternal, they can be overcome, and that we are not alone suffering in the endlessness of history.

The Symbolic

These works try to incorporate the event into the wider zeitgeist, drawing parallels between the crisis and the broader cultural attitudes of the era. The essence of Symbolic PC literature is to use the event itself as a kind of symbol for the ‘end of an era’, or to implicate the event as a catalyst for that change. Sometimes these works can be written decades afterwards, with the full force of hindsight allowing the writer to approach things with more objectivity than those at the time could. But the rarer kind are those works in which the writer sees the crisis as an appropriate symbol of what they were already writing about, at the time of writing. 

A prime example of the latter is William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition, which Gibson had been penning throughout the year 2001. Ostensibly just the tale of an advertising consultant called Cayce Pollard who has a powerful ‘sensitivity’ towards symbols and corporate branding, the novel incorporates the memory of September 11th as an icon of the shattering of 20th century idealism, and the dawn of a new age of uncertainty.

9/11 was a major influence on modern post-crisis fiction

Another, more idiosyncratic example might be Withnail and I, which mirrors the decadence and increasing decrepitude of the protagonists’ relationship through its hedonistic setting. When as drug dealer Danny puts it, “the greatest decade in the history of mankind is over… and we have failed to paint it black.”

... Not all calamities result in huge numbers of casualties, but that doesn’t make them any less personally significant or epoch-defining. In the case of Withnail and I, what makes the new decade a crisis is the realisation that ideals have been shattered, and lives may have been irreparably harmed in the process.

Alternate History

The final subgenre, Alternate History, is already a pretty well known one, which has long attracted people who like to speculate on the “what-ifs” of history. The big hitter of the genre is of course World War II, but it’s hard to find a major crisis that hasn’t had the alt-hist treatment at one time or another. 

In The Man in the High Castle, (which also was recently adapted into an excellent TV show by Amazon Prime), author Philip K Dick explores the ways in which our world would have been affected by an Axis victory in the War. In it, he focuses on the ways in which societal expectations of what is normal or acceptable can be dramatically altered by earth-shattering events, and how in hindsight such events can seem inevitable, yet could have gone either way at the time.

Similarly, in Stephen King’s 11/22/63, a time traveller succeeds in saving the life of John F Kennedy, in the belief that saving his life will lead to a better world. Instead, his action spirals into a far worse alternate reality in which nuclear weapons are frequently used in conflict, racism is inadvertently far more rife in the USA, and nations worldwide are on the brink of societal collapse.

Alternate history novels comfort us in the aftermath of calamities, reminding us that the future is not set, and that the choices we make in the moment, however small, can have a huge impact. They can also remind us of how things could have been far worse, or comfort us by suggesting that even from the greatest tragedies, hope springs eternal from the human heart.

So on that basis, what’s next?

“Okay”, you might say. “But how does this apply to the current pandemic?”

It’s inevitable to assume that in the near future, the coronavirus pandemic will have a huge impact on global literature, even potentially overshadowing all the political turbulence of the previous decade through sheer scale. Because of this, we can most likely expect to see a surge in Post-Crisis literature of all flavours.

For example, as governments and the news media have been keen to remind us, the success of our attempts to combat the spread of the disease rests on us staying at home and taking preventative measures. This could be the difference between thousands of deaths and millions. This emphasis on the power of the ordinary individual to make a difference, and the drastic differences in possible outcomes, could be fertile ground for any number of alternate history tales.

Likewise, Covid-19 has rekindled a strong public interest in the notorious Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1920, and has caused a resurgence in readers interested in classic contagion fiction such as Albert Camus’ The Plague. Could we soon find ourselves in a world in which past accounts of disease are revived and updated to suit the post-Covid era? With our illusions of a world freed from disease now shattered, perhaps we will find that we have more in common with our ancestors than we once thought.

In the midst of all this confusion and uncertainty, we have also seen conflicting statements by officials, statistics that change day by day, and a huge influx of new and unfounded conspiracy theories. We have also been subject to huge turbulence in our daily lives, feared for and lost loved ones, and been forced by circumstances beyond our control to try new things. We now order our food online en masse, volunteer to help our communities, work remotely more than ever, and more bleakly, have become more reliant on the government than at any time since World War II. 

Many of these changes will likely have a lasting impact well beyond the pandemic itself. It could be that like Gibson, the authors of the first great works of post-Covid literature are already in the works, incorporating the virus into their pre-existing narratives as a symbol for the changes already at hand.

It’s just as likely that many are already writing personal accounts of the pandemic, ready to translate them into narrative form when the time is right. These may not be as grand as the other works that emerge from this calamity, but they will remind us of the human impact: the medical staff who died fighting the virus, the elderly people trapped in their homes, and the children who don’t understand why they can’t see their friends anymore.

No silver lining can take the tragedy away from the situation, but if fiction has taught us anything, it’s that humans endure. And they make great art out of it.