Literature and Medicine

It is an interesting, frightening time for those who study health or practice medicine, especially related to infectious disease. While airborne has been in the common lexicon for several decades (reinforced by films like Outbreak [1995] and bioterrorism discourse surrounding 9/11), today fomites, aerosol, and droplets are matters of semantic and scientific Facebook disagreements among family, friends, and strangers. This is not unrelated to debates about the efficacy of masks and the degree to which they are claimed by some to cause hypercapnia and hypoxemia. At stake here is the capacity, efficacy, and danger of breath.

My training as a literary scholar and my fondness for Priscilla Wald’s ever-relevant “outbreak narrative” would normally incline me toward considering breath in narratological terms, something like “the airborne narrative”—which might be the story of the (developing) academic and public discourse surrounding SARS-CoV-2’s mode of transmission, along with the politics that co-constitute what we do with that knowledge (or lack of it).¹ It might also describe the emplotment of human and nonhuman actors in this uncertain moment. But because time, matter, bodies, and space have for so many of us been radically altered, perhaps something other than conventional narrative logic is in order.

In “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Ezra Pound defines a form that might express some of the uncertainty and angst of the moment: the image, “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”² In that vein, what might William Carlos Williams’s confounding imagist poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” help us to understand about the complexity of this radical alteration?³ What does [End Page 242] the poem’s condensation of language, thingness, and formal dependency reveal about breath, air, and human dependency in this moment? Appropriating its form with some contemporary content might look something like the following:

The Fluid Medium

So much dependsUpon

A fluidmedium

Dynamic withflecks

depositing inairways

While a complete, declarative sentence, my reworking—like the original poem itself—foregrounds matter and density; it also forestalls, or at least makes us work for, closure and meaning.

If syntactically speaking the crux for Williams is “a red wheel / barrow,”—on which “so much depends”—then consider what the crux in mine is not: the virus itself. To discover what it is, we must unravel a similarly (copied) dense sentence of recursive modification. Like Williams’s poem, mine has seven of its eight lines—everything after “So much depends”—operating as a prepositional phrase adverbially modifying “depends.”⁴ This drives our focus away from the ontological object that has captured our attention (the virus as a thing in itself) and asks us to reflect instead on the fluid medium, on air. What does it depend on, and how does that affect those ominous dynamic flecks—be they in droplet or aerosol form? We might, then, consider the role of that which is in between the lines, yet immersed in air: breath, and the human machines (with airways) that produce, diffuse, and vortex the fluid medium and the environments in which they are all entangled. What do all the above depend on and what depends on them?

Focusing on the agency, vibrancy, or animacy of air itself is appropriate given the increasingly acknowledged role of aerosol transmission in SARS-CoV-2, and even given just a more nuanced understanding of [End Page 243] what the glazing world of droplets actually entails.⁵ Unless one happens to suffer respiratory distress, or breathlessness, we don’t really think about the material inputs and outputs of this autonomic process: As Jane Macnaughton notes, “So entangled is breath in everything bodies are, experience and do that it gets taken for granted, lost from view and is rarely a direct focus of attention.”⁶ Perhaps that is changing. Given the acceleration of climate change, the attention required to produce justice in the social determinants of health, given the way breath has been stifled for so many Black bodies—by police or the virus, among other means—breath must “be understood in...