In These Times, Season 4 | Joy and Plague (Episode 2)

Alex Schein:

In Mary Shelley's novel The Last Man, the protagonist, one of the few survivors of a plague, searches for meaning in a world of loss, concluding that there is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life, to improve ourselves and contribute to the happiness of others. In 2022, as COVID-19 lingers on, the climate threat looms larger and war returns to Europe. There seems to be no answer to when this era, defined by loss, will end. And many of us are finding that making sense of the intricate riddle of life and extracting meaning out of adversity is one of the things that art does best.

In this season of In These Times, we talk to scholars, musicians, and poets, and other members of creative communities to explore the link between making art and making meaning, and how creativity shines a light on that way out of adversity, past and present. In these times, knowledge is more important than ever.

In this episode, we speak with a scholar of English literature about another era defined by loss, the Black Death of the 1300s, and how authors reported and responded to it. Welcome to episode two, Joy and Plague.

In 1346, Bubonic Plague began to spread through Northern Africa and Eurasia. In seven years, it had become the most fatal pandemic recorded in human history, killing between 75 and 200 million people.

David Wallace:

Hence, the countless numbers of people who fell ill, both male and female were entirely dependent upon either the charity of friends, who were few and far between, or the greed of servants who remained in short supply, despite the attraction of high wages, not of all proportionate to the services they performed.

Alex Schein:

That's David Wallace, Judith Rodin Professor of English and Comparative Literature, reading from Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. Boccaccio's father was a merchant, an official of the city of Florence in 1348, as the black death was tearing through Europe. Half of the population of the city died, including Boccaccio's father. Wallace's area of study centers on medieval literature, which covers the time of the Great Plague. His many books include Jeffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction, and A Literary History of Europe from 1348. In 2019, he received the Sir Israel Gallant's prize from the British Academy for his lifetime contribution into the study of Chaucer and medieval Europe.

David Wallace:

So things in that play got so bad that people became sort of unhinged, and you can just tell the whole society is sort of falling apart in a culture of death, which in Florence took away 50% of the population. The Florentines were living in a republic in which they tried to take care of everybody. So everybody flooded in from the countryside, and they tried to bake bread and feed everybody, but the increasing numbers of persons led to more people dying. Whereas in the north of Italy in Milan, they had a despotic society, a dictatorial society, in which the duke simply ordered anybody who had plague-like symptoms to be bricked into their house, and they would just be left there and they would die in the

house. But the mortality rate there was about 15%. So there were different responses to the pandemic in different parts of Italy.

Alex Schein:

Boccaccio wrote the Decameron immediately after the plague devastated Florence. In it, he testified to the suffering that took place.

David Wallace:

He talks very pointedly about what death is like. And the scariest thing for him is that people died alone, which for a medieval person is the scariest thing of all. "It had once been customary, as it is again nowadays, for the women relatives and neighbors of a dead man to assemble in his house in order to mourn in the company of women who had been closest to him. Moreover, his kinfolk would foregather in front of his house, along with his neighbors and various other citizens.

And there would be a contingent of priests whose numbers varied according to the quality of the deceased. His body would be taken thence to the church in which he had wanted to be buried, being born on the shoulders of his peers, amidst the funeral pomp of candles and dirges. But as the ferocity of the plague began to mount, this practice all but disappeared entirely as replaced by different customs. For not only did people die without having many women about them, but a great number departed this life without anyone at all to witness their going. Few indeed were those to whom the Lamentations and bitter tears of their relatives were recorded. On the contrary, more often than not bereavement was the signal for laughter and witticisms and general jollification."

Alex Schein:

But the Decameron goes beyond the horror of the plague. It tells of a group of young people who flee Florence to the countryside. They pass the time telling stories, 100 in all. They talk of human vices, tales of love, both happy and tragic, and the role of fortune versus human will.

David Wallace:

So it's kind of an escape from the plague into storytelling, which of course keeps your spirits up, because part of the work is to avoid not being completely depressed and overwhelmed by the horrors of the plague. So it's a phenomenal testimony, both to the suffering of the plague and how to recover from it through storytelling, through artwork, if you like.

Alex Schein:

While Boccaccio was an adult when the Black Death began, Jeffrey Chaucer was only about five years old when the plague came to England.

David Wallace:

The plague is always there for Chaucer. There's a passage, for example, in the Pardoner's Tale. It's a sort of allegorical tale where three drunken men in a pub have heard that death has been taking off lots of people, and they decide to go in search of death, which is allegorical, of course.

And they're sort of sitting in the pub in a rather drunken state, and this boy explains to them what the clinking of a bell is, and it's about a body being taken to church. And they said, "What's that all about?"

And the boy replies to them that this is an old friend of yours and "Ther cam a privee theef men clepeth Deeth, That in this contree al the peple sleeth, And with his spere he smoot his herte atwo, And wente his wey withouten wordes mo. He hath a thousand slayn this pestilence."

He has slain 1,000 people in this time of plague, so that's the common experience that's appealed to there. 1,000 people killed off and death walks the land. So the Pardoner's Tale is like an allegorical version of experience in plague. And then in another tale, for example, the Knight's Tale, you get a series of temples, the temple of Mars and of Venus and of Diana with their attributes. And then finally, we get a description of Saturn, which is the planet with the widest circuit. And he has various negative effects. And one of them is, "me looking is the father of pestilence."

So Saturn says, "My gaze is the begetter of pestilence and plague," which is to say the astrological conditions when Saturn is in the ascendant can lead to plague. So they thought that was one cause of plague, astrological, if you like. So the plague is always there in Chaucer. But also I would say, it's there in the very joy of being alive, which I think is very Chaucerian.

Alex Schein:

Today, we envision the people who lived in the Middle Ages, and the Black Death as pretty grim, and focused on gloomy themes.

David Wallace:

I think the opposite is true. That in a way, if you're in the middle of disaster and misery you tend to focus on positive things. In World War II in England, Vera Lynn would sing about, "there'll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover," even as the Nazis are dropping bombs on London. And I think the opening of the Canterbury Tales, which the very end of that very long opening sentence on line 18, it talks about that God has helped them who were sick.

"Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne, And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open ye (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages), Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes; And specially from every shires ende Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke."

Right, so that's where they're going on pilgrimage it's, "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote." It's joyful. It's about natural regeneration and the coming of spring, the return of the seasons. And so, it's actually a very positive opening, I think. This is what we need, and we'll take pleasure in simple things like sunshine and the birds singing and things like that, which we all understand since we've all been in lockdown. The great joy for many of us has been going out on our bikes or just going for a walk in the countryside. That's been the great thing.

Alex Schein:
Like the Decameron, the Canterbury Tales is set up as a series of stories.

David Wallace:

Storytelling obviously is a deep human impulse, isn't it, and a collective enterprise, I think. Look at the great old Icelandic sagas, for example. I mean, the winter goes on for so long in Iceland. It's dark for months on end. And they produced these endless sagas about families that people know and locations that people know. And one person reads the manuscript or maybe recites, because I think a lot of it starts with the recitation form before it gets written down, and other people listen. And I think that just simply carries on through the centuries as you carry the body of your culture through oral reperformance. Boccaccia thinks that his writing the Decameron is going to help people, especially women, who have to stay indoors too much. And so this idea that you do amuse yourself by reading indoors, and I'm sure that probably went up, or reading aloud, one should say, because it only takes one person to read the book and other people listen to it.

We don't know yet what forms of art are going to emerge after this pandemic, but I would imagine it will not be just focusing upon lockdown conditions. I don't think that'll happen right away. I mean, who wants to watch a lockdown drama? I don't think so. I think it'll be the great outdoors. It'll be sunshine and positive themes. And I think there'll be a return to lockdown themes a bit later when we've gotten through this, if we ever get it through it, when the pandemic has become endemic or whatever we want to call it.

Alex Schein:
This time has been challenging for most of us, and Professor Wallace is no exception.

David Wallace:

My mother's in a nursing home in England. She's 94 years old and they've got COVID in the home so nobody can visit. So yeah, that's kind of heartbreaking. And teaching has been a great challenge, but the students have been phenomenal. Their adaptivity has been amazing. One thing that's changed in my own teaching is I taught Dante last semester. I'll teach it again next semester. And last year was the 700th anniversary of Dante's death. And that was kind of spooky because I had to teach it online, and we were reduced to being kind of images of one another, kind of spectral images. And so then when we got to the afterlife, the Inferno and the Pergatoria, we met spectral beings. We met ourselves in funny ways in a kind of weird, weird state. And so, I think we understood Dante more appreciatively than ever before in that state. So there are certain things we have discovered through lockdown conditions. Yeah.

Alex Schein:

Pandemics bring tragedy and hardship and change, but change has two faces. Workers can demand better conditions of labor. We reconsider how we do things and how we think, and artists create new ways of seeing and help regenerate society.

David Wallace:

I think that Chaucer is the first great poet of the modern English mother tongue, if you like. And that before Chaucer, French was a more prestigious language and serious things were done in Latin, but English becomes for him a language in which you can do all things. And this company is a sort of shift

where the language of parliamentary debate switches from French into English, the language of law, even eventually the language of the coronation of the king. And so Chaucer has got the great advantage of being a first generation poet. There's a beautiful plasticity to Chaucer's verse because he can try things, he can experiment with word orders and rhymes in ways that we can't today. If we write a line of poetry, we think we've done something original. And then we realize it sounds like Bob Dylan, or it sounds like somebody else. There's always somebody on our back.

But there's a joy in experimentation in Chaucer, which makes it very popular with modern poets, actually. Modern poets love Chaucer. Lavinia Greenlaw said "reading Chaucer is like meeting the English language before the paint has dried." And many women are very inspired, often women of color, by Chaucer, because there's something unsettled and [inaudible 00:13:53] about Chaucer. The Wife of Bath has become almost like a muse for modern women poets. And it does owe to the age he's in, I think, having survived the plague. Right? And there is a big shake up. There's more social mobility than before. There's a joy in living. But there are also great challenges as well. I think it's an extraordinary period of time. It's no accident that the period of time produces Chaucer, in the same way that the 1580s produced Shakespeare.

Alex Schein:
Professor Wallace has found joy, especially in his work and teaching.

David Wallace:

I think I've been buoyed up by my students by their love of knowledge. And I think actually being a humanist scholar really helps as well, to get some historical perspective. You get some joy and enjoyment, and you see people trying to react to the pandemic, trying to react creatively to the pandemic and give expression to it as well. So, that's been good. I mean, Zadie Smith wrote some really lovely reflections on the pandemic, some of the firsts that I found very helpful to read. Yeah. I'm a member of the School of Arts and Sciences, and I think we respect the sciences because the sciences will get us out of the pandemic.

But the arts have their role to play, that we can help our students digest what's going on, make sense of what's on, connect them with texts from earlier times which are inspiring, that have been through what we are going through, but often in a more acute way, and also enable the students to be creative themselves, to record their own experiences, to think about their own ancestry, if you like, something I've been doing with my students. Penn students are remarkable from all over the world and they just bring to us phenomenal richness. So for me as a teacher to notice what they're bringing to the classroom and devise ways of bringing that out, which has been such a great joy for me. So, that's what I'd say.

Alex Schein:

That wraps up the second episode of In These Times, The Intricate Riddle of Life. Join us in two weeks for episode three, Tangled Up In Nature, where we'll talk to an expert on Shakespeare and early modern literature who will discuss lessons from nature, or how writers from the past have found meaning in and read meaning into the natural world.

The Omnia Podcast is a production of Penn Arts and Sciences. Special thanks to Judith H Roden Professor of English and Comparative Literature, David Wallace. I'm Alex Schein. Thanks for listening.

Subscribe to the Omnia Podcast by Penn Arts and Sciences on Apple iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts, to listen to every episode of In These Times, The Intricate Riddle of Life.