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Overwhelming the Medium: Fiction and the Trauma of Pandemic Influenza in 1918

Few illness narratives have been published about the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic. This essay links this silence to representational problems posed by mass trauma that happened before response to the Holocaust began our present era of attention to the narrative testimonies of suffering. In a pandemic, the collective replaces the individual as protagonist, and the health of the public takes precedence over the particular and subjective. History turns to statistics. Beginning with Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider, her novella about her experience during the pandemic, and speculating on the entanglement of Virginia Woolf's accounts of influenza with Porter's strategies for recounting her sickness, the essay then examines two 2006 novels—Thomas Mullen's The Last Town on Earth, and Myla Goldberg's Wickett's Remedy—to show how narrative representations of the 1918 flu grapple with recounting the experience of sickness, a struggle repeatedly troped as waking from and remembering a nightmarish sleep. The value of these fictional accounts lies less in their historical accuracy than in the attention they draw to the representational demands that pandemic disease makes as it threatens to overwhelm the narrative medium.