Suddenly it seemed, quite simply, like good advice. “It is the strict adherence to daily routine that tends towards the maintenance of good order and the preservation of sanity” (Atwood, Oryx and Crake). There are labyrinths of references and degrees of citation to work through, but my point here is that for the first time ever a few days into the Confinement, I read this and took it straight:

His consciousness is a jumble of quotations, from, among other things, self-help books of the late 20th century, on which he wrote his thesis. My concern is to work on strategies of irony and distancing, and recently I have been looking at the fragments of texts from the world before which survive in the head of Jimmy, one of the main characters, and survive only there, since he is the last person alive with that knowledge. The job of the critic is to deconstruct, to problematise, to apply theories to the text, but at the moment I feel as if I am living inside it, as well as reading it from the outside. Although Covid-19 is not on the same scale, nonetheless something which seemed utterly remote, something which I never for a moment imagined could happen in my lifetime, is suddenly upon us. Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam Trilogy is a particularly long and dense example of a pandemic deployed in this way, and centres on a human-made pandemic, the Waterless Flood, which kills most of the Earth’s population. Do the humanities have any role to play here? My Twitter feed tells me that people are going back to Defoe and Camus, and I find myself very much taken up by one particular aspect of my corpus of Noah rewritings, which happens to concern pandemics as stand-ins for the Great Flood of Genesis, whether metonymically, metaphorically or allegorically. I can only admire the medics and scientific researchers who are getting us through this, and their work makes me feel helpless and useless, and so the Covid-19 crisis brings us back also to the old arts-sciences debate. And now what began as a minor news item about China has transmuted into where we live: it is, if you like, our chronotope, our timespace. At the time I wrote a blog entry about it, finishing with a jaunty “to be continued”, with no idea of what was coming next.

In 2019 I spent six months in researching rewritings of the Noah myth in contemporary anglophone clifi (climate change literature) at Western Michigan University.

The waterless flood