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Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show

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Speaker 1: where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.

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Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. Readers all over the world are buying

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Speaker 1: books about epidemics right now. Sales of Albert Kamu's nineteen

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Speaker 1: forty seven novel The Plague have tripled in Italy, They're

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Speaker 1: up in the UK and in France. Stephen King's nineteen

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Speaker 1: seventy eight novel The Stand about a Killer Virus saw

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Speaker 1: a fifty eight percent increase in online sales last month,

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Speaker 1: and among scholars of literature, some of the classics of

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Speaker 1: Western writing, like Boccaccio's famous collection of stories The Decameron,

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Speaker 1: which are set in a time of plague, are drawing

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Speaker 1: renewed and indeed almost obsessive potension. Maybe we're turning to

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Speaker 1: books for answers that we can't get from scientists and politicians,

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Speaker 1: or maybe we're trying to find another way to make

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Speaker 1: sense of our world. We also might be just trying

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Speaker 1: to get out of it and escape. To discuss the

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Speaker 1: literature of pandemics and what we can learn from it.

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Speaker 1: I knew I wanted to hear from Marta Fikorovich. Marta

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Speaker 1: as an associate professor of comparative literature and of English

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Speaker 1: at Yale University. It's not just that Martha has read

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Speaker 1: every book there is to read. It's that she's consistently

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Speaker 1: clear and at the same time profound in her thinking

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Speaker 1: about literature and how it affects the way we think

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Speaker 1: and experience the world. Marta, thanks for agreeing to talk

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Speaker 1: to me, and our general topic is literature in the

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Speaker 1: time of Corona. I want to start by just asking you,

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Speaker 1: how irritated are you by this question? I mean, have

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Speaker 1: we already entered the realm of cliche in this subject.

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Speaker 1: That's a funny question. I think if we get to

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Speaker 1: Boccaccio in the next five minutes, then yes, But hopefully

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Speaker 1: we're going to go somewhere else. And thank you again

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Speaker 1: for inviting me to participate. I mean, in some sense

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Speaker 1: it's my parents are both scientists, and they're very much

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Speaker 1: involved in the COVID effort in Poland. So in some

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Speaker 1: sense I have been feeling a humanist's sense of futility

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Speaker 1: for the past few weeks. I'm like, Oh, my mother

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Speaker 1: is on National TV again talking about a case, and

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Speaker 1: here I am reading the Collected Gutta. So I think

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Speaker 1: in some ways the Poccaccio is a joke, but in

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Speaker 1: another sense, the joke is at us humanists, because it

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Speaker 1: raises the perpetual question of in times of crisis, what

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Speaker 1: does literature do? Exactly, both literature kind of dug up

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Speaker 1: from the past to help us persist, and also any

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Speaker 1: literature that might come out of this moment. At the

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Speaker 1: risk of them diving into cliche because you brought it up,

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Speaker 1: I want them to just ask you, maybe only very briefly,

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Speaker 1: about this classic work of literature, Pocaccio's to Cameron, composed

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Speaker 1: in the aftermath of the thirteen forty seven plague throughout Europe,

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Speaker 1: but in particular in Florence. Why do you think that

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Speaker 1: becomes everybody's go to COVID literary reference. I was actually

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Speaker 1: speaking about this to an Italian scholar a couple of

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Speaker 1: days ago, and what he said, and I agree with this,

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Speaker 1: is that Bocaccio captures something about quarantine that is about

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Speaker 1: recreation in two different senses. Kind Of, under one hand,

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Speaker 1: quarantine is all about figuring out what society might turn

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Speaker 1: out to be once kind of everybody emerges and some

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Speaker 1: people have died and the economy and politics will have

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Speaker 1: shifted in ways that we cannot as yet imagine. But

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Speaker 1: then in addition to that lofty sense of recreation, there's

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Speaker 1: also the less lofty sense of recreation. Meaning of quarantine

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Speaker 1: is all about dailiness overwhelming your life. It's all about

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Speaker 1: thinking about the very large scale, within the confines of

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Speaker 1: something that is kind of much smaller even than your

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Speaker 1: regular professional life or regular everyday life. That huge difference

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Speaker 1: in scales between the banality of what will I make

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Speaker 1: for breakfast and how will it be until the peak hits.

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Speaker 1: I think that's something Boccaccio captures quite well, and that's

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Speaker 1: something that the pathos of the stories, which are kind

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Speaker 1: of charming and funny but also often profoundly sad. And

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Speaker 1: this is very quickly developed, rapidly ending way, because there's

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Speaker 1: something about the stories that also captures the shortness of

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Speaker 1: every person's life and also kind of how easily a

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Speaker 1: life can be turned into a twist in a tail.

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Speaker 1: Then will then take you through maybe ten minutes of quarantine.

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Speaker 1: Marjor you said that as a humanist, you were asking yourself,

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Speaker 1: you know, what do we have to contribute? And seems

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Speaker 1: to me the answer is a whole lot, because it's

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Speaker 1: humanists who are interested in how we process our experiences. Yes, yeah,

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Speaker 1: what writers or ideas are are helping you to process

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Speaker 1: the strange experiences that we're in now. Well, one thing

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Speaker 1: I've been thinking about a lot is the work of

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Speaker 1: Vassily Grossman, who is a relatively lesser known Russian author

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Speaker 1: who lived in the time of the Soviet period, was

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Speaker 1: then exiled to Armenia because the Soviet government at first

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Speaker 1: really liked his novels and then suddenly turned against them.

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Speaker 1: And a lot of what he tries to write about

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Speaker 1: is kind of experiences of war in siege. I mean,

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Speaker 1: his big novel Stalingrad is about the Siege of Stalingrad,

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Speaker 1: and here again it's all about kind of different temporalities

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Speaker 1: coming together, kind of the temporality of waiting for the

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Speaker 1: Germans to come in the Sigi of Stalingrad, and then

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Speaker 1: the rapidity with which everybody in the novel spoiler alert

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Speaker 1: kind of rapidly dies in the siege. And he has

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Speaker 1: that amazing book called Everything Flows, which is about a

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Speaker 1: man who comes back from Goula to his home village,

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Speaker 1: and is this encounter between a man who has experienced

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Speaker 1: something unimaginable for over a decade and is suddenly back

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Speaker 1: in a town that is, on the one hand, exactly

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Speaker 1: the way it used to be and on the other hand,

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Speaker 1: completely different, and he can't figure out how to re

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Speaker 1: enter it. And I've been thinking about those books in

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Speaker 1: part because of the question of how do you begin

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Speaker 1: again and what does it mean to kind of leave

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Speaker 1: the house and resume life after all of this has happened.

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Speaker 1: So those are two book end ideas that you're finding there.

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Speaker 1: The first is the waiting idea that we're sitting around.

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Speaker 1: We know something bad is almost certainly going to happen,

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Speaker 1: we know it can involve death, and we're just sitting here.

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Speaker 1: The other end of the book end is what will

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Speaker 1: happen afterwards? Yes, what about the in between? I think

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Speaker 1: in the in between? One thing I've been thinking about

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Speaker 1: as an academic and a writer is kind of how

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Speaker 1: the monastic ideal of the solitary writer is such a lie.

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Speaker 1: I mean, even monasteries are usually full of people. That's

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Speaker 1: the point of a monasteries. You have a lot of

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Speaker 1: people who have nothing else to do but pray and

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Speaker 1: talk to you. And I think one thing I've been

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Speaker 1: thinking about is just universities and how much as we

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Speaker 1: scholars fetishize the notion of getting to go away on sabbatical,

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Speaker 1: which is where COVID currently finds me, there's also the

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Speaker 1: beauty of getting to go talk to people. And so

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Speaker 1: many of our best ideas actually happen in conversation with

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Speaker 1: people in a way that it just makes this myth

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Speaker 1: of disappearing into yourself to come up with a magnum

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Speaker 1: opus seem all the more like a kind of romantic

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Speaker 1: individualists mirage. And the other thing I've been thinking about

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Speaker 1: is just the realist novel in its capacity to think

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Speaker 1: about the every day and make us notice the every day.

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Speaker 1: I think it's no accident that we're all reading very

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Speaker 1: long novels, or at least everybody I know one has

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Speaker 1: been reading very long novels. And it's not just to

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Speaker 1: pass the time, which is why novels used to be

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Speaker 1: long in the first place, back in the day, because

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Speaker 1: you had to go off into the countryside and there

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Speaker 1: would be winter, there would be only one neighbor to

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Speaker 1: talk to a horse right away, So what were you

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Speaker 1: going to do? You're going to read the long Dickens novel,

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Speaker 1: but there's also something about them that celebrates that day

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Speaker 1: lead us, and sometimes, as Inflabet is really pessimistic about

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Speaker 1: it and treats it as this thing that will eventually

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Speaker 1: grind you down, but also kind of makes you realize

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Speaker 1: that most of your life does actually happen within your

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Speaker 1: house in a certain sense, and the people whom you

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Speaker 1: touch most intimately are often to people whom you live with.

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Speaker 1: Anything in that sense, the genre is like the poem

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Speaker 1: or the novel that could have tried to get you

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Speaker 1: back into that place are kind of precious in a

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Speaker 1: very different way because rather than kind of getting us

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Speaker 1: back into this place of contemplation, they kind of accompany

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Speaker 1: us in what has become constant contemplation of the living

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Speaker 1: room and then the kitchen and the living room. Again.

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Speaker 1: That's super interesting to me because my instinct before you

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Speaker 1: said that was sort of like the point that you

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Speaker 1: were initially making, I think, in part to disparage it,

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Speaker 1: namely that one reason we might feel able to take

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Speaker 1: on long novels is that the pace of our lives

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Speaker 1: feels different. But I think you were saying sort of

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Speaker 1: the opposite. I think you were saying that that's not

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Speaker 1: what's going on that it's really has to do more

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Speaker 1: with the idea of a novel about our inner worlds

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Speaker 1: and our inner lives corresponds to the fact that we

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Speaker 1: are stuck in our rooms. Yeah, no, I think that's

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Speaker 1: exactly right. And in that sense it's also making me

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Speaker 1: appreciate at least how much Beckett is engaged with realism

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Speaker 1: in a very serious way. Kind for all is absurdity,

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Speaker 1: and absurdism is actually just like the slowing down of realism.

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Speaker 1: It was ultimate degree. When you think about the Beckett

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Speaker 1: of the long novels, which are all about a person

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Speaker 1: slowly losing mobility. There's Molloy, where Malloy initially as a

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Speaker 1: bike and then he loses the bike, and then he

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Speaker 1: goes lame in one foot, then then in both feet,

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Speaker 1: and by the end of the novel he's just a

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Speaker 1: crawling somewhere, sort of forgetting where it was he was

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Speaker 1: crawling to in the first place. And then Malone Dies,

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Speaker 1: which is about a character who may or may not

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Speaker 1: be related to the characters of Molloy lying in bed, dying,

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Speaker 1: trying to write his diary of being stuck in this room,

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Speaker 1: occasionally getting food, and he keeps dropping his pencil. So

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Speaker 1: a lot of the novel is just about like I

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Speaker 1: found my pencil again. It has been two weeks since

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Speaker 1: I have seen my pencil. Pure in is again, so

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Speaker 1: I will write about the last two weeks. You make

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Speaker 1: it seem so thrilling. It's fascinating, Marta. What about escapism

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Speaker 1: and the novel? One of the experiences that most of

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Speaker 1: us have when reading novels is to not be where

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Speaker 1: we are. It seems especially valuable when you can't get

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Speaker 1: out of the place where you, in fact are. Are

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Speaker 1: there any escapist novels that seem to you particularly suitable

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Speaker 1: to the moment. Well, I think it depends to me

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Speaker 1: on what you mean by escapism, because I often find

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Speaker 1: that what I initially think of escapism is actually something

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Speaker 1: like a parallax, meaning it doesn't so much get me

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Speaker 1: out of reality that it transposes it by a couple

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Speaker 1: of degrees, so I can think about it a little

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Speaker 1: bit more freely, which is what daydreaming off it is fundamentally.

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Speaker 1: And I when we daydream, it's not like we're coming

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Speaker 1: up with something from scratch, like what would that even mean?

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Speaker 1: Is that we're trying to imagine a version of the

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Speaker 1: people we know in the lives we go in a

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Speaker 1: different country, or from a different perspective, or with a

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Speaker 1: slightly different balance of power. When COVID first hit, I

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Speaker 1: found myself obsessively thinking about the zombie movies of Roberto,

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Speaker 1: particularly the one that takes place in the super market,

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Speaker 1: Dawn of the Dead, which is all about kind of

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Speaker 1: the fascination of going into the supermarket and being like, oh,

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Speaker 1: I could survive here forever if I could only give

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Speaker 1: the zombies out. And then they do give the zombies out,

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Speaker 1: and then they collapse because they can't agree with each other.

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Speaker 1: And I think it's not accidental that, like a lot

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Speaker 1: of other people I know, we're looking to the dystopian

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Speaker 1: literature of surviving and scarce resources. Like most of the

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Speaker 1: children I know and I've been hearing about during the

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Speaker 1: epidemic have been making a little self isolation forts in

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Speaker 1: the living room, which is sort of adorable. And you

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Speaker 1: would think they would be doing something else, like imagining,

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Speaker 1: like I don't know, like huge villas or world travel,

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Speaker 1: but no, it's always like I am in this timy place.

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Speaker 1: We have three pieces of bread, let's share them together.

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Speaker 1: I love that zombie movies come to your mind as

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Speaker 1: say that, yes, I recognize the form of escapism that

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Speaker 1: form of escapism though, that, at least on the surface,

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Speaker 1: radical escapism. I mean, so for me, if I am

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Speaker 1: at my lowest point, if I open Conan Doyle, you know,

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Speaker 1: of Holmes and Watson. It's that's so radically disjunct from

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Speaker 1: my world. And that's a different form I think of

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Speaker 1: escapism where you literally want to just get out of

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Speaker 1: I want to think about something completely different right now.

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Speaker 1: Not going to psychoanalyze pattern, but I'm very tempted too.

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Speaker 1: Oh go for it. No, just in the sense that

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Speaker 1: could of the crime narrative and the clue narratives, also

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Speaker 1: the fundamental form of imagine control, of imagining that the

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Speaker 1: world is actually legible, and if you only look for

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Speaker 1: enough clues and put them together, it's long going to

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Speaker 1: be okay, and everything's going to be clear again. You

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Speaker 1: can send me a bill. I mean, that's a great

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Speaker 1: psychomanalytic insight of why I love mystery novels. They embody

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Speaker 1: the fantasy of putting it all together and making sense

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Speaker 1: of it and then being in control again. We'll be

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Speaker 1: back in just a moment. Magical realism got The first

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Speaker 1: Corona shout out has to have been within a couple

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Speaker 1: of days of people starting to talk about sociation that

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Speaker 1: everyone was saying love in the time of Corona, Love

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Speaker 1: and the time of Corona. And I remember the first

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Speaker 1: person who texted that to me. I thought, oh my god,

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Speaker 1: then very quickly I realized that, you know, the hive

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Speaker 1: anyone's actually out there reading Marquez now, but there is

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Speaker 1: something about the kind of slowing of pace in magical realism,

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Speaker 1: does seem just almost intuitively appropriate for the moment, right.

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Speaker 1: And it's also funny because put the question that collected

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Speaker 1: and magical vitalism is also interesting because on the one

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Speaker 1: hand it's about the individual author's imagination. On the other hand,

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Speaker 1: it's about juxtaposing certain traditions that are non imperialist Western

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Speaker 1: kind of showing that the novel doesn't have to be

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Speaker 1: realist in the sense that's the nineteenth century British and

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Speaker 1: angle kick in here? Because I have this instinct that

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Speaker 1: one of the weirdest things about COVID is that people

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Speaker 1: in broadly speaking, the rich West or North, or call

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Speaker 1: it whatever you wish, are accustomed in our era to

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Speaker 1: thinking of pandemics as things that happen all the time

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Speaker 1: to other people Zeka in Latin America, or Ebola in Africa,

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Speaker 1: or earlier versions of stars in China. So if you

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Speaker 1: think of Marquez or something like that, you're thinking of

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Speaker 1: again non Western quote unquote literature as the more contemporary

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Speaker 1: literature of pandemic. You're talking about it in terms of

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Speaker 1: past and present and future. Is always fascinating to me,

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Speaker 1: in part because like I don't quite identify with that

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Speaker 1: part of my impetus for moving to the United States

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Speaker 1: those fifteen years ago now was because I kind of

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Speaker 1: wanted to live in the future. I didn't want to

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Speaker 1: the future in Poland, so I thought I could could

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Speaker 1: have jumped a decade. And that's how it felt at first.

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Speaker 1: And how does it feel now, especially with reference to

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Speaker 1: the pandemic. Is it if there's a sort of flattening

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Speaker 1: we're all sort of in the same situation. Yes, And

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Speaker 1: I think there's a kind of big difference in kind

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Speaker 1: of what kinds of memories to spring back, because my

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Speaker 1: family in Poland, I find myself talking to them a

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Speaker 1: lot about my grandmother's memories of the war, which, for

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Speaker 1: her and for a lot of the people I know

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Speaker 1: who were the people survived, was all about trying to

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Speaker 1: wait it out and occasionally having something very dramatic happened,

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Speaker 1: which would become the story that you told to people

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Speaker 1: that most of the time you were just kind of

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Speaker 1: trying to be in the potato field when the planes

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Speaker 1: came and not to be seen. Yes, I think it's

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Speaker 1: weird and interesting what kinds of transgenerational memories that brings up,

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Speaker 1: and with parts of my heritage, it makes me feel

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Speaker 1: close to because in some senses it's been making me

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Speaker 1: feel more connected to a certain part of my Eastern

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Speaker 1: Europeanist that I have been in a while. It is

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Speaker 1: really really interesting that the experience of waiting is a

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Speaker 1: sort of hoping to hoping to get through it to

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Speaker 1: the other side. Yeah, Kamu is my last topic to

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Speaker 1: bring up. I mean, I think then we've hit all

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Speaker 1: the big three of the on a literature discussion. Have

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Speaker 1: you heard or read anything or thought of anything around

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Speaker 1: the Kamu that was a value or of interest. I

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Speaker 1: think I've been thinking about Mu in great part in

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Speaker 1: relation to the notion of the plague is a time

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Speaker 1: of trial, meaning kind of people's real character comes out

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Speaker 1: and what it means for that to be quote unquote

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Speaker 1: your real character like. Emergencies certainly bring to the foreground

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Speaker 1: certain parts of ourselves, and they're valuable parts of ourselves,

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Speaker 1: but how do they relate to the rest of reality.

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Speaker 1: I've been reading in my World War Two phase of

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Speaker 1: my COVID reading, I've been reading Joan Juno's Occupation Journal.

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Speaker 1: He's a French novelist. It's a journal from the occupation

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Speaker 1: of France by the Germans, which is coming out in

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Speaker 1: its first English translation, and one of the things he

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Speaker 1: meditates about is kind of what those situations of emergency

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Speaker 1: due to people. And he says, there are some people

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Speaker 1: them to be weak. And there are people who have

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Speaker 1: always imagined themselves to be weak, but a situation of

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Speaker 1: crisis actually shows them to be unconsciously very strong. And

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Speaker 1: then he says there's the third kind of person, which, surprise, surprise,

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Speaker 1: is most valuable of all, which is stay true to

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Speaker 1: themselves and who are able to act in a crisis

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Speaker 1: the way they would in an everyday situation. And that's

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Speaker 1: another thing I guess I've been wondering about, kind of

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Speaker 1: in relation to the kind of existentialist view of COVID,

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Speaker 1: which is kind of what are we to do with

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Speaker 1: what it makes of us? And how do we, on

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Speaker 1: the one hand, kind of allow ourselves to think seriously

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Speaker 1: about the things it forces us to think about, like

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Speaker 1: socio economic inequality, like our own lives, our own choices,

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Speaker 1: without succumbing to the fallacy of kind. Everything I think

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Speaker 1: in a period of isolation is true, or everything I

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Speaker 1: do in this moment is the essential part of me,

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Speaker 1: and probably those answers will be different to different people. Marta,

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Speaker 1: thank you very very much for the conversation. I really

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Speaker 1: I learned a huge amount. As always, it's so fun

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Speaker 1: to talk to you. My pleasure. Listening to Marta really

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Speaker 1: brought home to me two pretty different aspects of our

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Speaker 1: inner experiences of sitting at home and reading books during Corona.

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Speaker 1: On the one hand, that there's the individual experience. Marta

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Speaker 1: talked about being Polish coming to the United States and

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Speaker 1: how that affects her experiences in engaging with literature and

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Speaker 1: with ideas. Each of us has our own individual path

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Speaker 1: to follow, and indeed, our conversation about existentialism puts the

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Speaker 1: individual's judgment and the individual's ability to make a choice

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Speaker 1: front and center. In our experiences. Yet at the same time,

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Speaker 1: Marta also brought home that there's a universal collective experience

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Speaker 1: they were undergoing in relation to the coronavirus, and literature

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Speaker 1: is a mechanism whereby we collectively process and think about experience.

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Speaker 1: Books are meant to be read by more than one person.

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Speaker 1: There are ways of engaging the world that are shared

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Speaker 1: at least between the writer and the reader, and ideally

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Speaker 1: of many more people as well. Our collective life experiences

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Speaker 1: are being shaped by Corona. We're alone, but we're alone

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Speaker 1: together until the next time I speak to you. Be careful,

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Speaker 1: be safe, and be well. Deep background is brought to

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Speaker 1: you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Cott,

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Speaker 1: with research help from zooe Wynn. Mastering is by Jason

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Speaker 1: Gambrel and Martin Gonzalez. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our

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Speaker 1: theme music is composed by Luis Gera special thanks to

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Speaker 1: the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg and Mia Lobel.

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Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. I also write a regular column for

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Speaker 1: Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com.

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Speaker 1: Slash Feldman. To discus Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go

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Speaker 1: to bloomberg dot com slash podcasts. You can follow me

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Speaker 1: on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is deep background