Hello, welcome to the project, How Epidemics and which is based at the University of Oxford.
I'm Kristin Heitman. And with me today are Dornberger and Arthur Rose to talk about the nature and the power of epidemic narratives.
Dorries, professor of history and medical humanities at the University of Exeter in the U.K. She works primarily in the history of epidemics,
the politics of health and Cold War history, from the politics of epidemic management to public health systems and access to therapeutics.
Arthur is a post-doctoral research fellow in English at the University of Exeter, where he works with Lunine,
Dolezal and the Wellcome Trust funded Shame and Medicine Project and HRC r.i project Seeds of Shame and Stigma and covid-19.
He's particularly interested, interested in questions of narrative, emotion and philosophy of history and literary scholarship.
Welcome to both of you. So this interview is part of a long running conversation, primarily between Arthur and Dorothy.
I've been privileged to be part of recently about the nature of narrative and history and and now in particular about epidemics.
So like many others who've discussed epidemic narratives,
we decided to take as our jumping off point the model first broached by this story of medicine.
Charles Rosenberg, Bertha Endure. How would you characterise that model?
Industry scholarship? We tend to start by going back to the text.
So I'm going to just read, I think,
one of the potentially the most important lines from Rosenberg's piece for how we think about the model of the epidemic.
Rosenberg writes, Epidemics start at a point in time, proceed on a stage limited in space and duration,
follow a plotline of increasing and revelatory tension, move to a crisis of individual and collective character, and then drift towards closure.
Now, I think it's worth remarking on the distinction that a literary scholar would make between closure
and ending because whereas ending is when something comes to a stop and a kind of external sense,
closure is much more to do with the expectations than questions that an audience brings to a dramatic piece.
Obviously, drama and modern drama particularly is often as much about the absence of closure as it is about closure, per say.
But it's worth remembering, and I take the work of Albert Porter or Tabit as my starting point that closure is very
much about resolving your expectations and answering any as yet unanswered questions and.
What is I think, maybe support stories point about the fact that endings often don't unravel historically as neatly as Rozenberg maybe portrays them,
is that in addition to that, the reason why they don't unravel in these kind of easy ways isn't just because of the external historical factors,
but also because the people involved are often left with unresolved expectations and unresolved questions.
I think there are two things to consider here.
One is, is the point that that he makes in other other other pieces that he's written, that epidemics serve as a sampling device,
as a window into seeing things going on in society and politics and culture that we wouldn't otherwise see.
And and that is that remains, I think, a very strong point.
However, I think that this overarching narrative and imagining epidemics as a as a as a plague that that goes through acts in the particular sequence,
brings up certain issues in this case, particularly with with the ending.
And I think through this problematise the ending and how we might think about models and what models, not just the Rosenbergs,
but more in general can reveal about endings, can then help us rethink what epidemics are in the first place and how they play out.
So one of the interesting things that actually each of you said in other conversations is that the responses to Rosenberg's model,
that one has really reflect one's own priorities and so that the objections to the model tend to be in part about one's own expectations,
about what a model ought to accomplish in terms of describing what a narrative looks like and in particular, what an epidemic narrative looks like.
Do you want to comment on that a little bit?
I would like to know that into with something that Arthur just mentioned, and this is why I find our conversation so fruitful,
because there are always very constructive overlaps, but also disagreements encoded in this.
And I think that reflects our priorities from coming from our disciplines and some of our personal interests as well that are folded into this.
And I'd like to go back to to what you said earlier about modern drama and and how I find that really useful as a as a vehicle to really think about.
OK, this is this is not necessarily a model. A dramaturgy like the dramaturge itself is already problematic.
And it can be problematise in that way. And I find that useful, too,
to think about what is modern trauma to what kind of actors and tensions and and and taking a part of conventions it's working with.
And we can utilise to rethink how we tell a story and a narrative in a historical sense.
But I would also push back against this distinction between I.
I completely agree that I think the distinction between ending and closure is important.
But coming from a historical perspective, I think that they collapse into each other more easily.
And what I mean by this is that the external and the personal are not not divisive in this sense,
because the ending then what what ending might mean is,
is what you would term as closure when the says that this epidemic has ended or when a state is no longer governments are no longer invested in it,
or there's a medical research stops giving it a high priority and so on and so forth.
And that comes together with the fact that closure as such on a very personal and individual level also comes, may come.
And, you know, historically, we can see that it does come very different times for very different actors if if we want to use that term.
So there is a complexity here that that that ending as something external is very much embedded with the closure.
And there can be various expressions of this, like a commemoration of an epidemic, thinking about plate columns,
for instance, in the 18th century, that's replicate something into the past, both on a social level, on a cultural level.
It has very strong political meanings.
And and that, you know, that that is that is an act of creating that closure that that may or may not be overlapped with the ending itself.
So that's I think that's that's where my interest is coming into it,
of what is belonging to that, who's making that decision, who is propelling these endings?
Who is propelling the way that the model is, the way that the story is being told,
what kind of stories being told and who gets included into that and who doesn't?
I feel that the what kind of narratives we have to create make sense of what has happened.
And making sense is telling the story of what had gone before and how did we get to where we are right now.
So very broadly speaking, and that can be told in many ways.
It can be interpreted in many ways that the the facts and the events that are happening,
it depends on who we are looking at, what kind of actors we're taking into account.
And there can be parallel narratives going on at the same time.
But one makes, I think, particularly historical. What is important from a historical perspective is that all this narrative and the kind of
the way that we are making sense of it is bound by the sources that we use in our research.
So the documents that have been produced, the people who have, you know, whose stories we can access, and there are a lot of ways to do it.
And that that gives an explanation of the varied narratives that that are going on.
But it is bound by that by that very material side of of the of the story.
What do you see as being characteristic of.
Historical narratives differ somehow from literary ones, if they do or insofar as they do.
I mean, it's a very easy way of answering that question, which is that ultimately.
The relationship to their.
Which is to say, when you're talking about an actual epidemic, historical epidemic, you're talking about actual people who have died.
And no matter how. Responsive to an actual historical figure, a literary narrative will be the death in literature is always a fictional death.
And and I think it's partly one of the great.
Privileges of my conversation, Torah that we always.
When when I get too excited about models and narrative modes and and things like that,
she pulls me back with the fact that we're talking about real people in the world who have lived in the world,
who suffered in the world and who have died in the world. That's Ed.
It is to concede a little too much to historians, for the literary scholar to always say, well,
we just look at fiction and put up their hands and say, oh, well, you know, it's like, of course, we're not talking about the real world.
And I think that's the case for two reasons, which is that if one thinks of.
The distinction between the activity of of of of artefacts or things we study in the humanities
along the lines of a distinction that that John Guillory makes between monuments and documents,
wherein a monument may talk about an actual statue or something like that.
But it but it can equally be a novel or something, a fact in the world or something like that.
And you think about documents then is the extreme of textual apparatus that respond to that monument.
Then one can start to think about the ways that particular works, although there may be works of fiction,
have exerted their own pull and influence and and locus of gravity on the way that material historical facts have played themselves out.
And in this respect, we might return to Rozenberg and think of Rosenbergs, which is the second point that I'm making.
Rosenberg's model not simply as an explanation of epidemics, as the title of this book suggests,
but also has a particularly influential model for how people think that they need to live through an epidemic.
Now, in that sense, when a model presents the the the span of an epidemic is something that gradually unfolds
and then has a moment of crisis and then comes to a kind of point of closure or ending.
One is less likely to be sensitive to the fact that epidemics as they pulled out unfolded in historically, I've never really followed the model.
They've always been more complicated than that model allows.
I mean, one just needs to think of the Spanish influenza and the fact that there were
three waves to as a as a as a sample of why a model that is overly linear,
overly emphasising, emphasises, I believe, the traditional curve that the door,
the door sketched out for us earlier is is going to be is going to set up unreasonable expectations.
Which brings us back to this kind of question of closure as the resolution of a set of expectations.
And I would I would just add to that that this is where I think it really matters why, you know,
how we think about literary narratives and historical narratives and how we tell the stories of the past or how we we think about dramaturgy models,
because this is you know, it makes for a very interesting academic conversation.
As Arthur and I have know, there's a reason why we've been we've been having these conversations or for for a while now.
But there is a real stake in this. And just, you know, picking up on what what Arthur was saying,
that that the way that we perceive the epidemic narrative, the way that we perceive these models,
maybe maybe epidemiological models, you know,
that that get folded into this story or the or the narratives that people tell about their own individual illness, which may cause frustrations.
I've had covid, you know, why am I still struggling with this? It's supposed to be over.
And but then, you know, it has also other real stakes.
And, you know, what do we understand as an ending?
What how do we construct that closure if the ending is no more cases or very little cases or not enough cases to create a public health concern?
You know, if that is where where an epidemic ends, then what happens to the people who are not experiencing it on that timeline?
What happens to the if that's that's if we're following that narrative as a as a
government or as a world international organisation or as a narrower community,
you know, what is that? What is the work that's that the narrative is doing?
And I think we need to be just conscious of that, that there is it is doing very, very real and palpable work.
And in how we're drawing imagined narratives,
may that be historical or fictional of of past epidemics and how we're using that to to make sense of what's going on right now.
And it's just that that action that I think it needs to be we need to be aware that that is part of what we're doing.
We are telling it's not an objective thing that we're living through that plays out in a certain way.
We are participating and creating that story. I hope this conversation can continue for a very long time.
It's been very interesting and a lot of fun just to listen to the two of you exchange insights and opinions.
And I I hope to see more of it in the future. So thank you both very much.