Abstract:
Catastrophes always occur without the consent of any worldly being, do the annihilation and leave the human kind in bewilderment. They create uncertainties and spread the feeling of helplessness, hopelessness, stress, anxiety, fear and other different kinds of apprehensions. Post catastrophic phase is a more serious concern in which most of the survivors of catastrophes become unable to sort out for the rest of their lives. All the calamities (natural and manmade) are recounted in the literature from time to time. Literature from Greeks to present times portrays the real essence of these cataclysms and also their causes and ramifications across the genres. It also depicts that human beings should remain alert about the disasters and contemplate critically to minimize the risk of all the calamities. The present paper endeavours to delineate some of the literary texts that describe the natural adversities like plague, earthquake, tempest, hurricane, cyclone etc. Suffering, trauma, fear, confusion, guilt, anguish, bizarreness etc. are the common leitmotifs of such texts. These texts contribute a lot to create a mutual platform under which the writers highlight all the concerns and complications of the catastrophe that the populace faces. Some of these literary texts describe the precautionary measures taken during the tough times of calamities and also predict future adversities and epidemics too.
Key Words: Catastrophe, Ramification, Anxiety, Suffering, Trauma,
Introduction:
Catastrophe is a common phenomenon that the world has witnessed from antiquity. They perform a definite role in the framework of the world. Every year, the world comes across one or the other catastrophe whether natural or manmade. Some of them have a very short span of time and are not hazardous too while some others encompass for years together and prove to be more disparaging for the whole cosmos. In the latter case, science and technology of the epoch also fail and become destitute to cope with such cataclysms very immediately. It is the human tendency to have control over everything that comes in its way but due to the limited resources, the whole universe bows before the Natural Will. These catastrophes always give a very tough time for everyone–an ordinary man or government agency. In such circumstances, some lose the battle of their life while others struggle to manage. The ramifications label a question mark on the development of a nation and the mind set up of the masses. It gives birth to myriad ailments. Scientists and other intellectuals work hard to clutch it as soon as possible. Literary figures across the globe also come up with their write ups and describe numerous debacles. These literary documents provide a detailed description of the incidents and share their ideas to deal and control such annihilations. It is the literature that assists the people at all the junctures (ups and downs) and across the times as well.
Literature humanizes the humans and contributes to the backup of every phase and testimony. It portrays the real perception of humanity. It keeps its vigil on every single aspect and whatever happens in the society is recorded in all the possible angles. Literature from Greek’s till present times has shared the views about almost all the epidemics and catastrophes. There are some classical texts too which even predict these concerns as well. All the famous authors of ancient Greek and Roman literature from Homer to Virgil delineated about all the calamities that they had come across. The ancient Greeks and Romans had witnessed both types of catastrophes and epidemics like plague, war, drought, earthquake, volcanic eruption, tsunami, flood, hurricane, famine that affected thousands of people, numerous cites and killed countless citizens. In the contemporary epoch, several texts are available related to catastrophes and epidemics. There is hardly any untoward about which writers have not shared their valuable insights.
Plague:
Homer is famous for his classical text Iliad that begins with an epidemic of plague. The plague afflicts Greek soldiers. It was due to this endemic a paradigm shift was created in the text and also in the minds of the readers. It altered the tone and setting of the text too. The epic produces a kind of narrative framework of catastrophe. “It was / the son of Jove and Leto; he was angry with the king and sent a pestilence upon the host to plague the people . . .” (1. 7-9). Oedipus Rex initiates with this endemic that acts as a ghost throughout the drama. It ended with the contriteness of the protagonist. Sophocles exemplifies the repercussions of plague in different places in the text as, “a blight on wives in travail” (26), “earth her gracious fruits denies” (151) and “women wail in barren throes” (215). Plagues that affected the world at numerous times like the plague of Athena, Bubonic plague, Florida plague, plague of Justinian (Egypt) are described in numerous literary texts. Ralph Major in his book, Fatal Partners, War and Disease delineates that Thucydides’ description of Athenian plague is unmatched in the whole literature. His description became the base for further writing about the plague. Lucretius described it in the Latin poem, “On the Nature of Things” by translating Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Procopius illustrated the Justinian plague that began in Egypt and reached Constantinople. It became the cause of infinite deaths. Creighton says that this pandemic is one of the reasons for the dark ages. Boccaccio’s Decameron set during the Black Death. Some men and women, in order to save themselves from being infected, stayed in a sequestered lodge. To spend time they narrated stories to each other. These one hundred tales were tragic as well as comic in their nature. In Pardoner's Tale, Chaucer referred to one of the pestilences that occurred during his lifetime from 1348-1376, but some of the critics are of the opinion that he had talked about Black Death of 1348. Chaucer opines about it as:
An unseen thief, called Death, came stalking by,
Who hereabouts makes all the people die,
And with his spear he dove his heart in two
And went his way and made no more ado.
He's slain a thousand with this pestilence (389- 93).
Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist and Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Due Preparations for the Plague, as Well for Soul as Body and Albert Camus’ The Plague were written about the same syndrome. Journal of the Plague Year fictionalized London life during the 1665-66 plague. Defoe was a kid when the pestilence hit London. He provides month wise statistics of deaths in this text. He gives the concept of home quarantine and other precautionary measures that should be taken during the time of epidemic like social distancing, storing essential commodities, proper discarding of things, use of sanitizers etc in Due Preparations for the Plague. A family craves to safeguard themselves from getting infected remains indoors for more than five months. In some of the texts, this ailment acted as a metaphor of human conditions especially pain, suffering, absurdity, death and punishment.
When plague spread, no medicine could help, and no one could stop it from striking; the only way to escape was to avoid contact with infected persons and contaminated objects. . . . the plague was viewed as one of God’s punishments for sins, so the frightening description of its spread was interpreted as a warning to the Israelites to behave morally. This causal relationship between plague and sin is seen also in Greek literary texts, such as Homer’s Iliad and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. (Riva et al. 1753)
Marry Shelly’s novel The Last Man describes the plague and prophesies the future for the late 21st century. The plague emerges mysteriously and Anne K. Mellor says that it became difficult to comprehend the origin, cause and remedy for it.
Tempest, Tsunami and Cyclone:
Apart from plague, literature has illustrated other natural calamities in all its genres. Numerous pieces of literature have been set in the seas, ships, islands or on the shores of the sea. There are illustrations of catastrophes–Tempest, Tsunami and Cyclone–in some of the popular works of literature like Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Merchant of Venice, S. T. Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner, Lloyd Parry’s Ghosts of Tsunami, Gretel Ehrlich’s Facing the Wave, Richard Lewis’ The Killing Sea etc. In the Greek epic of Odyssey, Odysseus/Ulysses encountered the disaster in the sea more than five times with his companions. All his associates in twelve ships lost their lives in the sea. He returned unaccompanied back to Ithaca. Ulysses describes the scene of it as:
. . . My men fell overboard
and rode atop the waves, like cormorants,
around our blackened ship, because the god
had robbed them of their chance to get back home (12.546-549)
The dramatization of the tempest by Shakespeare is somewhat different from Homer. In Tempest, he depicts that it engulfs everyone that strikes it whether a well off or a deprived one and different people react differently to natural calamities. The playwright makes the realization of sins that some characters like Antony and King of Naples, Alonso had committed by the calamity of the tempest. The adversity of Merchant of Venice alters the fortune of some characters. These calamities sometimes turn the board of someone upside down too.
Hurricane and Volcanic Eruption:
It is the fear of disasters that makes the life of humans struggling one. The continuous struggle makes the life of the common masses humdrum and accelerates their other problems as well. These problems became difficult to handle. A Caribbean island, Montserrat has experienced several natural calamities that affect the island very badly. In 1989, Montserrat was smashed by a devastating Hurricane called ‘Hugo’ that damaged almost all the structures of the island and its loss was about three hundred million dollars. It resulted in the collection of poetry, Horrors of a Hurricane produced by a group of writers called ‘Maroon’. The leitmotif of this publication was to depict the nature of Hugo Hurricane at all levels and how this catastrophe impacted the imagination of the masses. This collection had a contribution of more than thirty poets of the island. It provided the notion of unity in the whole island and kept them alert for future calamities. Hugo versus Montserrat and Letter from Ulster and the Hugo Poems were the other two collections that were related to this hurricane. This group of writers came up with other collections like Volcano Song Eruption: Montserrat versus Volcano and Hope. These collections opine about the calamity of volcanic eruption and the suffering and agony that these people underwent during that tough epoch. These writers provide the lesson of optimism in their works.
Erik Larson’s contribution is unmatchable in the field of disaster narratives. He has written several texts in which he dealt with natural cataclysms and mass deaths in particular. Isacc’s Storm: A Man, A Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History (1999), Thunderstruck (2006) are his two texts that deal with the same hurricane that hit Galveston in 1900. Isacc’s Storm portrays Isaac Cline’s (popular meteorologist of Taxes) magnificent role during the calamity of Galveston. There were thousands of deaths and half of the island was annihilated. The islanders did their best in rebuilding their island but they could not bring back the former charm and beauty of it.
Earthquake:
The most frequent and disparaging natural disaster is an earthquake that has a high ratio of casualties. After the Quake (2000) by Haruki Murakami is a collection of short stories about the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan. The author describes the pain and suffering of the populace. The bizarreness of the whole area is portrayed very minutely through different characters of these short stories. Death is the recurrent theme of this collection. The usage of symbols viz mysterious package, bonfire, frog, worm etc. also replicates the wilderness made by the earthquake. The Great Quake (2017) of Henry Fountain records the great earthquake of America of 1964. This book provides a detailed narrative of three regions of America like Anchorage, Valdez, and Chenega. It narrates the phatic accounts about the brutal forces of nature.
The earthquake known as Sichuan or Wenchuan earthquake hit China in May 2008. In this seismic activity, almost seventy thousand lives were lost, more than three lakh seventy thousand were injured and around twenty thousand were missing. The contemporary writers of China, especially poets, began to upload their verses related to this catastrophe on the internet, before their write ups circulated throughout the county in the print form. This poetry is emotionally driven and represents the mental anguish and traumatic experience of the Chinese nation. It acted as a catharsis. This literature provided a kind of shock therapy to those who were impacted by the devastation. “. . . the diversity and numbers of people writing poems in response to the earthquake . . . and the emotional effects of these poems, "consoling those who lost relatives in the disaster, inspiring those helping in rescue efforts, and eulogizing the fortitude shown by Chinese people in times of great calamity. Some exclaimed ‘the entire population writes poetry’” (Inwood 934). It created the collective and creative consciousness even among the common masses of China. Like Maroon they too shared the concept of unity in their stanzas.
It is not only English literature that sheds light on different catastrophes especially natural calamities but there are numerous schools of thought and several philosophies that briefs about the cataclysms. In the view of religion, disasters are divine punishments and crave to bring human beings to the right track. There are references to numerous natural adversities like flood, plague, earthquake, drought in the religious scriptures of the world. These scriptures also delineate man made catastrophes like war as well.
Albrecht von Haller, a Swiss physiologist, biographer and poet addressed hundreds of letters to eminent writers and scholars of the different countries of the world related to the natural catastrophes. In his correspondences, he delineates about different reasons and ramifications of several natural adversities viz earthquake, famine, flood, plague, and other cattle diseases. He provided the theological underpinning of these calamities and interprets them in the essence of religiosity. It was because of his good official links and direct contacts, he became able to get the exact and clear details of the diseases. Haller in one of his letters addressed to Charles Bonnet, writes that we do not have such a rationale to explain disasters like earthquakes and the cause behind their occurrence. An extract from one of the letters of Haller is quoted in Martin Stuber paper as:
It is Almighty God, who destroys whole empires with earthquakes, who commands the seas to flood the land, drowning thousands of mortal souls in a moment, who sends infectious diseases from which a third of the population may perish . . . it is not by chance or so-called laws of nature but by the will of God, who, in his infinite wisdom, directly punishes his people that they may know their one true king. (174)
Everyone including science and technology becomes helpless during the epochs of uncertainty especially of natural adversities. It becomes very much difficult to cope with these cataclysms very quickly. Some illustrations are different plagues, other epidemics and Corona Viruses of 2019-20. Covid-19 shattered the economy across the globe and forced the whole world to implement lockdown worldwide. It is due to its contamination nations altered into quarantine centres and lazarettos. There are a few literary texts that predict such types of pandemics. Sylvia Browne’s End of Days published in 2008 prophesies about an influenza that will spread across the globe in 2020 and affect the respiratory system of human beings. This book envisages several other things too. She opines as “In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely” (117).
Conclusion:
There is no domain from unconsciousness to the collective consciousness, private to social life, happiness to agony, harmony to dissonance, aristocracy to peasantry etc. which literature has not explicated in an elaborative fashion. Its top most priority remains to provide the best to the society in every possible way and the readers have to understand all the moral ethics and try to implement them. The narratives of catastrophes also expound to remain united during the times of calamities as they occur without any intimacy. Everyone must aid others in such circumstances without any bias and should spread love and care with the sufferers rather than neglect and make them feel as others. It is also important to analyze critically all the previous catastrophes and try to minimize its effects in the future. It is better to generate awareness before such occurrences rather than over burden during the actual time of cataclysms and this can be done by the literature very easily.
References:
- Browne, Sylvia. End of Days. Dutton, 2008.
- Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Tale of Pardoner.” Translated by L. D. Benson. The President and Fellows of Harvard College, Jan. 2006.
- Homer. Illiad. Translated by Ian Johnston, Vancouver Island University. Revised ed., Apr. 2010.
- ---. Odyssey. Translated by Ian Johnston, Vancouver Island University. Revised ed., 2019.
- Inwood, Heather. “Multimedia Quake Poetry: Convergence Culture after the Sichuan Earthquake.” Cambridge U P, no. 208, Dec. 2011, pp. 932-950. JSTOR
- Riva, Michele Augusto et al. “Pandemic Fear and Literature: Observations from Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague.” Emerging Infectious Diseases, vol. 20, no. 10, Oct. 2014, pp. 1753-57,
- Sophocles. Oedipus the King. Translated by Ian Johnston. Malaspina University Nanaimo. Revised ed., Aug. 2004.
- Stuber, Martin. “Divine Punishment or Object of Research? The Resonance of Earthquakes, Floods, Epidemics and Famine in the Correspondence Network of Albrecht von Haller.” White Horse Press, vol. 9, no. 2, May 2003, pp. 173-193. JSTOR