Larvatus prodeo: I advance wearing a mask. Descartes’s dictum could be the epigraph to our age. Images of doctors and nurses with their faces obscured have become the icons of our era, as evocative of viral modernity as Venetian plague masks were of early modernity. By order of the state, human contact has been reduced to a bare minimum; even when we do encounter someone while out exercising, a wry smile – equal parts complicity and suspicion – is our default mode of interaction. Paranoia and panic shopping are ‘the new normal’, ugly terms for an ugly epoch. For the first time ever, untold millions across the world are doing the same thing at the same time: staying at home. We have become our own prisoners.
If the Cartesian mask symbolizes the sudden barrier that has gone up between our minds and our bodies – between the res cogitans and the res extensa – how can culture help us come to terms with this unprecedented situation? What does it mean to cogitate in gated communities, to think and to write in enforced isolation? The obvious initial answer is that thinking is the one thing we still can do: even under quarantine, the life of the mind remains unfettered. From Boethius to Braudel, from More to Mandela, the consolations of philosophy have long proven their worth in prison conditions. ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space’, in the celebrated words of Hamlet. Perhaps such cultural precedents can help us delineate the limits of our nutshells.
Like Hamlet, however, we also have bad dreams. The grave new world outside us guarantees it: we feel the net tightening as we read the horror stories and statistics. Here, too, literature provides precedents, all those plague narratives by the likes of Defoe, Giono, Mann, Camus, or Saramago that no doubt come to all our minds. For those of us sitting in the safety of middle-class homes, though, such reflexes are accompanied by a degree of bad conscience: what of those who don’t have the luxury of leaning back and reading? What of the millions of illiterate people across the world who barely even know about the pandemic in the first place?
The question is particularly pertinent for the discipline of Comparative Literature, predicated as it is upon breaking down borders between languages and cultures. In an age in which borders have been re-erected almost overnight, how do we retain intellectual freedom of movement? In an era in which we have all been weaponized against each other, how do we avoid simply retreating to our castles and closing the drawbridge? How, in short, do we not become ever more self-centred? If we are paradoxically more connected now than ever before, Zooming towards each other from our Windows-led monads, such connectivity merely reinforces existing structures of power. In the viral-virtual regime, we are only as mobile as our Internet provider.
Given the unprecedented changes that are happening around us, cultural criticism must keep pace. The BCLA accordingly invites reflection on what it means to compare in the age of confinement. To adapt Hölderlin’s famous question: What good are critics in destitute times? How can culture contribute to quarantine? Statements of no more than 1,000 words are requested in any of the major languages; they will be edited and published on the BCLA website, to be disseminated as broadly as possible.
Please click here to submit your Reflection.
Now more than ever, the promise and provocation of Comparative Literature remain indispensable.
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