Outbreak Narratives of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic: Contagion, Community, and Politics in Myla Goldberg’s Wickett’s Remedy and Thomas Mullen’s The Last Town on Earth

This chapter investigates the possible reasons and underlying significance of the 1918 influenza narratives’ absence and outbreak. It first of all examines the historical amnesia related to the 1918 influenza in the 1920s and the later return of the repressed memories in personal and fictional flu narratives published in the 1930s. It then turns to two recent American historical novels as examples, Myla Goldberg’s Wickett’s Remedy and Thomas Mullen’s The Last Town on Earth, to explore how the outbreak narratives by writers who did not have any personal contact with the 1918 influenza pandemic transcend the predominant discourse of trauma and illness that dominates early flu stories while configuring the contours of contagion, community, and politics that are more relevant to contemporary readers than the influenza itself. At first glance, through the public imagination of both the local and national communities as a population that are susceptible to the contagious influenza, Goldberg’s and Mullen’s outbreak narratives seem to construct what Priscilla Wald in Contagious terms the “epidemiology of belonging” (Wald in Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Duke University Press, p. 29, 2008). Nonetheless, subtle details about the scapegoating of foreigners and strangers as potential disease carriers and the exposure of marginalized communities to infectious situations lay bare the extension of biopolitics to necropolitics and the precarious conditions under which lives become disposable and deaths acceptable.