Delphi is a Covid novel. We’ve read earlier novels that use Covid as part of the contextualizing furniture. Ali Smith’s Summer and Companion Piece both allude to the pandemic, but neither is what I would describe as a Covid novel because neither treats Covid as central to the story. But with novels like Sarah Moss’s The Fell and now, with Clare Pollard’s Delphi, we find characters for whom Covid is the central concern, dominating their thoughts, motivating their (in)actions, and determining how they interact (or don’t) with other characters. If novelists continue to investigate the Covid experience like this, we may have to create a new category of genre fiction. Sci-fi, Romance, Mystery, Plague.
For me, and maybe for many other readers, the pressing question is: do we need such a genre? After two and half years of living this shit, do we want it represented to us in the fiction we read? Maybe it’s time for some escapism.
I have to confess that almost the instant we went into lockdown I developed a plague reading list, reasoning that the cultural traces of past experience might help us to reckon with our own. I also considered that these might inspire people like myself to pay it forward, creating an account of our experience for future reference. In short order, I had enough selections for a syllabus: Plague Lit 101. My imagined course would include readings from The Decameron, selections from Pepys’s 1665 diary entries, Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Edgar Allen Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Albert Camus’s The Plague, Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, José Saramago’s Blindness, The Children of Men by P. D. James, Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice, The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue. I cobble together enough material to fuel a decent intro course but when I set it against the vast output that comprises our literary canon, I find that it is a minuscule collection. I’m hard pressed to develop a reading list for a follow-up course. In the grand panoply of literary concerns, plague falls near the bottom of the heap, just above novels about zombie clowns.
In her book, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, Laura Spinney notes a dearth of books on the Spanish Flu that supports my observation about the literary treatment of plague. She observes that the WorldCat lists approximately 80,000 titles in 40 languages on World War I but only 400 titles in 5 languages on the Spanish Flu. Two hundred books on the war for every one book on the Spanish Flu. This is striking for the fact that, while these two events were contemporaneous, the Spanish Flu was the more deadly.
Previously, in connection with this observation, I have mentioned Jan Assman’s distinction between communicative and cultural memory to account for the marked disparity in our treatment of the two events. Communicative memory is the transmission of stories within a family from one generation to the next. Typically, these memories last about 80 years, then fade as those with personal experience of the remembered event die. By contrast, cultural memories are more durable, especially if personal experience is translated into a mythic narrative of national or ethnic importance. It seems we consign pandemics to communicative memory, fragmenting our shared experience and treating it as a familial narrative to be transmitted from one generation to the next. After a couple generations, members of the family lose interest and memory of the health crisis fades like morning mist. Meanwhile, larger political and social institutions make intentional efforts to memorialize losses to military conflict. Think, for example, of the liturgy that has arisen around Remembrance Day with the routine recitation of John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” and the bugle call of Reveille. Maybe what this points to, more than anything else, is that over time we lose the sense of pandemic as a shared experience; the social dimension vanishes and all that remains to us is our private experience of loss.
In March of 2020, when we first went into lockdown, I read all of the 1665 entries from Samuel Pepys’s diary, the entries that document direct experience of the Bubonic plague outbreak in London. I noted uncanny parallels to our own experience and realized that this kind of documentation has much to teach us. By syllogism, I reasoned, those who follow us will benefit from our documentation of the Covid-19 experience. Inspired by Pepys, I assiduously documented my experience. Just as Pepys noted the regular bulls which announced death tallies, so I recorded the daily public health data. I recorded developments in the news and interwove them with my personal experiences and observations, rounding it out with reflections on my psychological well being. My journaling became the raw material for a photo book in the spirit of Daniel Defoe, 2020: Journal of a Plague Year. It is my personal effort to remember and I address it principally to my descendants, whoever they may be. I began a second volume for 2021 but ran out of gas. Memory is an act of will and I have lost my will. I want to dine in crowded restaurants. I want to holiday in Mallorca. More than anything, I want to forget.
Still, I continue to read, and I have stumbled on Clare Pollard’s Delphi, and it has prompted me to revisit the question of how to sustain our will to remember. Ostensibly (but only ostensibly), Delphi reads as autobiographical fiction. The protagonist is a contract instructor teaching something vaguely classical at a post-secondary institution while working on a vaguely academic book. She lives with her husband Jason in a relationship that isn’t perfect, but isn’t horrible either, and together they have a young son Xander who may or may not be on some kind of spectrum. These days, when so many kids have their noses buried in digital devices, it’s hard to tell; and the constraints of the pandemic have only exacerbated the situation. The husband and son have remarkably classical names and that in itself should satisfy any questions we have about this as autobiographical fiction.
This family is the pandemic Everyfamily, experiencing the challenges and frustrations of life we’ve all come to know in varying degrees. There is the novelty of work-from-home protocols and online teaching conducted through Zoom and other video-conferencing technologies. Even as it points to a bright and shiny future such protocols grow tiresome and alienating. There is the tension between family members who have differing views about public health protocols. Here, Jason tends to regard such edicts merely as suggestions while our narrator is more compliant, so while Jason slips out to drink with friends, our protagonist stews at home. Then there is the pressure to join holiday gatherings of extended family, knowing full well that if you do the sensible thing and follow protocols, everyone will thing you’re an uptight prick. Finally, there is the guilt when the inevitable happens and your elderly grandmother tests positive and dies. At last, you contract it too and everything turns to shit.
It may not be a coincidence that all the fictional pandemic accounts I have read thus far come from the UK where I suspect the experience of Covid-19, at least in the early days, was more intense than we experienced in Canada. Initially, public health officials in the UK took a “herd immunity” approach to the Sars-Cov-2 virus on the twin suppositions that infection wasn’t that bad and would trigger a durable auto-immune response. There was no evidence to support either supposition and when public health officials discovered that both were false (by which time their PM had been hospitalized), authorities implemented restrictions aimed at preventing transmission of the virus. Meanwhile, here in Canada, we had taken a more cautious approach from the outset, imposing restrictions while waiting on the evidence. At the risk of making sweeping generalizations, my impression is that the early experience of Covid-19 was far less traumatic for Canadians than for Britons, and that fact plays out in our respective fictional lives. Britons have more to work out.
To her credit, Clare Pollard avoids the fiction-as-personal-therapy trap. She does this by using the pandemic as the occasion to ask a bigger question. Distilled to the fewest words possible, she wonders: What’s next? As the narrator sits at the kitchen table, writing her book, she observes: “To write anything requires this ludicrous confidence in the future—that it exists, and contains a person who might read my words with interest.” However, with restrictive protocols, she feels she is only living provisionally. She feels “this abject, poisonous need to know what’s next.” Rather than living one day to the next, she needs to know what to aim for. I call this a bigger question because it points to a concern that will persist long after we’ve set Covid-19 firmly in the past. It is the existential concern that screams at us daily as we read about a nuclear power’s aggression in Eastern Europe and as we read of wild fires raging all over the globe, rising sea levels, unprecedented floods in Pakistan and equally unprecedented droughts in the American southwest. Never has the future seemed so improbable.
With her need to know the future, the narrator twice engages the services of a Zoom tarot card reader whose statements are necessarily vague but reassuring all the same. In keeping with her anxiety for the future, each chapter of the novel takes its name from a specific practice of psychic prediction: theomancy, theia mania, haruspicy, etc. And the novel itself, named for the oracle at Delphi, calls to mind the cryptic proclamations that chastened ancient Greeks. However, the problem with foresight, as we learn from the tale of Cassandra, is that no one else wants to share in it. The narrator can ask What’s next? but the answer is for her alone. Even then, she may not understand the answer. So, yes, read Delphi. It is a good novel and worth the read. But for god’s sake, don’t read it as a lesson or a prediction or a warning. Even if there is a lesson or a prediction or a warning, you won’t care because, like me, you want to forget.