Narratives in Pandemic Time: Stories as “a Possession for all Time”

Abstract

This paper investigates the links between some representations of the Covid pandemic and the books read in Italy during the first lockdown in 2020. First, I will argue that the choice of some titles that occupied the bestseller list in that period (such as Spillover by D. Quammen, Blindness by J. Saramago, or The Plague by A. Camus) can be traced back to some semiotic strategies helpful in limiting the state of uncertainty and anxiety in a pandemic context.
Second, it will be shown that uncertainty and anxiety are addressed through two strategies made possible by books: on the one hand, the historiographical strategy, aiming to limit uncertainty through a series of causal concatenations that reconstruct the present from the past; on the other hand, the exotopical strategy that stabilizes the anxiety about the present by providing closure in the possible worlds of the fictional narratives.
Then these strategies will be analyzed in their historicity and related to the uses of literature in a time of the pandemic. Finally, the books read during the lockdown will be compared with other famous cases in the pandemic literature, such as History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides and The Decameron by Boccaccio. The conclusion will be that we are dealing with a cultural topos historically honed through the practices, useful if necessary to reconstruct the present and free us from the anxiety of the future.