Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. Readers all over the world are buying
Speaker 1: books about epidemics right now. Sales of Albert Kamu's nineteen
Speaker 1: forty seven novel The Plague have tripled in Italy, They're
Speaker 1: up in the UK and in France. Stephen King's nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight novel The Stand about a Killer Virus saw
Speaker 1: a fifty eight percent increase in online sales last month,
Speaker 1: and among scholars of literature, some of the classics of
Speaker 1: Western writing, like Boccaccio's famous collection of stories The Decameron,
Speaker 1: which are set in a time of plague, are drawing
Speaker 1: renewed and indeed almost obsessive potension. Maybe we're turning to
Speaker 1: books for answers that we can't get from scientists and politicians,
Speaker 1: or maybe we're trying to find another way to make
Speaker 1: sense of our world. We also might be just trying
Speaker 1: to get out of it and escape. To discuss the
Speaker 1: literature of pandemics and what we can learn from it.
Speaker 1: I knew I wanted to hear from Marta Fikorovich. Marta
Speaker 1: as an associate professor of comparative literature and of English
Speaker 1: at Yale University. It's not just that Martha has read
Speaker 1: every book there is to read. It's that she's consistently
Speaker 1: clear and at the same time profound in her thinking
Speaker 1: about literature and how it affects the way we think
Speaker 1: and experience the world. Marta, thanks for agreeing to talk
Speaker 1: to me, and our general topic is literature in the
Speaker 1: time of Corona. I want to start by just asking you,
Speaker 1: how irritated are you by this question? I mean, have
Speaker 1: we already entered the realm of cliche in this subject.
Speaker 1: That's a funny question. I think if we get to
Speaker 1: Boccaccio in the next five minutes, then yes, But hopefully
Speaker 1: we're going to go somewhere else. And thank you again
Speaker 1: for inviting me to participate. I mean, in some sense
Speaker 1: it's my parents are both scientists, and they're very much
Speaker 1: involved in the COVID effort in Poland. So in some
Speaker 1: sense I have been feeling a humanist's sense of futility
Speaker 1: for the past few weeks. I'm like, Oh, my mother
Speaker 1: is on National TV again talking about a case, and
Speaker 1: here I am reading the Collected Gutta. So I think
Speaker 1: in some ways the Poccaccio is a joke, but in
Speaker 1: another sense, the joke is at us humanists, because it
Speaker 1: raises the perpetual question of in times of crisis, what
Speaker 1: does literature do? Exactly, both literature kind of dug up
Speaker 1: from the past to help us persist, and also any
Speaker 1: literature that might come out of this moment. At the
Speaker 1: risk of them diving into cliche because you brought it up,
Speaker 1: I want them to just ask you, maybe only very briefly,
Speaker 1: about this classic work of literature, Pocaccio's to Cameron, composed
Speaker 1: in the aftermath of the thirteen forty seven plague throughout Europe,
Speaker 1: but in particular in Florence. Why do you think that
Speaker 1: becomes everybody's go to COVID literary reference. I was actually
Speaker 1: speaking about this to an Italian scholar a couple of
Speaker 1: days ago, and what he said, and I agree with this,
Speaker 1: is that Bocaccio captures something about quarantine that is about
Speaker 1: recreation in two different senses. Kind Of, under one hand,
Speaker 1: quarantine is all about figuring out what society might turn
Speaker 1: out to be once kind of everybody emerges and some
Speaker 1: people have died and the economy and politics will have
Speaker 1: shifted in ways that we cannot as yet imagine. But
Speaker 1: then in addition to that lofty sense of recreation, there's
Speaker 1: also the less lofty sense of recreation. Meaning of quarantine
Speaker 1: is all about dailiness overwhelming your life. It's all about
Speaker 1: thinking about the very large scale, within the confines of
Speaker 1: something that is kind of much smaller even than your
Speaker 1: regular professional life or regular everyday life. That huge difference
Speaker 1: in scales between the banality of what will I make
Speaker 1: for breakfast and how will it be until the peak hits.
Speaker 1: I think that's something Boccaccio captures quite well, and that's
Speaker 1: something that the pathos of the stories, which are kind
Speaker 1: of charming and funny but also often profoundly sad. And
Speaker 1: this is very quickly developed, rapidly ending way, because there's
Speaker 1: something about the stories that also captures the shortness of
Speaker 1: every person's life and also kind of how easily a
Speaker 1: life can be turned into a twist in a tail.
Speaker 1: Then will then take you through maybe ten minutes of quarantine.
Speaker 1: Marjor you said that as a humanist, you were asking yourself,
Speaker 1: you know, what do we have to contribute? And seems
Speaker 1: to me the answer is a whole lot, because it's
Speaker 1: humanists who are interested in how we process our experiences. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: what writers or ideas are are helping you to process
Speaker 1: the strange experiences that we're in now. Well, one thing
Speaker 1: I've been thinking about a lot is the work of
Speaker 1: Vassily Grossman, who is a relatively lesser known Russian author
Speaker 1: who lived in the time of the Soviet period, was
Speaker 1: then exiled to Armenia because the Soviet government at first
Speaker 1: really liked his novels and then suddenly turned against them.
Speaker 1: And a lot of what he tries to write about
Speaker 1: is kind of experiences of war in siege. I mean,
Speaker 1: his big novel Stalingrad is about the Siege of Stalingrad,
Speaker 1: and here again it's all about kind of different temporalities
Speaker 1: coming together, kind of the temporality of waiting for the
Speaker 1: Germans to come in the Sigi of Stalingrad, and then
Speaker 1: the rapidity with which everybody in the novel spoiler alert
Speaker 1: kind of rapidly dies in the siege. And he has
Speaker 1: that amazing book called Everything Flows, which is about a
Speaker 1: man who comes back from Goula to his home village,
Speaker 1: and is this encounter between a man who has experienced
Speaker 1: something unimaginable for over a decade and is suddenly back
Speaker 1: in a town that is, on the one hand, exactly
Speaker 1: the way it used to be and on the other hand,
Speaker 1: completely different, and he can't figure out how to re
Speaker 1: enter it. And I've been thinking about those books in
Speaker 1: part because of the question of how do you begin
Speaker 1: again and what does it mean to kind of leave
Speaker 1: the house and resume life after all of this has happened.
Speaker 1: So those are two book end ideas that you're finding there.
Speaker 1: The first is the waiting idea that we're sitting around.
Speaker 1: We know something bad is almost certainly going to happen,
Speaker 1: we know it can involve death, and we're just sitting here.
Speaker 1: The other end of the book end is what will
Speaker 1: happen afterwards? Yes, what about the in between? I think
Speaker 1: in the in between? One thing I've been thinking about
Speaker 1: as an academic and a writer is kind of how
Speaker 1: the monastic ideal of the solitary writer is such a lie.
Speaker 1: I mean, even monasteries are usually full of people. That's
Speaker 1: the point of a monasteries. You have a lot of
Speaker 1: people who have nothing else to do but pray and
Speaker 1: talk to you. And I think one thing I've been
Speaker 1: thinking about is just universities and how much as we
Speaker 1: scholars fetishize the notion of getting to go away on sabbatical,
Speaker 1: which is where COVID currently finds me, there's also the
Speaker 1: beauty of getting to go talk to people. And so
Speaker 1: many of our best ideas actually happen in conversation with
Speaker 1: people in a way that it just makes this myth
Speaker 1: of disappearing into yourself to come up with a magnum
Speaker 1: opus seem all the more like a kind of romantic
Speaker 1: individualists mirage. And the other thing I've been thinking about
Speaker 1: is just the realist novel in its capacity to think
Speaker 1: about the every day and make us notice the every day.
Speaker 1: I think it's no accident that we're all reading very
Speaker 1: long novels, or at least everybody I know one has
Speaker 1: been reading very long novels. And it's not just to
Speaker 1: pass the time, which is why novels used to be
Speaker 1: long in the first place, back in the day, because
Speaker 1: you had to go off into the countryside and there
Speaker 1: would be winter, there would be only one neighbor to
Speaker 1: talk to a horse right away, So what were you
Speaker 1: going to do? You're going to read the long Dickens novel,
Speaker 1: but there's also something about them that celebrates that day
Speaker 1: lead us, and sometimes, as Inflabet is really pessimistic about
Speaker 1: it and treats it as this thing that will eventually
Speaker 1: grind you down, but also kind of makes you realize
Speaker 1: that most of your life does actually happen within your
Speaker 1: house in a certain sense, and the people whom you
Speaker 1: touch most intimately are often to people whom you live with.
Speaker 1: Anything in that sense, the genre is like the poem
Speaker 1: or the novel that could have tried to get you
Speaker 1: back into that place are kind of precious in a
Speaker 1: very different way because rather than kind of getting us
Speaker 1: back into this place of contemplation, they kind of accompany
Speaker 1: us in what has become constant contemplation of the living
Speaker 1: room and then the kitchen and the living room. Again.
Speaker 1: That's super interesting to me because my instinct before you
Speaker 1: said that was sort of like the point that you
Speaker 1: were initially making, I think, in part to disparage it,
Speaker 1: namely that one reason we might feel able to take
Speaker 1: on long novels is that the pace of our lives
Speaker 1: feels different. But I think you were saying sort of
Speaker 1: the opposite. I think you were saying that that's not
Speaker 1: what's going on that it's really has to do more
Speaker 1: with the idea of a novel about our inner worlds
Speaker 1: and our inner lives corresponds to the fact that we
Speaker 1: are stuck in our rooms. Yeah, no, I think that's
Speaker 1: exactly right. And in that sense it's also making me
Speaker 1: appreciate at least how much Beckett is engaged with realism
Speaker 1: in a very serious way. Kind for all is absurdity,
Speaker 1: and absurdism is actually just like the slowing down of realism.
Speaker 1: It was ultimate degree. When you think about the Beckett
Speaker 1: of the long novels, which are all about a person
Speaker 1: slowly losing mobility. There's Molloy, where Malloy initially as a
Speaker 1: bike and then he loses the bike, and then he
Speaker 1: goes lame in one foot, then then in both feet,
Speaker 1: and by the end of the novel he's just a
Speaker 1: crawling somewhere, sort of forgetting where it was he was
Speaker 1: crawling to in the first place. And then Malone Dies,
Speaker 1: which is about a character who may or may not
Speaker 1: be related to the characters of Molloy lying in bed, dying,
Speaker 1: trying to write his diary of being stuck in this room,
Speaker 1: occasionally getting food, and he keeps dropping his pencil. So
Speaker 1: a lot of the novel is just about like I
Speaker 1: found my pencil again. It has been two weeks since
Speaker 1: I have seen my pencil. Pure in is again, so
Speaker 1: I will write about the last two weeks. You make
Speaker 1: it seem so thrilling. It's fascinating, Marta. What about escapism
Speaker 1: and the novel? One of the experiences that most of
Speaker 1: us have when reading novels is to not be where
Speaker 1: we are. It seems especially valuable when you can't get
Speaker 1: out of the place where you, in fact are. Are
Speaker 1: there any escapist novels that seem to you particularly suitable
Speaker 1: to the moment. Well, I think it depends to me
Speaker 1: on what you mean by escapism, because I often find
Speaker 1: that what I initially think of escapism is actually something
Speaker 1: like a parallax, meaning it doesn't so much get me
Speaker 1: out of reality that it transposes it by a couple
Speaker 1: of degrees, so I can think about it a little
Speaker 1: bit more freely, which is what daydreaming off it is fundamentally.
Speaker 1: And I when we daydream, it's not like we're coming
Speaker 1: up with something from scratch, like what would that even mean?
Speaker 1: Is that we're trying to imagine a version of the
Speaker 1: people we know in the lives we go in a
Speaker 1: different country, or from a different perspective, or with a
Speaker 1: slightly different balance of power. When COVID first hit, I
Speaker 1: found myself obsessively thinking about the zombie movies of Roberto,
Speaker 1: particularly the one that takes place in the super market,
Speaker 1: Dawn of the Dead, which is all about kind of
Speaker 1: the fascination of going into the supermarket and being like, oh,
Speaker 1: I could survive here forever if I could only give
Speaker 1: the zombies out. And then they do give the zombies out,
Speaker 1: and then they collapse because they can't agree with each other.
Speaker 1: And I think it's not accidental that, like a lot
Speaker 1: of other people I know, we're looking to the dystopian
Speaker 1: literature of surviving and scarce resources. Like most of the
Speaker 1: children I know and I've been hearing about during the
Speaker 1: epidemic have been making a little self isolation forts in
Speaker 1: the living room, which is sort of adorable. And you
Speaker 1: would think they would be doing something else, like imagining,
Speaker 1: like I don't know, like huge villas or world travel,
Speaker 1: but no, it's always like I am in this timy place.
Speaker 1: We have three pieces of bread, let's share them together.
Speaker 1: I love that zombie movies come to your mind as
Speaker 1: a motive escapism. My instinctive reaction to that is to
Speaker 1: say that, yes, I recognize the form of escapism that
Speaker 1: just changes things by a few degrees. And I also
Speaker 1: identify that very much with science fiction, as the genre
Speaker 1: where you just tweak a few a few assumptions and
Speaker 1: you get something different out of it. What about the
Speaker 1: form of escapism though, that, at least on the surface,
Speaker 1: isn't just tweak a few things, but is move yourself
Speaker 1: to an entirely different environment. I mean the sort of
Speaker 1: radical escapism. I mean, so for me, if I am
Speaker 1: at my lowest point, if I open Conan Doyle, you know,
Speaker 1: and I'm at two twenty one B Baker Street, I
Speaker 1: am instantaneously in escape. And that's not because my life
Speaker 1: is just a few twists and turns away from those
Speaker 1: of Holmes and Watson. It's that's so radically disjunct from
Speaker 1: my world. And that's a different form I think of
Speaker 1: escapism where you literally want to just get out of
Speaker 1: your head. I don't want to think about what's going on.
Speaker 1: I want to think about something completely different right now.
Speaker 1: Not going to psychoanalyze pattern, but I'm very tempted too.
Speaker 1: Oh go for it. No, just in the sense that
Speaker 1: could of the crime narrative and the clue narratives, also
Speaker 1: the fundamental form of imagine control, of imagining that the
Speaker 1: world is actually legible, and if you only look for
Speaker 1: enough clues and put them together, it's long going to
Speaker 1: be okay, and everything's going to be clear again. You
Speaker 1: can send me a bill. I mean, that's a great
Speaker 1: psychomanalytic insight of why I love mystery novels. They embody
Speaker 1: the fantasy of putting it all together and making sense
Speaker 1: of it and then being in control again. We'll be
Speaker 1: back in just a moment. Magical realism got The first
Speaker 1: Corona shout out has to have been within a couple
Speaker 1: of days of people starting to talk about sociation that
Speaker 1: everyone was saying love in the time of Corona, Love
Speaker 1: and the time of Corona. And I remember the first
Speaker 1: person who texted that to me. I thought, oh my god,
Speaker 1: this person is the cleverest person I've ever met, And
Speaker 1: then very quickly I realized that, you know, the hive
Speaker 1: mind had thought of this. And I don't know if
Speaker 1: anyone's actually out there reading Marquez now, but there is
Speaker 1: something about the kind of slowing of pace in magical realism,
Speaker 1: and something about the slight tweaks to the world that
Speaker 1: does seem just almost intuitively appropriate for the moment, right.
Speaker 1: And it's also funny because put the question that collected
Speaker 1: and magical vitalism is also interesting because on the one
Speaker 1: hand it's about the individual author's imagination. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: it's about juxtaposing certain traditions that are non imperialist Western
Speaker 1: traditions and bringing them into the world of the novel,
Speaker 1: kind of showing that the novel doesn't have to be
Speaker 1: realist in the sense that's the nineteenth century British and
Speaker 1: French novel imagine it to be. And how does that
Speaker 1: angle kick in here? Because I have this instinct that
Speaker 1: one of the weirdest things about COVID is that people
Speaker 1: in broadly speaking, the rich West or North, or call
Speaker 1: it whatever you wish, are accustomed in our era to
Speaker 1: thinking of pandemics as things that happen all the time
Speaker 1: to other people Zeka in Latin America, or Ebola in Africa,
Speaker 1: or earlier versions of stars in China. So if you
Speaker 1: think of Marquez or something like that, you're thinking of
Speaker 1: again non Western quote unquote literature as the more contemporary
Speaker 1: literature of pandemic. You're talking about it in terms of
Speaker 1: past and present and future. Is always fascinating to me,
Speaker 1: in part because like I don't quite identify with that
Speaker 1: Western subjectivity I guess as a Polish person, and because
Speaker 1: part of my impetus for moving to the United States
Speaker 1: those fifteen years ago now was because I kind of
Speaker 1: wanted to live in the future. I didn't want to
Speaker 1: wait until gay rights were okay at some point in
Speaker 1: the future in Poland, so I thought I could could
Speaker 1: have jumped a decade. And that's how it felt at first.
Speaker 1: And how does it feel now, especially with reference to
Speaker 1: the pandemic. Is it if there's a sort of flattening
Speaker 1: we're all sort of in the same situation. Yes, And
Speaker 1: I think there's a kind of big difference in kind
Speaker 1: of what kinds of memories to spring back, because my
Speaker 1: family in Poland, I find myself talking to them a
Speaker 1: lot about my grandmother's memories of the war, which, for
Speaker 1: her and for a lot of the people I know
Speaker 1: who were the people survived, was all about trying to
Speaker 1: wait it out and occasionally having something very dramatic happened,
Speaker 1: which would become the story that you told to people
Speaker 1: that most of the time you were just kind of
Speaker 1: trying to be in the potato field when the planes
Speaker 1: came and not to be seen. Yes, I think it's
Speaker 1: weird and interesting what kinds of transgenerational memories that brings up,
Speaker 1: and with parts of my heritage, it makes me feel
Speaker 1: close to because in some senses it's been making me
Speaker 1: feel more connected to a certain part of my Eastern
Speaker 1: Europeanist that I have been in a while. It is
Speaker 1: really really interesting that the experience of waiting is a
Speaker 1: common thread. You know, we're waiting for something and we're
Speaker 1: sort of hoping to hoping to get through it to
Speaker 1: the other side. Yeah, Kamu is my last topic to
Speaker 1: bring up. I mean, I think then we've hit all
Speaker 1: the big three of the on a literature discussion. Have
Speaker 1: you heard or read anything or thought of anything around
Speaker 1: the Kamu that was a value or of interest. I
Speaker 1: think I've been thinking about Mu in great part in
Speaker 1: relation to the notion of the plague is a time
Speaker 1: of trial, meaning kind of people's real character comes out
Speaker 1: and what it means for that to be quote unquote
Speaker 1: your real character like. Emergencies certainly bring to the foreground
Speaker 1: certain parts of ourselves, and they're valuable parts of ourselves,
Speaker 1: but how do they relate to the rest of reality.
Speaker 1: I've been reading in my World War Two phase of
Speaker 1: my COVID reading, I've been reading Joan Juno's Occupation Journal.
Speaker 1: He's a French novelist. It's a journal from the occupation
Speaker 1: of France by the Germans, which is coming out in
Speaker 1: its first English translation, and one of the things he
Speaker 1: meditates about is kind of what those situations of emergency
Speaker 1: due to people. And he says, there are some people
Speaker 1: who think they're really strong, and then the occupation shows
Speaker 1: them to be weak. And there are people who have
Speaker 1: always imagined themselves to be weak, but a situation of
Speaker 1: crisis actually shows them to be unconsciously very strong. And
Speaker 1: then he says there's the third kind of person, which, surprise, surprise,
Speaker 1: is most valuable of all, which is stay true to
Speaker 1: themselves and who are able to act in a crisis
Speaker 1: the way they would in an everyday situation. And that's
Speaker 1: another thing I guess I've been wondering about, kind of
Speaker 1: in relation to the kind of existentialist view of COVID,
Speaker 1: which is kind of what are we to do with
Speaker 1: what it makes of us? And how do we, on
Speaker 1: the one hand, kind of allow ourselves to think seriously
Speaker 1: about the things it forces us to think about, like
Speaker 1: socio economic inequality, like our own lives, our own choices,
Speaker 1: without succumbing to the fallacy of kind. Everything I think
Speaker 1: in a period of isolation is true, or everything I
Speaker 1: do in this moment is the essential part of me,
Speaker 1: and probably those answers will be different to different people. Marta,
Speaker 1: thank you very very much for the conversation. I really
Speaker 1: I learned a huge amount. As always, it's so fun
Speaker 1: to talk to you. My pleasure. Listening to Marta really
Speaker 1: brought home to me two pretty different aspects of our
Speaker 1: inner experiences of sitting at home and reading books during Corona.
Speaker 1: On the one hand, that there's the individual experience. Marta
Speaker 1: talked about being Polish coming to the United States and
Speaker 1: how that affects her experiences in engaging with literature and
Speaker 1: with ideas. Each of us has our own individual path
Speaker 1: to follow, and indeed, our conversation about existentialism puts the
Speaker 1: individual's judgment and the individual's ability to make a choice
Speaker 1: front and center. In our experiences. Yet at the same time,
Speaker 1: Marta also brought home that there's a universal collective experience
Speaker 1: they were undergoing in relation to the coronavirus, and literature
Speaker 1: is a mechanism whereby we collectively process and think about experience.
Speaker 1: Books are meant to be read by more than one person.
Speaker 1: There are ways of engaging the world that are shared
Speaker 1: at least between the writer and the reader, and ideally
Speaker 1: of many more people as well. Our collective life experiences
Speaker 1: are being shaped by Corona. We're alone, but we're alone
Speaker 1: together until the next time I speak to you. Be careful,
Speaker 1: be safe, and be well. Deep background is brought to
Speaker 1: you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Cott,
Speaker 1: with research help from zooe Wynn. Mastering is by Jason
Speaker 1: Gambrel and Martin Gonzalez. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our
Speaker 1: theme music is composed by Luis Gera special thanks to
Speaker 1: the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg and Mia Lobel.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. I also write a regular column for
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com.
Speaker 1: Slash Feldman. To discus Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go
Speaker 1: to bloomberg dot com slash podcasts. You can follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is deep background