T.S. Eliot in the 1918 Pandemic: Abjection and Immunity

Abstract

The influence of the 1918 pandemic was overshadowed by the catastrophe of the First World War. The current COVID-19 pandemic leads the academic attention to how the 1918 pandemic shaped literature of that period. Elizabeth Outka’s book brings the history of the pandemic into the study of modernism. The vast scale of a sudden outbreak of pandemic disease had made decent burials and mourning very difficult. Outka argues that The Waste Land mourns the deaths during the pandemic. The traumatic experience of the pandemic can also be found in the difficulty of speech and the fragmentation of ghostly existence in The Waste Land. Building upon Outka’s work, this essay will engage with the cultural influences of the pandemic in Eliot’s other works and reveal how the famous touchstones of modernisms are shaped by such an event. I will specify how the war and the pandemic were connected in the following section on historical backgrounds. Immunity aims to fight against foreign invaders such as viruses on a micro-level. However, on a macro-level of politics, the logic of the immune system often wrongly identifies certain groups as the scapegoats for contagious diseases. My article aims to reveal the underlying metaphor of immunity in Eliot’s writing of the abject in the late 1910s. By doing so, I hope to contribute to current academic discussions of Eliot and the writing of the pandemic, anti-Semitism and post-colonialism.