Law in the Time of Coronavirus
Law and literature both grow out of the impulse to mythologize and ritualize, which is to say they share common roots, so there's no better time to explore that connection than in the midst of the current pandemic, writes Randy D. Gordon of Barnes & Thornburg.
April 06, 2020 at 07:55 PM
6 minute read
The philosopher/cultural critic Rene Girard once remarked that "the plague is found everywhere in literature. … It is older than literature—much older, really, since it is present in myth and ritual in the entire world." Law and literature both grow out of the impulse to mythologize and ritualize, which is to say they share common roots, so I propose—as my title's nod to Gabriel García Márquez suggests—that there's no better time to explore that connection than in the midst of the current pandemic.
Bibliographies dedicated to "plague literature" run to dozens of pages, so we can only hope to discuss a small sample here. A convenient starting place is Giovanni Boccaccio's "The Decameron," the controlling conceit of which is that seven young women and three men have decamped for the countryside, where each will tell 10 stories (many bawdy) over 10 days, to escape the pestilent atmosphere of 14th century Florence.
"The Decameron" reveals a sharp divide between the humorous stories told in good fun and the horrors of the plague that serve as the occasion for them. The plague brings with it economic disaster, eroded social conventions, and political entropy. Literary scholar David Steel is thus right to argue, I think, that "there is a sense in which the age of modern fiction was ushered in by a virus."
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