Of Journeys, Masks, and Wars: World Literature in Times of Crisis

Resumo

 Commencing with Thucydides, literature abounds in narratives about crises focused on the plague. Thucydides, of course, should also be credited with a narrative that places a crisis within another crisis: the depiction of the plague of Athens during the second year of the Peloponnesian War; narratologists would probably refer to this as “framed crisis”. Further examples readily spring to mind: Bocaccio, Defoe, and of course Camus. Some of the contemporary dimensions of the crisis Covid plunged us all into can be made sense of, and consolation sought in, in other works of world literature. Think of Sophocles’ Antigone and the denial of intimate communication with the deceased, indeed the denial of dignified burial rights. Peter Sloterdijk has recently thematised this denial, without reference to Sophocles, but with clear reference to what was taking place in Europe in 2020.
In the first two parts of this article, I want to look with fresh eyes at the nexus of word and visuality that is so central to how important questions, themes, and stock images of world literature travel in time; and to do that with our recent pandemic crisis in mind. In the third (longer) part, I extend this discussion to consider how a philosopher who would also write on literature (Arendt) and a writer who would also write on politics, human rights, religion and philosophy (Broch) work out ways in which one could respond to a crisis of a different order: war, genocide, and the extinction of human dignity – realities that are, sadly, once again part and parcel of life in Europe