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The Humanities Pandemic
Towards a Front-Line
Approach

Margaret Topping
The Humanities Pandemic
 Margaret Topping

The Humanities
Pandemic
Towards a Front-Line Approach
Margaret Topping
Modern Languages
Queen’s University Belfast
Belfast, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-31628-9    ISBN 978-3-031-31629-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31629-6

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Pattern © Melisa Hasan

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For MBH
 Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the intellectual input into my thinking for

this book of the many colleagues with whom I have engaged, particularly
in the field of travel literature. More specifically, I would like to thank
Albrecht Classen, general editor of the journal Humanities, for granting
me permission to reproduce here elements of an article on Agnès Varda’s
Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, which first appeared in a special issue on ‘The
Relevance of the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century: Past and
Present’ [9(3), 2020]. I would also like to thank Charles Forsdick, Kathryn
Walchester and Zoë Kinsley, as well as the Anthem Press, for permission to
reproduce parts of my discussion of virtual travel which appeared in their
2019 volume, Keywords for Travel Writing Studies: A Critical Glossary. A
number of the images reproduced here also require acknowledgement, in
particular the generosity of the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne/Fonds
Nicolas Bouvier and the Thierry Vernet estate. Particular thanks, however,
go to Prof. Helen McCarthy who has challenged me to think entirely dif-
ferently about how we communicate across disciplines.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction: We Need to Talk About Covid  1

2 Cosmopolitanism, Monoculture and Inequality 23

3 Mobility
 Matters: Checkpointisation, Rights and a New
Way to Travel 77

4 An
 Intercultural Roadmap for Intersectoral and
Interdisciplinary Collaboration117

5 Conclusion: What Next for the Humanities?133

Index 139

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Varda posing in the style of Jules Breton’s La Glaneuse,

displayed in the background 48
Fig. 2.2 Varda gleans with her camera 48
Fig. 2.3 Tourists in front of Millet’s Des Glaneuses in the Musée
D’Orsay in Paris 51
Fig. 2.4 In a curious blend of mobility and movement, Varda
repeatedly films her hand by holding it steadily against the
background of fast-moving vehicles 52
Fig. 2.5 Varda shifts the camera from gleaner to gleaner in time to the
music of the ‘Rap de récup’ soundtrack. This is one example 56
Fig. 2.6 A sample image of the heart-­shaped potatoes to which Varda
returns almost obsessively 57
Fig. 2.7 One example of the damp stains on the walls and ceiling of her
apartment which Varda imagines as works of art of established
artists57
Fig. 2.8 Selection of the detail of Van der Weyden’s The Last
Judgement on which Varda’s camera lingers for a full minute
accompanied by the music of Bruzdowicz 58
Fig. 2.9 Selected still from the ‘dancing lens cap sequence’ which, in
total, lasts almost 50 seconds 59
Fig. 2.10 Judge reading aloud the legal position on gleaning in a field of
cabbages62
Fig. 3.1 Single-adult male detainees stand at a Border Patrol station in
McAllen, Texas, U.S. July 12, 2019. Picture taken July 12,
2019. Photo by Veronica G. Cardenas/Reuters 86

xi
xii List of Figures

Fig. 3.2 Migrants at the Nogales, TX detention center; https://

racinewir.com/2019/07/02/helping-asylum-seekers-an-
interview-with-brent-mitchell/86
Fig. 3.3 People look out from behind a fence at a detention centre for
illegal immigrants in Athens, Greece. Photograph: Angelos
Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images 87
Fig. 3.4 Female detainees turn their back to the visiting media, as
instructed by Homeland Security officials, inside a Homeland
Security Detention Center in Texas, 2007 @ Getty/Paul
J. Richards & STR 88
Fig. 3.5 Ghost, 2007, Kader Attia, Saatchi Gallery, London 89
Fig. 3.6 Ghost, 2007, Kader Attia, Saatchi Gallery, London 89
Fig. 3.7 Ukraine invasion: where are refugees going?, https://news.
sky.com/story/ukraine-invasion-where-are-refugees-
going-12557320. Credit: AP 91
Fig. 3.8 Nicolas Bouvier, Femmes ainous, île d’Hokkaido, 1966.
(© Musée de l’Elysée/Fonds Nicolas Bouvier) 108
Fig. 3.9 Untitled ink drawing by Thierry Vernet. (Reproduced
courtesy of the Vernet estate) 111
Fig. 4.1 The Culture Map of modes of communication ranging from
low context to high context 122
Fig. 4.2 The Culture Map of approaches to time from linear to flexible 122
Fig. 4.3 The Culture Map of persuading from applications-first to
principles-first123
Fig. 4.4 Mapping the objects of research with reference to the Culture
Map (C refers to the Culture Map; D to the Disciplinary Map) 124
Fig. 4.5 Mapping epistemological foundations with reference to the
Culture Map 125
Fig. 4.6 Mapping methods with reference to the Culture Map 125
Fig. 4.7 Mapping theories and assumptions with reference to the
Culture Map 125
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: We Need to Talk About Covid

Abstract This chapter investigates the relationship between the two cul-
tures of the Sciences and the Humanities in the context of responses to the
pandemic, demonstrating—with reference to the distribution of research
funding—the extent of the (inevitable and necessary) dominance of the
Sciences, and primarily Health Sciences, in the fight against Covid. While
more funding was directed towards the Social Sciences as the social and
economic impacts of the pandemic became clear, the Humanities proper
have remained relatively absent. Drawing on C.P. Snow’s famous indict-
ment of the mutual disdain that characterises the relationship between the
Two Cultures, I argue that this is symptomatic of a failure of communica-
tion between them. However, with enhanced tools for intercultural com-
munication across disciplines, we can begin to make the case for Humanities
as a front-line service that should be built into the foundations of research
projects, not as an afterthought for the purposes of awareness-raising, but
as ethical levers for activism and change. The chapter thus posits the idea
of a ‘Translational Humanities’ and articulates a challenge to Humanities
researchers to communicate differently the value of their work to global
challenge research.

Keywords Pandemic • Translational Humanities • Intercultural

communication • Interdisciplinarity • The Two Cultures

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
M. Topping, The Humanities Pandemic,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31629-6_1
2 M. TOPPING

March 2020 marked the beginning of a period that we now unthinkingly

categorise as ‘unprecedented’, to use one of the ‘8 Pandemic Words &
Phrases People Absolutely Never Want To Hear Again’ (‘Pandemic words’,
2020). Whether or not it was genuinely unprecedented is a matter of
debate, for pandemic hyperbole has been rife, and language and narrative
have been stretched to generate new terminologies and discourses. What
is more, earlier generations have, of course, also experienced seismic cri-
ses—world wars, plague, genocide, natural disasters—while concurrently
with the Covid pandemic, we have been facing another global crisis of
potentially more devastating and irreparable effects in the form of climate
change. And yet one has had the sense of living in a very different world
under Covid. Why this is so is perhaps because of its immediacy, its rapid
global spread, its democratic reach regardless of wealth or privilege and
the fact that it has been played out on multiple news and social media
platforms on a minute-by-minute basis.
The shock of Covid was in part attributable to a momentary shaking of
our faith in science, when contrary to expectations, a medical solution was
not readily available; we were suddenly placed in a position of ‘unknow-
ing’ in which science could not provide immediate answers. In this space
of uncertainty, conspiracy theorists, civil rights activists and, most recently,
anti-vaxxers have thrived. However, even with these counternarratives,
widespread public faith in science did not fundamentally wane, as the pub-
lic at large shifted its focus to the race to find a vaccine, and through the
power of effective public messaging operating across multiple media chan-
nels, vaccine fever took on the proportions of football fever as a national
obsession at the height of the pandemic.
James Bridle explores the phenomenon of what he sees as an increas-
ingly unquestioning belief in the power of science and technology in his
2015 book, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. Its fun-
damental premise is a warning about a future in which the contemporary
promise of a new technologically assisted Enlightenment may just deliver
its opposite: an age of complex uncertainty and the hollowing out of
empathy (Bridle, 2015). Bridle—a visual artist whose own disciplinary
background is Computer Sciences—highlights the tension between our
contemporary cultural and academic emphasis on the quest for, and prom-
ise of, ‘knowing’ (in which logic and scientific enquiry, often powered by
technology, are key), and the position of ‘unknowing’ that this has directly
produced. By way of illustration, he describes an Amazon warehouse in
which stock is not organised by type, but rather by a complex set of
 1 INTRODUCTION: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT COVID 3

algorithms that dictate the most efficient movements for collecting the
stock for distribution on receipt of an order. The result is a structure that
simply cannot be navigated by human intuition. As he explains:

The reason Amazon workers need hand-held devices to navigate around the
warehouse is because it is otherwise impenetrable to humans. Humans
would expect goods to be stored in human-type ways: the books over here,
DVDs over there, racks of stationery to the left, and so on. But to a rational
machine intelligence, such an arrangement is deeply inefficient. Consumers
don’t order goods alphabetically or by type; rather they fill a basket with
goods from all over the store—or, in this case, the warehouse. As a result,
Amazon employs a logistics technique called ‘chaotic storage’—chaotic, that
is from a human point of view. (Bridle, 2015, pp. 114–115)

Products are sorted by association rather than type (books beside sauce-
pans, televisions beside children’s toys), thus allowing for shorter paths
between items. The outworking of this logistical process which is incom-
prehensible to human beings is, for Bridle, that it ‘accelerates their oppres-
sion. […] They have nothing to do but follow the instructions on the
screen, pack and carry. They are intended to act like robots, impersonating
machines while remaining, for now, slightly cheaper than them’ (Bridle,
2015, p. 116).
Bridle’s book focuses on the tension between knowing and unknowing,
control and confusion, reason and emotion in this age of technological
and scientific advances; and it stands as a warning that, without a critical
reflection on these tensions, we risk sliding towards an era of apathy and
indifference, and towards a culture that prizes knowledge, science and
reason to such an extent that it has stopped questioning its assumptions
about human value. What Bridle foresees is a culture that, at worst, has
completely lost the power to empathise, and at best has lost sight of the
absolute necessity of empathy and emotion as drivers of change.
Translating these theories to the Covid context requires us to recog-
nise, of course, that human tragedy, and thus also empathy, are at the core
of a pandemic in a way that they are not in the operations of an Amazon
warehouse. It is precisely the human tragedy of the virus to which science
was seeking to respond. And yet, the question still remains as to the place
of the Humanities proper—that is those disciplinary fields which are by
definition grounded not only in the recognition of human value, but also
in the exploration of emotion, uncertainty, ‘unknowing’ in its broadest
4 M. TOPPING

sense—at a moment when the world was looking to science for a solution
and was apparently rewarded. Should we be worried, as Bridle suggests in
his own bleak diagnosis of the domination of science and technology,
about the loss of human value and values as enshrined in Humanities dis-
ciplines? At a time when the expertise of scientists has been communicated
across multiple social media platforms and news outlets in ways that are by
necessity easily accessible to the general public, and at a time when, within
the disciplinary economy of research environments, the vast majority of
funding has been directed towards scientific discovery, are we witnessing a
fatal blow for the Humanities unless a ‘vaccine’ for these apparently ailing
disciplines is not developed, or is the death of the Humanities just another
conspiracy theory?
This book aligns itself with neither of these extremes, for as commenta-
tors such as Eleonora Belfiore and Anna Upchurch (2013) and Zoe
Bulaitis (2020) have suggested in their own analyses of the health of the
Humanities, extreme perspectives on our disciplines—which either pres-
ent them as the panacea for all of society’s problems or pronounce their
demise—may become convenient distractions from a new critical engage-
ment with what they can do in collaboration with and/or in a comple-
mentary vein to those disciplines, typically from the Health or Physical
Sciences, which tend to dominate global challenge research. This is also
the underpinning vision for the British Academy’s SHAPE initiative which
was launched in 2020 ‘as a tool to tell the story of these subjects, which
help us make sense of the human world, to value and express the complex-
ity of life and culture, and to understand and solve global issues’.1 The
SHAPE agenda is explicitly not in opposition to STEM, but rather an
attempt to encourage collaboration between the two disciplinary land-
scapes. Such an endeavour is not straightforward, however, for while uni-
versities globally have created structures to promote multidisciplinary and
interdisciplinary research, these rarely reflect explicitly on the most funda-
mental challenge of finding a common language and set of ‘cultural’
assumptions between disciplines as the basis for communication. Thus,
even if we do not recognise the near-parodic mutual disdain between ‘The
1
SHAPE is the acronym for Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the
Economy/Environment (https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/this-is-shape/), and the
SHAPE Observatory now has resources covering the role of subjects including Languages,
Archaeology, Economics, Theology and Religious Studies, as well as analyses of the value of
SHAPE skills in the workplace, and more recently, and as discussed further in this chapter,
the role of SHAPE subjects in the context of COVID.
 1 INTRODUCTION: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT COVID 5

Two Cultures’ famously elaborated by C.P. Snow (as discussed further

below), the call for a new critical engagement that is at the heart of the
present book does require a form of honest and critical self-reflection on
how we, as Humanities scholars, communicate what we do to other disci-
plines that is not hampered by a retreat into defensiveness.
This book seeks to navigate a path through these questions, with the
remainder of this chapter setting out the roadmap for the journey. An
overview of research undertaken by Humanities scholars in response to
Covid, with a particular focus on research which was funded by UK
research councils, provides a springboard to understanding assumptions
and preconceptions about Humanities research and its impact, as well as
to identifying the types of core Humanities research, such as literary study,
which are not widely represented. From there, I introduce the nature of
the challenges that can beset collaboration across disciplines (and indeed
across sectors, notably between researchers and the general public) and to
which theories and methods drawn from the fields of Translation Studies
and Intercultural Communication may provide not only illuminating per-
spectives but also practical tools. This has shaped the research questions
for the book as whole, in which I argue for a new Translational Humanities,
in both the sense of an applied Humanities and a Humanities that can
translate itself across disciplines and sectors. A final section of this intro-
ductory chapter sets out how these ideas will be explored and tested in
subsequent case studies, before I circle back to my key hypotheses and
desired outcomes for the study.

* * *

I began writing this book in the Summer of 2021 at which point we were
over a year into a pandemic which was first announced as such in March
2020. At that point, the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines were being rolled
out (as of December 2020 in the UK); we had two full lockdowns; and
travel restrictions had been extreme (involving, at their most stringent, an
interdiction to travel further than 10 miles from one’s own home),
although these were easing.
Since then, there have been significant advances in the fight against
Covid, and the UK government announced the end of all restrictions in
6 M. TOPPING

England and Wales under the banner of ‘Living with Covid’ in early 2022.2
They were the first in the world to do so, thus arguably introducing a herd
immunity strategy by stealth beneath a triumphalist banner of having
beaten Covid. Yet, notwithstanding media focus shifting to other crises
such as the war in Ukraine and consequent cost of living emergency, med-
ics, scientific advisors and bodies such as the WHO continue to voice con-
cerns about the lifting of restrictions (‘BBC’, 2022; ‘BMJ’, 2022;
‘Independent’, 2022; ‘NHS Confederation’, 2022), while the timing for
the announcement that we were now ‘living with Covid’ was noted as
felicitous for the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson: it came when the
media focus was firmly fixed on the so-called Partygate scandal which fol-
lowed a series of revelations about parties infringing all rules governing
the general public being held in 10 Downing Street at the height of the
lockdown (‘WSJ’, 2022). In addition, in late 2022/early 2023, China is
once again facing a surge in Covid that is prompting large-­scale lockdowns.
In other words, Covid has not disappeared. Death and hospitalisation
rates are still high. Debates persist around anti-vaccination and around the
wearing of face masks, while quarantines still exist for travel to many coun-
tries. Indeed, it was only in June 2022 that the UK came off Germany’s
red list. In terms of the research landscape, too, it is of note that, in
February 2022, funding of £10m was awarded to researchers working on
vaccines for diseases, such as Lassa Fever, the Zika Virus or Crimean
Congo Haemorrhagic Fever, which the WHO believes could be the next
global pandemic.3 Notwithstanding the progress on Covid, therefore, the
issues raised by the present discussion continue to resonate, not only in
relation to the specific context of the recent and potential future pandem-
ics, but also in terms of the broader question interrogated throughout the
book of the role of the Humanities as front-line services in tackling
global crises.

2
The devolved governments in Scotland and Northern Ireland followed suit shortly
afterwards.
3
https://www.ukri.org/news/10-million-to-combat-potential-epidemics-in-developing-
countries/.
 1 INTRODUCTION: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT COVID 7

Humanities in the Time of Covid: How Did

We Respond?
The echoes of the title of Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of
Cholera are deliberate, and indeed García Márquez’s book is one that
appears on the crowd-sourced corpus produced as part of The Humanities
Coronavirus Syllabus, a project initiated by Altschuler and Maddock
Dillon, both Humanities scholars at Northeastern University, on 12
March 2020, the day following the announcement that officially classified
Covid-19 as a pandemic. The initiators of the project set out as their
avowed aim to ‘curate a set of literary, cinematic, historical, art philosophi-
cal, religious and cultural resources—that is Humanities resources—for
understanding the current health crisis and its history’ (Altschuler &
Maddock Dillon, 2020). García Márquez’s novel is one of approximately
100 literary texts to appear on the syllabus, and is accompanied by films,
TV series, religious texts, art history, philosophy, historical resources and
databases, and cultural studies artefacts. The Humanities Coronavirus
Syllabus thus represents a multifaceted undertaking to highlight how the
subjects of Humanities research may provide a mirror in which we reflect
on the current pandemic. Its goals are defined as twofold: (1) to provide
resources for educators looking to ‘retool’ syllabi in the light of the Covid
pandemic; and (2) to provide a robust, interdisciplinary, Humanities-­
focused resource for people looking to make sense of our current crisis.4
Altschuler and Maddock Dillon’s discussion of the aims and content of
the Humanities Covid Syllabus is one of many scholarly contributions to
have been published since mid-2020 on the role of the Humanities and
the Social Sciences in responding to the pandemic. Typically, such contri-
butions highlight the importance of these disciplinary fields in under-
standing and influencing behavioural, environmental, social and systems
interventions. In a BMJ article, for instance, Susan Michie and Robert
West (2020, n.p.), both Professors of Health Psychology, have written of
the ‘vital importance of human behaviours such as social distancing in
controlling pandemics’, emphasising in particular how behaviours are
embedded in ‘complex systems involving individuals, groups, and

4
Teaching resources such as this have considerable value for the reasons that Altschuler
and Maddock Dillon suggest. The primary focus in the present study, however, is on the
importance of Humanities research in the contribution to tackling global challenges rather
than on Humanities pedagogy.
8 M. TOPPING

communities operating in diverse physical and social environments’. Thus,

any change to those behaviours must take account of the complex web of
environments and influences within which human beings operate, or their
‘habitus’ to borrow Bourdieu’s term. Similarly, Chloe Jeffries et al. (2020,
p. 2) note, in their piece for the Higher Education Policy Institute (www.
hepi.ac.uk), how the Humanities and Social Sciences can ‘interpret data,
contextualise trends and offer frameworks for understanding’ which can
translate into recommendations that reflect their ‘deep understanding of
how cultures, societies and economies function’. Among the examples
they provide from research conducted at their home institution, the
University of Manchester, are projects on cultures of misinformation, and
on the oral histories of NHS workers. A further strand of research, as
exemplified by the work of Wendy Hesford, a Professor of English at Ohio
State University, focuses on values more aligned to James Bridle’s vision.
Hesford (2021, n.p.) argues, for example, that the Arts and Humanities
not only provide access to wider geo-political and historical contexts; but
crucially their fundamental methods are also ones that ‘foreground deep
observation, listening and empathy and skills to communicate diverse
viewpoints and imaginative possibilities. Significantly they cultivate the
compassion that drives social change.’ She thereby intimates that they
have potential roles as mediators for debate and levers for activism.
However, notwithstanding these claims for the relevance of Arts,
Humanities and Social Sciences understandings of, and approaches to,
Covid-19, the reality in terms of distribution of research funding points to
the almost complete dominance of clinical research over that on social,
cultural and behavioural contexts.5 Michie and West (2020, n.p.) them-
selves refer to data gathered from www.bessi-­collab.net (the ‘Behavioural,
Environmental, Social and Systems Interventions for pandemic
5
The evidence to support these observations as to the dominance of clinical research is
drawn from two main sources where data can be quantified with rigour. The first is the
BESSI online resource which draws its findings from a second resource that mines data from
research databases worldwide, including Australia and New Zealand, North and South
America, South Asia, Southeast Asia, China and the Middle East (for details of the methodol-
ogy and databases mined, see: https://app.iloveevidence.com/loves/5e6fdb9669c00e4
ac072701d?population=5e7fce7e3d05156b5f5e032a&intervention_variable=603b9fe0
3d05151f35cf13dc&section=methods&classification=all). The second is the UK funding
landscape where comprehensive data can be gathered and project objectives and outcomes
analysed from the UKRI web resources. The focus of the narrative here is therefore on
examples of research funded by UKRI. However, the BESSI data would indicate that this
position is not atypical in terms of the global funding landscape.
 1 INTRODUCTION: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT COVID 9

­preparedness’, n.d., website). An interrogation of this resource at the time

of writing their 2020 paper revealed ‘975 registered and 46 reported drug
trials but only six registered and one reported behavioural, environmental,
social, or systems intervention trial’. As of BESSI’s most recent update to
their ‘scorecard’ of COVID-related research (on 24 February 2022),
those figures have risen to 2570 registered and 920 reported drug trials in
contrast to 18 registered and 17 reported behavioural, environmental,
social and systems-based projects. In other words, in mid-2020, ‘BESSI’-
oriented studies accounted for only 0.7% of all COVID studies counted,
and by early 2022, that figure has risen only by just under 0.3 to 0.99%.
These figures do not therefore yet support the suggestion in a number of
analyses that while ‘the first act of the crisis saw a necessary focus on health
risks [with] medical research dominat[ing] the media, funding calls, and
the communications and planning of many universities’, attention has
turned towards the societal and economic impact of Covid-19 as we enter
act 2, and this is where ‘Humanities and Social Sciences researchers can
play a leading role, to inform and shape the recovery’ (Jeffries et al.,
2020, n.p.).
In the UK context, Covid certainly transformed the research funding
landscape. At the point of writing this introduction,6 UKRI (www.ukri.
org), the main umbrella organisation for a range of disciplinary-focused
research councils, had invested in the region of £554m in over 3600 new
Covid-19 research and innovation initiatives in the UK and globally. These
are impressive headline figures, but understanding what lies beneath them
is key to the present discussion, for if we delve further into the distribution
of UKRI Covid funding, we may detect certain disciplinary trends and
offer hypotheses as to the assumptions they imply.
UKRI investment in Covid research was divided into seven overarching
strands of activity as follows (‘ukri.org’, 2020): National Core Studies;
Vaccines and Treatments; Understanding the Coronavirus; Recovery and
Rebuilding; The Impacts of Coronavirus; Our Global Contribution; and
Technological Solutions. The National Core Studies programme was
established in the summer of 2020 to respond to identified requirements
to increase research scale or provide infrastructure. The six studies that
were set up within it have focused on: Epidemiology and Surveillance;
Clinical Trials Infrastructure; Transmission and Environment; Immunity;
Longitudinal Health and Wellbeing; and Data and Connectivity. UKRI

6
This data was first gathered in July 2021.
10 M. TOPPING

has specifically funded the last three of these studies, investing £11.5m,
£10m and £15m in each strand respectively. The core research questions
for each do not indicate any engagement with humanistic interrogation.
Within the remaining six strands, only 9.6% of projects funded were
Arts and Humanities-led; and while highlighting this distribution in no
sense represents a call for a rebalancing away from medical solutions which
must by necessity be at the core, a number of observations do nonetheless
emerge as to the role of the Humanities: firstly, in relation to the types of
Humanities projects which predominate; and secondly, in relation to the
balance between Humanities and Social Sciences, which reveals stark dif-
ferences despite the trend towards grouping both together in scholarly
discussions of the value of responses to Covid that are not from the
Physical or Health Sciences.
It is immediately clear, for example, that a significant percentage of the
AHRC-led projects (Arts and Humanities Research Council) have focused
on how cultural organisations (from the creative industries to libraries)
‘pivoted’ to adapt to the challenges of Covid. ‘Arts and culture in the time
of coronavirus’ (led by Prof. Pascale Aebischer and Dr Rachael Nicholas
from the University of Exeter) responded to the immediate post-­lockdown
impact on the creative and cultural industries by seeking to support cul-
tural organisations to adapt for survival in a digital, lockdown, context.
Thus, for example, its activities included bringing immersive cultural expe-
riences into people’s homes and making art collections available online.
Similarly, ‘Shelf-help: how Scotland’s libraries adapted to lockdown’ (led
by Prof. Peter Reid from Robert Gordon University) documents how
libraries continued to serve their communities by adapting their practices
using digital solutions; and while ‘Art and dementia during COVID-19’
(led by Prof. Victoria Tischler from the University of West London)
focused on the wellbeing of a demographic with a particular degenerative
condition, it was still underpinned by a drive to maintain access to art,
culture and heritage during lockdown, and to do so by digital means. In a
similar vein, ‘Culture, creativity and COVID-19: tackling isolation’ (led
by Prof. Helen Chatterjee from University College London) sought to
demonstrate how the social isolation and loneliness that was exacerbated
for many groups during lockdown was in part alleviated by accessing cul-
tural artefacts in new ways (e.g. online performances), as well as by indi-
viduals experimenting with their own creativity via a renewed interest in
arts and crafts.
 1 INTRODUCTION: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT COVID 11

A second further group of projects could be defined as using narrative

strategies either to understand impacts of Covid on the general public or
to improve impacts and outcomes in a healthcare setting. For example, the
project ‘Arts-based methods to help healthcare workers’ (led by Profs
Suzy Willson and Graham Easton of Queen Mary University of London)
tested the application of arts-based practices in the training of medical staff
in order to enhance their communication with patients and to support
their own wellbeing. With consultations moved online or impeded by the
wearing of PPE or by social distancing, the project brought performance-­
based techniques such as acting and choreography into the training of
healthcare professionals. In this, it represented a genuinely front-line
intervention with potential for immediate impact on patients and health-
care practitioners. The impact of other projects within this loose category
has tended to be in relation to a longer-term potential for shaping future
policy. For instance, ‘Home is where the impact is’ (led by Prof. Alison
Blunt from Queen Mary University of London) may be used to inform
how, in the case of a future lockdown, policy would need to take greater
account of different histories and identities. Above all, though, it has
sought to analyse the political and personal significance of ‘home’ by doc-
umenting and analysing the ways in which home was ‘mobilised, experi-
enced and imagined during and after the lockdown’. It has included
people of different ethnicities, faiths and migration histories, and children
as well as adults, and is producing films and podcasts for the London-
based Museum of the Home, as well as policy briefs and an interfaith
toolkit. Similarly, ‘Conspiracy theories and COVID-19’ (led by Prof. Peter
Knight from the University of Manchester) responded to the ‘infodemic’
prompted by Covid. The WHO have highlighted how this is the first pan-
demic in history to have been played out on social media in ways that can
keep people safe and connected but can also be vectors for misinformation
and conspiracy theories. The project has thus aimed to diagnose the
sources of conspiracy theories, in the sense of who has been promoting
and spreading them, what form they have taken on social media platforms
and why some theories have gained more traction than others. In terms of
longer-term impact on policy and practice, the project also seeks to assess
12 M. TOPPING

the effectiveness of the varying interventions by social media companies to

manage conspiracy theories.7
However, even these sorts of Humanities-based projects remained the
minority within the already minority group of projects funded outside the
disciplinary remit of the Medical Research Council (MRC) or the
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), for the
majority within this minority were more Social Sciences focused than
Humanities, as is borne out by the proportion of UKRI-funded projects
that have been led either by the Economic and Social Research Council
(ESRC) or funded by Innovate UK with a strong underpinning most
commonly in business and economics. These account for 31.5% of the
projects funded, and they have tended to focus on the economic impacts
of Covid, such as those generated by prolonged periods of lockdown for a
range of business sectors.
The focus in this section has been on Research Council-funded projects
relating to Covid and on articles that have reflected, as their explicit con-
cern, on the role of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in the con-
text of the pandemic; but that is by no means to suggest that this is the
entirety of the scholarly engagement with the pandemic from within these
areas. There has been a significant amount of research from within the
Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences that has engaged with the philo-
sophical, cultural, political and ethical questions it raises, and these will be
referenced throughout the present study. Among the many excellent
examples include the special issue of the journal Cultural Politics [17.1
(2021)] on ‘Viral Culture’ edited by John Armitage and Mark Featherstone
that features discussion of: Trump and Authoritarian Populism in the con-
text of Covid; Žižek and Utopian Realism as read through the lens of the

7
The fact that, as part of the SHAPE initiative, Humanities research on Covid-19 is now
being brought together into a dynamic platform for interaction and discussion is a welcome
development. This follows the request from the Government Office for Science to the British
Academy in September 2020 to produce an independent report into the societal impacts of
Covid. The project, which is ongoing at the point of publication of the present book, is led
by Professor Dominic Abrams and has identified nine areas of long-term societal impact,
seven strategic goals for policymakers, and five principles for a successful recovery from ‘The
Covid Decade’ by 2030. Published in 2021, the report is a fascinating and hopeful read in
terms of the importance of the work of SHAPE scholars and the outlook for future recovery
from Covid. However, the remit of the project is, like many of those mentioned here, explic-
itly the long-term impacts of Covid, in contrast to the present discussion which focuses (a) on
the Humanities specifically—rather than the broader range of disciplines encompassed within
the SHAPE initiative—and (b) on their potential to operate as front-line services in the midst
of a global crisis.
 1 INTRODUCTION: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT COVID 13

pandemic; the metaphorical viral force of social media at a time of physical

virus spread; impacts on the mobility infrastructure and an online diary
charting the pandemic experience from within Wuhan. Such research out-
puts are not included here as an object of discussion per se, as they argu-
ably represent a category of more theoretical discussions targeted at
academics within cognate fields rather than interventions focused on
public-­facing impact or long-distance interdisciplinarity.

What More Could the Humanities Offer? Towards

a Translational Humanities

To pose the question of what more the Humanities could offer is in no

sense to suggest a deficit in the outstanding research summarised above,
the impacts and value of which will emerge and gain traction over the
lifetime of the projects. Rather, it is to recognise that (a) there is a ten-
dency for certain, relatively limited, types of Humanities research to be
funded, notably that which links to a social, educational or commercial
infrastructure (e.g. theatres, museums, libraries) or which is grounded in
forms of quasi-anthropological discourse analysis (of news media, social
media, story-telling by those experiencing the pandemic); and (b) some of
the core objects of Humanities research, notably artistic artefacts them-
selves, tend to be categorised exclusively, or at least primarily, as a means
of allowing individuals to see reflected their own experience of the pan-
demic and/or to try to ‘make sense’ of it. In the latter case, therefore,
literature, film or visual artworks are not seen as tools that could actively
and strategically be deployed as part of a more direct, even ‘front-line’
response to tackling crises such as the Covid pandemic. This book pro-
poses how they could.
The potential for the Humanities, including literary, artistic and cine-
matic works, to have a more front-line role has received limited critical
attention, but one notable voice is that of Kirsten Ostherr, Professor of
English at Rice University and a medical Humanities researcher, who
introduces the idea of Translational Humanities in her 2020 opinion piece
on ‘Humanities as Essential Services’ for the Inside Higher Ed forum. Her
discussion represents a compelling challenge to researchers in our fields,
for her argument is bolder than many that have been made about the need
for multidisciplinary approaches which take account of the role of the
Humanities, and more commonly the Social Sciences, as ways of thinking
through the ethical questions raised by COVID in the spheres of law,
policy, education and so on. What Ostherr (2020, n.p.) argues, in con-
trast, is that the Humanities could and should be part of the ‘front-line
14 M. TOPPING

response’ to the pandemic, whilst recognising that it is not always as obvi-

ous how these disciplinary areas can contribute at this level as is, of course,
the case for disciplines such as Medicine, Biology or Engineering.
Ostherr makes recommendations for longer-term interventions which
would, for example, see the integration of a Humanities syllabus into med-
ical training, but her thinking about what could also be done as an imme-
diate front-line response is pragmatic, realisable and has the potential for
immediate, demonstrable impact. In common with other scholarly discus-
sions of the role of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in responding
to the pandemic, she puts forward compelling arguments for how the
Humanities shed light on issues such as the power of discourse or the risks
of inequality, noting, for example, how:

the pandemic has made the human fragility of our response infrastructure
abundantly clear, and we need to understand how our decisions about
whose life matters will shape the future to come. Vaccines won’t help if huge
sections of the population believe they are part of a government or corpo-
rate conspiracy. Ventilators won’t save the lives of patients who are unable to
access healthcare due to systemic racism.

Thus, she argues, ‘we need translational humanities now to complete

our technological and biomedical response’. However, she also goes fur-
ther, to propose concrete and immediate interventions which begin with
the recognition that, for example, a chief scientist or a political decision-­
maker does not have time to read a selection of novels or view a range of
films before making a decision or recommendation in the fast-changing
world of a pandemic. The Humanities scholar thus becomes a translator
who is equipped to offer a range of achievable essential services:

Scholars in Asian American studies can identify and document xenophobia,

and they can disseminate those findings in real time to legal advocates.
Media scholars can draw on their knowledge of contagion films to alert
health organizations to harmful visual iconographies and suggest alterna-
tives. Literary scholars can identify how narratives are being used to spread
misinformation, and they can advise health communicators how to create
compelling counternarratives to challenge the fictions of conspiracy theo-
rists. Creative writers can draw on their narrative expertise to craft compel-
ling stories that help us imagine a path forward and the steps we could take
to get there—a “science fiction prototyping” for pandemic response.
 1 INTRODUCTION: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT COVID 15

Ostherr’s call to action is a powerful and inspiring one, and one that has
been taken up in the recently published volume, The Languages of Covid:
Translational and Multilingual Perspectives on Global Healthcare, edited
by Piotr Blumczynski and Steven Wilson (2022). As a researcher focused
on literature and visual culture and its connection to intercultural com-
munication, however, and one who believes firmly in the transformative
potential of the artistic work itself, the challenge I wish to take on is not
how we can apply the interpretative methods and strategies we normally
use to navigate a work of art or literature to other discourses that have
emerged in the context of the pandemic (such as conspiracy theories), but
rather to consider how works of art and literature can themselves be
deployed in a research-led ‘front-line’ capacity—as opposed to a teaching
environment—to influence or even simply facilitate debates, to change
public opinion, and/or to promote collective action. Moreover, as I argue
in subsequent chapters, this does not necessarily happen by drawing on
literary or artistic artefacts that depict pandemics; in fact, it may only be at
a distance from the current pandemic context that we can really begin to
talk about it, and actively address it, differently.

How Do We Talk About Covid? Challenges

and Opportunities for a Translational Humanities

The scientist and novelist C.P. Snow’s 1959 lecture, The Two Cultures,
famously tackles the real or perceived chasm between scientists and so-­
called literary intellectuals in terms of the cultures that shape and define
them. He laments the apparent mutual incomprehension that divides
them and that continues to perpetuate itself through their common dis-
dain for one another: ‘This polarisation is sheer loss to us all. To us as
people, as our society. It is at the same time practical and intellectual and
creative loss, and I repeat that it is false to imagine that those three consid-
erations are clearly separable. […]. The degree of incomprehension on
both sides is the kind of joke which has gone sour’ (Snow, 1990, p. 171).
He further describes how ‘the imaginative understanding [of scientists] is
less than it could be. They are self-impoverished’, he argues. Yet the liter-
ary intellectuals fare no better:

But what about the other side? They are impoverished too—perhaps more
seriously, because they are vainer about it. They still like to pretend that the
traditional culture is the whole of ‘culture’, as though the natural order
16 M. TOPPING

didn’t exist. As though the exploration of the natural order was of no inter-
est either in its own value or its consequences. As though the scientific edi-
fice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and
articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind
of man. Yet most non-scientists have no conception of that edifice at all.
Even if they want to have, they can’t. It is rather as though, over an immense
range of intellectual experience, a whole group was tone-deaf. Except that
this tone-deafness doesn’t come by nature, but by training, or rather the
absence of training.
As with the tone-deaf, they don’t know what they miss. They give a pity-
ing chuckle at the news of scientists who have never read a major work of
English literature. They dismiss them as ignorant specialists. Yet their own
ignorance and their own specialisation is just as startling. (Snow, 1990,
pp. 171–172)

For C.P. Snow, this state of affairs is more than just a pity; it is rather a
fundamentally missed opportunity for, ‘at the heart of thought and cre-
ation we are letting some of our best chances go by default. The clashing
point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures—of two galaxies, so far
as that goes—ought to produce creative chances’ (Snow, 1990, p. 172).
This, he proposes, is where the breakthroughs can emerge, but they will
not emerge because we do not speak the same languages.
This failure of communication between the Sciences and the Humanities
is, of course, no longer as catastrophic as once diagnosed in somewhat
caricatured form by C.P. Snow. Debates around the value of interdisciplin-
ary research have lost much of their heat (Redman et al., 2004), interdis-
ciplinary practices have become increasingly accepted and, indeed, widely
promoted (Bracken & Oughton, 2009), and research in the field is now
more focused on the definition, practices, tools and differing outcomes of
interdisciplinary research in comparison with its disciplinary counterparts
(Heemskerk et al., 2003). Scholarship in these latter areas is fertile, tack-
ling both practical and conceptual approaches to integrating the ontolo-
gies, epistemologies and methodologies from different disciplines in order
to facilitate the emergence of new ideas (Eigenbrode et al., 2007). What
this scholarship shares is a recognition that this is a challenging and often
uncomfortable endeavour that persists even in areas that are now estab-
lished as new ‘interdisciplines’. Kirsten Ostherr, for example, describes her
own experience moving into the field of Medical Humanities in which she
noted how there was a ‘huge gap between public health as an applied
practice and public health as an object of historical and theoretical work in
 1 INTRODUCTION: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT COVID 17

the humanities. Public health fieldworkers, for the most part, weren’t
reading humanities research, and humanities scholars weren’t focused on
the current demands of health communication. As a result, neither side
was benefitting from the expertise of the other, and common causes were
going unrecognised.’ In other words, even in a collaborative spirit that is
far distant from C.P. Snow’s mutually disdainful two cultures, there
remains a challenge of intercultural communication.
At the other end of the spectrum from C.P. Snow’s vision is the illumi-
nating and optimistic essay written in collaboration by ten postdoctoral
researchers in Columbia University’s interdisciplinary Earth Institute
detailing their own experience of trying to find a common ground from
which to develop an interdisciplinary approach to the question of how the
world’s population can feed itself justly and sustainably by the year 2050
(Winowiecki et al., 2011). The toolkit used by this widely diverse group
(that included researchers from Theology, Agronomy, Public Health,
Statistics, Soil Science, Ecology and Political Science) is one to which I
shall return in a later chapter, but suffice it to note for the moment a num-
ber of observations: (1) the six practical techniques for enhancing com-
munication outlined in the essay shed a sharply focused light on the critical
differences between disciplines in terms of ontology, epistemology and
methodology; (2) the researchers significantly overcame these differences
but only by means of processes that caused discomfort and required a set-
ting aside of any disciplinary defensiveness; and (3) these processes
required participants to inhabit a position of ‘open communication—
[based on having] the confidence to ask colleagues for clarification and to
expose, to understand, and to accept differences among us’ (Winowiecki
et al., 2011, p. 79).
For a researcher focused primarily on the fields of intercultural contact,
communication and representation, the image of cultures clashing to pro-
duce new creative chances, as evoked by Snow, and the potential for new
possibilities to emerge from these ‘clashes’, as reflected in the undertaking
of the ten Columbia University researchers, curiously evokes Mary-Louise
Pratt’s analysis of the operation of ‘contact zones’, albeit the link has not
previously been made, nor, I believe, has the concept of the ‘contact zone’
been applied to the relationship between disciplines. Pratt’s contact zones
are the spaces where ‘cultures, meet, clash and grapple with each other,
often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colo-
nialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of
the world today’ (Pratt, 1991, p. 34). What can potentially emerge from
18 M. TOPPING

these tensions, however, are new hybrid, syncretic forms and meanings
that mutually influence both cultures and create new ways of thinking.
Pratt’s context is colonialism and empire, and the associated power-based
clashes between nations that these geo-political movements created, rather
than scholarly disciplines. Yet if we pursue Snow’s fundamental metaphor
of a failure of contact between two cultures, a number of suggestive ques-
tions arise as to what disciplinary contact zones might look like and
whether Pratt’s concept offers a productive, alternative lens for under-
standing interdisciplinarity. Considering interdisciplinarity through the
lens of ‘contact zones’ and more generally of intercultural communication
also shines a light on the perceived, but often unspoken, asymmetrical
power relations between disciplines, not only within universities, but also
embodied, as noted above, in the research economy of global challenge
funding. Additionally, and equally important for the aspirations of the
present study, Pratt’s image of contact zones may provide tools for devel-
oping a model of intercultural communication to bridge the gap, in terms
of public health messaging, between experts in the Humanities and the
general public. Mobilisations of public opinion in the last decade that
brought about seismic social and political shifts, such as the election of
Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum in the same year, arguably saw
the rhetorical tools of the Humanities being deployed more effectively for
purposes of mis/disinformation than for those of information. The same
trend has been seen at key moments during the Covid pandemic, and in
all cases, the failure to provide compelling counternarratives to prevailing,
populist discourses might, at worst, be seen as a failure of communication
on the part of Humanities scholars, or more positively as an opportunity
that must absolutely be seized.
This book thus sits at a previously unconsidered intersection between
debates around interdisciplinary collaboration and communication, theo-
ries of intercultural contact and encounter, and the role of the Humanities
in tackling global challenges. These intersections are woven throughout
the chapters that follow. Chapters 2 and 3 provide case studies for apply-
ing these adapted theoretical models to specific scenarios, dilemmas and
challenges raised by Covid. These challenges are multiple. In narrowing
the focus, therefore, I retain the underlying motif of intercultural contact,
allowing it to become a thematic lens for the book as much as a theoretical
one, a key reason being that travel, mobility and the representation of
other cultures have been live issues during the Covid pandemic. Chapter
2 draws on literary and cinematic sources to interrogate and challenge the
 1 INTRODUCTION: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT COVID 19

rhetoric of cosmopolitanism that has defined the mediatised narrative of

‘global solutions for a global crisis’. A satirical novel enables a debate
around controversial strategies such as herd immunity, while a documen-
tary film prompts an uncomfortable reflection on who we should care for,
through a consideration of the boundaries of compassion within our local,
national and global communities. Chapter 3 then focuses on the impact of
restrictions on mobility during Covid, relating it to questions of human
rights, before progressing to a consideration of how literary works may
provide a roadmap for the necessary recalibration of travel on a sustainable
basis that Covid has arguably forced us to confront. I argue here that it is
not through narratives depicting a situation similar to the one we are expe-
riencing, for example, a pandemic novel or contagion film, that we can
actively engage with the contentious debates that need to be had about
the challenges Covid raises, but rather at a critical distance, via a thematic
context that allows us to question our normative values and assumptions,
a key example of which, I argue, are travel narratives which typically place
the self in the position of other.
Having argued in Chaps. 2 and 3 why ‘needing to talk about Covid’ is
not best effected by reference to artistic narratives of plague, pandemic or
contagion, as many scholars have argued in making the case for the value
of the Humanities (the Humanities Coronavirus Syllabus is a case in
point), I offer a practical roadmap in Chap. 4 to help researchers seeking
to have front-line impact, to undertake long-distance interdisciplinary
research, and indeed to communicate effectively with the public at large.
This ties in the threads woven together at a theoretical level in Chap. 1.
In terms of the range of artistic artefacts considered here, the vast
majority are from a French or francophone context, as reflects my own
disciplinary background. However, the relevance of the arguments is in no
sense intended to be limited to a readership working in French Studies.
The debates they prompt around the thematic core of (literal and meta-
phorical) travel, mobility and intercultural communication transcend
national boundaries, such that the arguments proposed—and indeed the
roadmap in Chap. 4—may be readily translated across cultural contexts,
disciplinary boundaries and even other global challenges. To that end, all
quotations are provided in the original French, but are also translated into
English.8

8
All translations are included in parentheses following the quotation in the original lan-
guage. Where these are from published translations, they are included in inverted commas
with the published version referenced; where they are my own, they are included without
inverted commas.
20 M. TOPPING

My aim is ultimately to answer the question of how the Humanities can

be front-line services in addressing global challenges, here in the context
of the pandemic, but also beyond. By front-line services, I mean tools that
can actively and strategically be deployed to mobilise and motivate com-
munities and populations, not merely for the purposes of awareness-­
raising, or to enable individuals to make sense of their experience by
empathising with that of a fictional character. Cognitive health expert
Jenny Brockis offers a light-hearted distinction between empathy and
compassion by imagining the scenario of a fellow traveller on a boat falling
overboard. Empathy, she argues, is sharing their pain, so you jump over-
board with them; compassion is reaching out a hand to help them back in.
Empathy can create paralysis; compassion generates a bias towards action.
This book seeks to make the case for the Humanities serving to do more
than generate empathy. At a time of crisis, let’s not jump out of the boat
ourselves, but be part of the rescue.

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10.1080/15487733.2011.11908067
 CHAPTER 2

Cosmopolitanism, Monoculture
and Inequality

Abstract This chapter argues that the Humanities can act as a front-line
service in tackling global crises by facilitating uncomfortable policy debates
to happen in real time and in ways that may genuinely shift public opinion.
Among the Covid debates that were resisted as ‘too hot to handle’ politi-
cally, or too threatening to our self-perception as liberal cosmopolitans to
engage in, were the possibility of (a) introducing a herd immunity strategy
and (b) genuinely asking who we should care for and why. Two works of
art—Amélie Nothomb’s extreme dystopian satire, Péplum, and Agnès
Varda’s stinging and compassionate film about food poverty in France, Les
Glaneurs et la glaneuse—can facilitate debates which may impact policy
and/or promote social activism in real time precisely because they are at (at
least) one remove from the pandemic. The same potential cannot be
realised, I argue, through artistic narratives representing pandemic or con-
tagion, albeit these have been the focus of many Humanities scholars.
What may prompt a new way of thinking, rather, is the unique capacity of
the work of art for ‘affect’, that is, its capacity to prompt a response of
near-simultaneous reason and emotion which I describe as an ‘ethics of
awkwardness’.

Keywords Cosmopolitanism • Monoculture • Herd immunity •

Compassion • Affect • Nothomb • Varda

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 23

Switzerland AG 2023
M. Topping, The Humanities Pandemic,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31629-6_2
24 M. TOPPING

Introduction: Global Crisis, Global Solutions?

If watery metaphors have helped us think through the distinction between
empathy and compassion, they persist also in the seemingly unanimous
view that, in terms of the Covid response, ‘we sink or swim together’.
With these words, the Head of the World Health Organisation, Dr Tedros
Adhanom Ghebreyesus, variously echoes the formal statements of the
World Economic Forum, the ethical call for unity by The Elders, and the
sensationalising discourse of media headlines: Covid is a global crisis
requiring global solutions (‘UN News’, 2020). But while the scientific
response—that is, the quest for, and delivery of a vaccine—was certainly a
global one, albeit with elements of competition among nations to win the
race—and indeed, so-called vaccine nationalism persists in terms of supply
chain and distribution (Vanderslott, 2021)—, is the same necessarily true
of the social, ethical and behavioural responses it demands? Individual
programmes of research, such as the AHRC-funded ‘Home is where the
impact is’ project, certainly acknowledge the need for a contextualisation
of what ‘home’ means in relation to culture, ethnicity and other factors
such as age group, but scholarly calls for the importance of Arts, Humanities
and Social Sciences research in tackling the pandemic and its aftermath
have typically not engaged critically with this discourse of celebratory
globalism.
This chapter explores a number of such issues and does so through the
prism of artistic objects of study. These are consciously not artefacts which
represent health crises such as the one we have been experiencing since the
beginning of 2020, notwithstanding the wealth of possibilities to consider
works of art that do so, as identified within the Humanities Coronavirus
syllabus. I argue, rather, that if we are to interrogate fully some of the
uncomfortable issues raised by the Covid pandemic, we require a critical
distance that allows for thorny questions to be debated ‘at one remove’
and often through irony and satire, particularly when it comes to potential
strategies for dealing with the crisis that are politically explosive, sensation-
alist in media terms, and therefore bordering on taboos. These might
include a frank debate about the logical outworkings of a herd immunity
strategy, which requires a potentially uneasy consideration of the tension
between individual rights and the collective good. For example, if we
focus on the collective good, at what level does that operate? Is it suprana-
tional, national, sub-national or at the level of local communities? How far
can compassion extend? Indeed, are there risks associated with an
 2 COSMOPOLITANISM, MONOCULTURE AND INEQUALITY 25

attempted ‘global’ response? At one end of the spectrum, it may presup-

pose a level of cultural similarity—to the point of an assumed ‘monocul-
ture’—which fails to recognise the need for place-based responses. At the
other end of the spectrum, and as Rousseau highlights in The Social
Contract, feeling compassion for everyone in theory can be a mask for act-
ing with compassion towards no one in practice. And if we focus instead
on individual human rights, let us not forget—notwithstanding the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights—that the values associated with
the concept are also culturally and linguistically contingent. This chapter
proposes a new way of having those debates.

Who Do We Care For? A Cosmopolitan Conundrum

Cosmopolitanism as a philosophical position is grounded in the principle
of a universal community of world citizens; as such, we can certainly
describe the Covid-19 pandemic as a cosmopolitan phenomenon, for it
has affected every human being, directly or indirectly, and has encour-
aged, globally, a new sense of purpose, community and empathy. However,
different versions of cosmopolitanism envision this community in differ-
ent ways, with some focusing on political institutions, others on moral
norms or relationships, and others placing shared markets or forms of
cultural expression at the core (Kleingeld & Brown, 2019; Woodward
et al., 2008). In most cases, the concept functions as a positive ideal to be
cultivated. However, cosmopolitanism risks acquiring a dangerous double
edge if it is allowed to stand as the shorthand identity for an elite, ultra-­
mobile, educated class that takes its own position and values as normative
and sees the community of global citizens as comprising reflections of
itself rather than its underprivileged, immobile, marginalised Other. Such
a position can serve to reinforce inequalities, to deepen cultural precon-
ceptions and to preserve a liberal but apathetic attitude of beneficence.
The hypocrisy of such a position is called out by the twenty-sixth-century
scientist, Celsius, with whom the protagonist of Amélie Nothomb’s 1996
novel, Péplum, known only as A.N., engages in moral and philosophical
debate having been transported into the future from her temporal home
in 1995. The world in which the novelist A.N. finds herself is explored in
a fuller discussion of the novel below, but as an opening indication, the
response of Celsius to A.N.’s outrage at the idea that the twenty-second
century’s response to the global energy crisis was ‘l’anéantissement du
26 M. TOPPING

Sud’ [the annihilation of the South] (Nothomb, 1996, p. 110) offers a

telling insight:

–– Au milieu du vingt-deuxième siècle, l’humanité a été forcé de choisir:

quelle catégorie humaine allait-on sacrifier? Les handicapés? Ils n’étaient
pas assez nombreux. Les Chinois? Ils étaient trop puissants. Les gens trop
laids? Le critère était flou. Les intellectuels? Ils étaient amusants. Les
gros? On les aimait bien. Et puis, pourquoi chercher si loin, quand il
existait une race aussi déplaisante que les pauvres? Les pauvres—pouah!
Quelle espèce détestable. Savez-vous pourquoi les pauvres étaient haïss-
ables? Parce qu’ils donnaient mauvaise conscience. Quand on croise un
boudin ou un malade mental, on ne se sent pas coupable: c’est un boudin
parce que c’est un boudin, c’est un malade mental parce qu’il est né
comme ça. Mais quand on se retrouvait nez à nez avec un pauvre, il était
difficile à ne pas se dire: “Si je lui donnais la moitié de mon avoir, il ne
serait plus pauvre.” Ça aussi, c’est de la logique.
–– J’ai envie de vomir.
–– Pourquoi? Je vous ai appris quelque chose? A votre époque aussi, on
détestait les pauvres. (Nothomb, 1996, p. 111)

–– [In the mid-22nd century, humanity was forced to make a choice: which
category of human being was to be sacrificed? Handicapped people?
There weren’t enough of them. The Chinese? They were too powerful.
People who were too ugly? The criterion was too hard to pin down.
Intellectuals? They were amusing. Fat people? Everyone liked them. And
on top of that, why search so hard when a race as unpleasant as the poor
was right there? The poor—ugh! What a detestable species. Do you
know why the poor were so hateful? Because they gave everyone a bad
conscience. When you come across an ugly old bag or someone who is
mentally ill, you don’t feel guilty. She’s an ugly old bag because she’s an
ugly old bag. He’s mentally ill because he was born like that. But when
you came face to face with a poor person, it was hard not to say to your-
self, ‘If I gave them half of what I own, they wouldn’t be poor anymore.’
That’s logical.
–– I want to throw up.
–– Why? Have I told you something you didn’t know? In your era, your
detested the poor too.]

On the surface, Nothomb’s novel is fanciful in the satirical extremes of

the dystopia it presents. This is an environment which provides a
 2 COSMOPOLITANISM, MONOCULTURE AND INEQUALITY 27

light-­hearted echo of Aldous Huxley’s (2007) Brave New World, a world

envisioned by Nothomb in which human beings are classified according to
intellect and, on that basis, by function, where nationalities no longer
exist, where spiritual beliefs have been eradicated in favour of science,
technology and logic, where a form of ‘benign’ tyranny has been assessed
to be the most efficient mode of government, and where energy is the
supreme value. It thus transports us into the world warned of by James
Bridle (2015) in New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. The
novel stands as a playful Gulliver’s Travels or Lettres persanes in which the
traveller—here a time-traveller—is forced to confront some of the failings,
absurdities and idiosyncrasies of her own culture through interaction with
another, However, it also satirises the future world in which the ultimate
utilitarian logic has not only erased any moral compass in the traditional
sense but has actually slid into unknowing (or unacknowledged) corrup-
tion. And yet, Celsius’ position has as much of a cosmopolitan underpin-
ning as A.N.’s; it simply has a different complexion. Within the taxonomy
of contemporary cosmopolitanisms, Celsius arguably aligns most closely
to an economic cosmopolitanism (Went, 2004), while A.N. espouses a
moral cosmopolitanism, both of which have their exponents and their
intellectual validity, however extreme the logical outworkings of the posi-
tion adopted by Celsius’ world may seem when unfettered by humanist
concerns.
Celsius espouses what could be seen as a curious blend of economic
and cultural cosmopolitanisms, both of which are taken to their extremes.
His cultural cosmopolitanism certainly rejects any exclusive attachments
to a particular culture in the sense that the world that he inhabits articu-
lates no strong nationalism. In fact, nations no longer exist, albeit the
motivation is less a desire to encourage cultural diversity—a common prin-
ciple within cultural cosmopolitanism—as it is to do with creating a geo-
political structure which is most conducive to the key measure of success
in this future world, namely ‘la rentabilité’ [profitability/return]. This
world may recognise the value of diversity in its population, but only to
the extent that it facilitates a rigid system of classification according to IQ
which in turn dictates function, with the effect that no individual has any
doubts as to their purpose in life. This includes those whose IQ would
previously have made them administrators or civil servants but who are
now obsolete as their jobs have been computerised. To ensure they have
some purpose, they are now employed, as A.N. learns to her astonish-
ment, in crossword factories. On discovering that all administrative jobs
28 M. TOPPING

are now automated—a stark warning about the future of work which has
been called out in books such as The Globotics Upheaval (Baldwin, 2019)
and which the twenty-first century is only now beginning to confront—
A.N. asks: ‘Où met-on les bons à rien, alors?’ [So where do you put people
who are useless?’]. Celsius replies:

–– Dans les usines de mots croisés.

–– Pardon?
–– Oui. Nous nous sommes rendus compte que les mots croisés réalisés par
ordinateur étaient sans intérêt. Le cruciverbisme demeure le seul terrain
où un homme à petit quotient intellectual peut surpasser une machine.
Aussi, pour que ces gens aient l’impression d’être utiles et ne menacent
pas la paix sociale, nous avons créé de très nombreuses usines de mots
croisés qui ont épongé jusqu’au souvenir du chômage.
–– Mais … y a-t-il une demande pour tous ces mots croisés?
–– Une demande, ça se suscite. Nous avons répandu la passion des mots
croisés chez les 80–100. (Nothomb, 1996, p. 141)

–– [In crossword factories.

–– Excuse me?
–– Yes. We realised that crosswords created by computers were uninterest-
ing. Cruciverbalism remains the only sphere where a person with a low
IQ can outdo a machine. Also, so that people had the sense of being
useful and didn’t threaten the peace, we created a great many crossword
factories which eradicated the very memory of unemployment.
–– But… is there a demand for all those crosswords?
–– The demand is growing. We’ve spread the passion for crosswords among
those with an IQ of 80–100.]

It is here that Celsius’ world shades more fully into a version of eco-
nomic cosmopolitanism, a position which advocates for free trade and
minimal political intervention (Went, 2004) and is thus espoused more
commonly by economists and politicians than by philosophers who are
more likely to focus on the risks it poses of increased inequalities. Of
course, Celsius’ world is not a global free market economy of the kind we
understand in contemporary capitalism, for markets do not appear to exist
as a form of currency exchange at all; it is also taken to an absurd extreme,
for it is in no sense a libertarian model, and it is supranational in a way that
has eliminated all sense of community. Here, cosmopolitanism is neither a
 2 COSMOPOLITANISM, MONOCULTURE AND INEQUALITY 29

human nor a humanist value. But this takes us into fertile ground for
debate when we consider the role of cosmopolitanism in the context of
our current crisis. Here, too, multiple ‘competing’ cosmopolitanisms co-­
exist and are ‘messaged’ across sectors and disciplines in ways that could
generate ‘creative chances’ (Snow, 1990), or new ‘contact zones’ (Pratt,
1991), but which may equally underpin discourses of misinformation or
disinformation and propaganda for political point-scoring.
Moreover, Celsius’ arguments in relation to the expendability of human
lives, in response to a greater good for civilisation as a whole, offers an
uncomfortable rehearsal for debates around permitting the spread of
Covid-19, without preventative measures or treatment, to encourage so-­
called herd immunity. The scientific arguments for this are clear. Herd
immunity is the term used to determine the proportion of the population
that needs to be immune in order to prevent a disease from spreading, a
figure which varies from disease to disease. For example, it is as high as
90% for measles, while the journal Nature estimated that the figure might
be more like 50% for Covid which, in the case of countries such as France
and the US, ‘would translate into 100,000–450,000 and
500,000–2,100,000 deaths, respectively’ (Fontanet & Cauchemez, 2020,
p. 584). Such an estimate thus immediately comes into a position of ten-
sion with the moral arguments against the strategy, in part because public
understanding of what is in reality a ‘fundamental epidemiological con-
cept’ has been subverted. As Jahnavi Gupta (2020, n.p.) argues:

The truth is that herd immunity is a way of preventing vulnerable people

from dying. It is achieved at the expense of some people dying, and we can
stop that by protecting the vulnerable class in the process. In an ideal situa-
tion, you would protect the vulnerable as best you can, let people go about
their business, allow herd immunity to build up, make sure the economy
doesn’t crash, make sure the arts are preserved, and make sure qualities of
kindness and tolerance remain in place.

However, the fact that any hint at a debate on this question was imme-
diately sensationalised on news channels and social media arguably pre-
vented the dialogue from gaining traction, with a generalised moral
cosmopolitanism focused on protecting the elderly and vulnerable and
minimising loss of life prevailing in the face of political fragility to opinion
polls. The two are not incompatible, but in the popular imagination, only
extreme alternatives were heard. Finnish philosopher Matti Häyry has
30 M. TOPPING

summed up the challenge of tackling this moral conundrum between utili-

tarianism, libertarianism, the golden rule and the common good on the
public stage:

We simply do not know which choice will, in the end, be the best life saver,
health promotor, or quality-adjusted life-year producer overall. Since many
of the ill effects of the two choices are not commensurable, utilitarian deci-
sions cannot be made, let alone communicated accurately to the general
public. If the public is not going to try to save the most lives, then the most
severe obstacle for utilitarian truth telling will be that the choice is unpalat-
able. If the government tries to prioritize reviving the economy, then telling
the truth would also require them to predict how many lives would be lost
as a consequence. People would then argue that the sacrifice is immoral and
point out that the lives lost would be in vulnerable groups. (Häyry, quoted
in Gupta 2020)

So, for example, Boris Johnson sparked an uproar in March 2020 when
he proposed a herd immunity strategy and later backtracked (‘Guardian’,
2020). And yet, as one commentator noted at the time, the ‘prima facie
case for abandoning a containment strategy in favour of the pursuit of
herd immunity is strong. COVID-19 is more than just a health problem.
The pandemic has crippled economies around the world, and the situation
has only been exacerbated by social distancing and lockdown measures
around the globe. The government’s response to a public health crisis can
have radical implications for the economy. […] And the economy matters’
(Symons, 2020). Subsequently, the debate evolved into the right not to be
vaccinated, with increasing numbers of employers withdrawing sick pay
for unvaccinated employees who contract Covid (‘Sky’, 2022), or indeed
into debates on access to healthcare, with some calls for the unvaccinated
who contract Covid to be denied the right to an intensive care bed (Gibbs,
2021). And yet, the dialogue between the scientific, economic and human-
ist positions has been shown to be ‘too hot to handle’ in many political
contexts. This chapter therefore explores whether a fictional dystopian
vision might offer a cooler lens.
 2 COSMOPOLITANISM, MONOCULTURE AND INEQUALITY 31

Amélie Nothomb’s Péplum: The Two Cultures

in Dialogue

Nothomb’s 1996 novel is one that has garnered relatively little critical
attention in comparison with more celebrated texts in her extensive corpus
such as Stupeur et tremblements or Le sabotage amoureux. Where critics
have referenced it, it is typically in terms of its structure which, alongside
texts including Hygiène de l’assassin, reflects a verbal duel between a male
and female character (Jordan, 2003; Hutton, 2002). Dewez (2016) has
also considered its alignment with science fiction and with utopian litera-
ture. Its lesser popularity may in part be due to the initially disorienting
dialogic structure. There are no chapters beyond an initial and concluding
framing device for the main dialogue between A.N. and Celsius which
lasts for approximately 140 pages with only very rare breaks in their con-
versation or explicit markers of who is speaking; the dialogue often includes
complex scientific neologisms and jargon on the part of Celsius; the dia-
logue progresses allusively; there is no clear conclusion; and no obvious
victor in this verbal confrontation.
The premise of the text is also somewhat challenging to grasp. The
novel begins with a conversation between A.N. (whom we do not yet
know as such) and an interlocutor (not Celsius whom at this point we have
yet to meet) that takes place in a hospital shortly before A.N. is to have an
operation. During the conversation, she proposes the seemingly absurd
idea that it is too unlikely a coincidence that the one ancient Greek city to
have been destroyed, but also ultimately preserved, by the eruption of
Mount Vesuvius, that is, Pompeii, just happened to have been one of the
most artistically and cultural sophisticated cities in the ancient world. She
ponders the fact that ‘L’ensevelissement de Pompéi sous les cendres de
Vésuve, en 79 après Jésus-Christ, a été le plus beau cadeau qui ait été offert
aux archéologues’ (p. 5) [the burial of Pompeii beneath the ashes of
Vesuvius in AD 79 was the most beautiful present that could ever have
been given to archaeologists]; and the hypothesis she finally articulates, at
the end of this brief, opening dialogue, is that:

Les scientifiques du futur, qui auront les moyens de voyager dans le passé,
sont les responsables de l’éruption du Vésuve en 79 après Jésus-Christ.
Mobile du crime: préserver, sous les cendres et les laves, le plus bel exemple
du cité antique—mieux: le joyau historique de l’art de vivre! (p. 8)
32 M. TOPPING

[Scientists of the future, who will have the means of travelling to the past,
are responsible for the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. The motive for the
crime: to preserve, beneath the ashes and the lava, the most beautiful exam-
ple of an ancient city—better still: the historic showpiece of the art of living!]

Her interlocutor jokingly suggests that she needs a rest and that her
editor is overworking her. However, her guess is correct, and she is trans-
ported into the future to prevent the truth becoming known. She wakes
up and, in a short first-person retrospective narrative, describes how the
hospital has become unrecognisable, how she finds herself lying down in a
room the size of a ballroom, on a bed suspended from the ceiling two
metres above the floor, that moves like ‘une escarpolette’ [a swing] when
she moves. She rises, walks to the door: ‘Je l’ouvris et je tombai dans le
vide’ (p. 11) [I opened it and fell into the void.]. On the following page,
the reader dives straight into the interaction between A.N. and Celsius
which has some of the characteristics of a Socratic dialogue, but is also
reminiscent of the inescapable, unrelenting, claustrophobic encounter of
the three protagonists in Sartre’s (1973) Huis Clos whose every action in
their lives is subjected to the unflinching scrutiny of the other two and
during which each is forced to acknowledge the truth of their motivations
and actions in life.
The text is comic and satirical; there are also elements of farce and slap-
stick; but as with so many of Nothomb’s works, this light-hearted surface
belies a more philosophical engagement with fundamental questions of
the role of nation states, the questions of community, empathy and char-
ity, questions of ethics and values, the tensions/interplay between science
and technology and the arts, and, linked to that, the tensions between
utility and beauty as guiding values for the organisation of our society.
Typically of Nothomb, no clear answers or moral position emerges.
Rather, the novel prompts us to reflect on the integrity of our own values
and beliefs, the genuineness of our proclamations of community and cos-
mopolitanism, our capacity for self-deception, and indeed our own sus-
ceptibility to superficial propaganda and discourse.
At a time, therefore, when the possibility of any discussion of what
might be perceived to be extreme tactics, such as a strategy of herd immu-
nity, became deeply challenging because of the outrage it tended to engen-
der (the equivalent in Nothomb’s novel is, as discussed below, the
annihilation of the Southern half of the globe), Nothomb’s text offers a
provocative and extreme enactment of such a discussion that replicates
 2 COSMOPOLITANISM, MONOCULTURE AND INEQUALITY 33

also the outraged response in such a way as, arguably, to neutralise it. This
is what the work of art can do that no other discussion of policy can. The
following section thus explores some of the areas where the debates
between Celsius and A.N. enable an undiluted engagement with pro-
foundly opposing ideas, each of which have their own logic and philo-
sophical underpinnings in differing cosmopolitan traditions and
reimaginings, however extreme or unpalatable they may seem to any given
reader. The closed space of the context in which A.N. and Celsius find
themselves, with no audience or other interlocutors to judge, direct or
curtail the conversation (beyond the extradiegetical readers who are by
definition silent observers in the debate, and therefore in the space of inac-
tion) means that they have no choice but to reflect on and question their
own philosophical positioning. It is in this affective moment that genuine
challenge and change can begin to emerge, the mechanisms for which can
be applied to our own pandemic context.

Beyond Nationalisms
From the earliest moments in their conversation, we learn that in the
future: ‘—Il n’y a plus de pays. Il n’y a plus que deux orientations: Le
Levant et le Ponant’ (p. 16) [There are no more countries. There are only
two orientations. The Rising and the Setting.’] In this, Celsius’ world
replicates a view put forward by radical eighteenth-century cosmopolitans
such as Anacharsis Cloots that all existing states should be abolished and a
single world state, a ‘Republic of united individuals’, be established under
which all human individuals would be directly subsumed (Cloots, 1792;
Poulson, 2014, p. 93). Yet, the reality is a formal preservation of one of
the key binaries that have defined geopolitical relations for centuries, that
is the East-West axis (as implied by the names ‘Levant’ and ‘Ponant’),
along with its historically unequal power relationships that are associated
with imperialism, colonialism and cultural paternalism. Moreover, the fur-
ther classification of the world’s inhabitants into strict categories and func-
tions by IQ creates not a supranational community, but a series of rigid
castes which may be designed to serve the common good and to benefit
humanity as a whole, but which curtail individual freedoms severely.
A.N. queries why they preserved only two ‘orientations’: ‘Pourquoi ne
pas avoir séparé le Ponant en Ponant boréal et Ponant méridional?’ (p. 96)
[Why did you not separate the Setting into the northern Setting and the
southern Setting?], to which Celsius replies in a typical example of the
34 M. TOPPING

facetious wit that initially drives their conversation forwards: ‘L’exemple

du Yémen et de la Corée ne vous a pas suffi?’ (ibid.) [Were the examples
of Yemen and Korea not enough for you?]. Equally, he argues how the
North-South axis was the one that it was expedient to sacrifice in favour of
the East-West axis. A.N. speculates on the political pressure that must have
been required to convince the general public that none of their objections
to wiping out the South should stand, on which point Celsius again cor-
rects her with the paternalism of a mock indulgent parent:

–– Détrompez-vous, ma pauvre enfant. Jamais idée n’a été acceptée avec

autant d’entrain et de soulagement par l’humanité survivante. Je vous l’ai
dit: les gens n’auraient pas eu la force de continuer à vivre avec une cul-
pabilité aussi écrasante. Là on leur offrait une échappatoire merveilleuse:
“Le génocide? Quel génocide? Les gens du Sud? Qu’est-ce que c’est le
Sud? Ça n’existe pas. Jamais entendu parler.”
–– L’hypocrisie a-t-elle pu aller jusque-là?
–– C’est n’est pas de l’hypocrisie. C’est l’instinct de conservation. Vous
n’avez pas l’air de comprendre à quel point l’anéantissement du Sud était
nécessaire. Vous n’aviez pas tort, tout à l’heure, de dire que l’axe Nord-
Sud était terrible, vous savez, l’axe qui séparait les nantis des crève-la-
faim. Ce n’était plus tenable. L’invasion des pauvres n’était même plus
une menace, c’était une fatalité numérique’ (p. 113).

–– [Don’t deceive yourself, my poor child. Never was an idea accepted with
as much gusto and relief by those who were going to survive. I told you:
people would not have had the strength to continue to live with such
crushing guilt. This offered them a marvellous escape route: ‘Genocide?
What genocide? The people of the South? What is this ‘South’? Doesn’t
exist. Never heard of it.’
–– Can hypocrisy really have reached such levels?
–– It’s not hypocrisy. It’s the instinct for survival. You don’t seem to under-
stand precisely how necessary it was for the South to be wiped out. You
weren’t wrong just now when you said that the North-South axis was a
terrible one, you know, the axis that separated the well-off from the
starving. It just wasn’t tenable anymore. The invasion of the poor wasn’t
even just a threat anymore, it was a numerical inevitability.]

It is at this moment that we return to the comment quoted above

(p. 17) as to the rationale for the eradication of the South (which he
equates to ‘the poor’) over other groups considered such as the ugly, the
 2 COSMOPOLITANISM, MONOCULTURE AND INEQUALITY 35

Chinese, the ‘handicapped’ or the fat. A.N. espouses a moral cosmopoli-

tanism that transcends nation states and is grounded in a common con-
cern for all of humanity (Dallmayr, 2003; Dufek, 2013). Yet that too is
punctured, for just as Rousseau, in The Social Contract, criticises cosmo-
politans for boasting that they love everyone [tout le monde—the entire
world] to have the right to love no one, Celsius repeatedly debunks A.N.’s
claims that the twentieth century genuinely cared, even suggesting that
within this form of cosmopolitanism lies a form of ultra-individualism.
Thus, while Celsius’ articulation of the rationale for the decision to wipe
out the South is coldly counter-intuitive, A.N.’s empathy is little more
than a generalised ethical stance, the concrete outworkings or practical
examples of which Celsius challenges her to demonstrate.

Science, Language and Art

The dialogue between A.N. and Celsius can be read as a humorous enact-
ment of the relationship between the two cultures described by C.P. Snow.
Indeed, the biting tone of his indictment of the mutual disdain which
marks the relationship between the ‘scientists’ and the ‘literary intellectu-
als’ finds its ready reflection in Péplum. As described by C.P. Snow, they
speak two different languages. Celsius initially bamboozles A.N. with com-
plex scientific jargon and distrusts her on the sole basis that she is a novelist
and therefore a ‘manipulatrice de mots’ (p. 22) [a manipulator of words].
Initially the power dynamic between the two cultures would appear firmly
to favour Celsius. Even in terms of the volume of speech accorded him in
the first part of the book, Celsius has by far the stronger voice. His style is
that of a confident orator; he pronounces at length on his intelligence, the
superiority of his era and the rightness of his/its logic. A.N. in contrast is
reduced to the briefest expressions of outrage and sarcastic incredulity. The
following extract provides a flavour of their interaction:

–– Pour déplacer un point, il est nécessaire de désintégrer ses coordonnées.

Le “maintenant” fut on ne peut plus simple à détruire. Pour dissiper la
détermination “ici”, il suffisait de mettre en apesanteur la chose que nous
voulions transporter—chose qui paraissait devoir être un humain, c’est-
à-dire un individu. Faire disparaître ce “moi” fut autrement difficile.
Comment enlever à quelqu’un la conscience de son individualité sans
toucher à son équilibre mental?
36 M. TOPPING

–– Ces scrupules m’étonnent de vous.

–– Ce n’étaient pas des scrupules. Pour que notre voyage ait une quel-
conque valeur, il nous fallait un voyageur sain d’esprit. Cela va de soi.
–– Comment avez-vous fait?
–– Sans Marnix, rien n’eût été possible. Il réunissait deux formations sans
rapport apparent: il était physicien et spécialiste de l’épilepsie.
–– Et alors?
–– L’épilepsie, qui n’est pas vraiment une maladie, est un phénomène beau-
coup plus répandu qu’on ne le croit. En dehors des crises, l’épileptique
est un sujet sain. Pendant, son triple détermination M.I.M. s’évapore
complètement.
–– Ne me dites pas que vous avez envoyé en migration temporelle des épi-
leptiques en pleine crise!
–– Mais si.
–– C’est monstrueux!
–– Vous êtes aussi bornée que les comités éthiques de votre siècle. Où est le
mal? La crise d’épilepsie, qu’elle soit grave our bénigne, est une absence.
Le sujet ne se rend absolument pas compte de la transplantation.
–– […]

–– [To move a single point, you must disintegrate its coordinates. The
“now” couldn’t have been simpler to destroy. To dissipate the determi-
nation “here”, it was sufficient to place the thing that we wanted to
transport into zero gravity—the thing being a human being, an individ-
ual. Making this “me” disappear was the hard part. How do you remove
someone’s consciousness of their individuality without affecting their
mental equilibrium?
–– Such scruples amaze me from you.
–– It had nothing to do with scruples. If the journey was to have any value
whatsoever, the traveller had to be of sound mind. That goes with-
out saying.
–– How did you do it?
–– Without Marnix, none of this would have been possible. He combined
two forms of expertise with no apparent link: he was both a physicist and
a specialist in epilepsy.
–– So?
–– Epilepsy, which isn’t really an illness, is a much more common phenom-
enon than people think. Outside their fits, they are totally healthy sub-
jects. During their fits, their triple determination N.H.M [Now Here
Me] evaporates completely.
 2 COSMOPOLITANISM, MONOCULTURE AND INEQUALITY 37

–– Don’t tell me you sent epileptics travelling through time when they were
in the middle of a fit!
–– Yes we did.
–– That’s monstrous!
–– You are just as limited as the ethics committees of your century. Where’s
the harm? The epileptic fit, whether it is serious or minor, is an absence.
The subject has no awareness whatsoever of being transplanted elsewhere.]

A.N. wonders, aghast, whether all of the inhabitants of Pompeii were

plunged into a collective epileptic fit.
As the novel progresses, however, the power relationship begins subtly
to shift, a transition marked visually in the increased volume of speech
progressively accorded the female protagonist and in Celsius’ increasing
recourse to defensiveness and angry retreat. What is striking is the cause of
this shift between the two characters, for while Celsius begins the novel
with a rational, scientific, unquestioning discourse, A.N. begins to see its
flaws when Celsius describes his motivation for wishing to save Pompeii.
Ultimately, his motivation, which he admits he had to conceal from the
Oligarchs who would ultimately approve the plan or not, had more to do
with his love of art, and his faith in its transcendent power, than any utili-
tarian reason. As Celsius talks about Pompeii, its culture and its beauty, his
style of speech subtly evolves into a discourse more suggestive of the nov-
elist than the scientist. Its lyricism is the chink in his protective armour of
reason and science which he unwittingly reveals to A.N. He also ultimately
agrees to send her back to 1995 against the desires of the ruler, ‘le Tyran’
[the Tyrant], so that she can write a novel about him that will preserve
him for anteriority, as posterity is already guaranteed by his actions in pre-
serving Pompeii.
Literature thus shifts from being subjected to ridicule to becoming the
perceived ultimate means of glorifying Celsius’ esteemed career. In
between, a fanciful historical account by Celsius of the various evolutions
that literature underwent in the twenty-second century comes to symbol-
ise, albeit in comically absurd mode, the clash between the two cultures
when one tries to absorb the other without an attempt at
translation/intercultural communication. The conversation emerges from
a comment made by Celsius to the effect that whales have replaced cows
as a source of milk, and ostriches have replaced chickens as a source of eggs
as the previous animals produced an insufficient ‘rendement’ [return]. He
concludes by commenting how in his time ‘nous aimons ce qui est grand’
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 Transcriber’s Notes
The language used in this e-text is that used in the
source document. Inconsistencies and unusual
spelling and style have been retained. Differences
in wording between lists of subjects, the table of
contents and the text have not been rectified.
Errors or unclear data in calculations and (table)
data have not been corrected except when the
source of the error was clear; such corrections are
mentioned under Changes made below.
Not all drawings in the available scans were of
sufficient quality to view all details; texts and
dimensions in particular may be illegible.
Internal references have been hyperlinked only
when this was considered useful, and when there
was a clear and unambiguous target.
Pages 118-125 and 267-272: the unusual use of
quote marks has not been standardised.
Page 224, table: the column “per cent” contains the
decimal fraction, not the percentage.
Page 241: reference letters A and B are not visible
in the illustration.
Page 289, “Shank cut off above the knee joint ...: the
closing quote mark is missing.
Page 419, Seasoning Formula: Saltpetre is
mentioned twice (in different quantities) in the
source document.
Page 461 ff.: Deviations from the alphabetical order
of entries have not been corrected.
Changes made
Illustrations and tables have been moved out of text
paragraphs. Footnotes have been moved to
 directly underneath the paragraph to which they
refer.
Some obvious minor typographical and punctuation
errors have been corrected silently. In tables, the
ditto-symbol has been replaced with the dittoed
text and some data have been re-aligned for
consistency and legibility.
Temperatures (°F and ° F) and densities (°B and °
B) have been standardised to ° F and ° B,
dimensions and multiplications to m × n, salt petre
and variants to saltpetre.
Page 35: The purchaser must never loose sight ...
changed to The purchaser must never lose sight
....
Page 45: ... a preventive or retardent in the
propogation ... changed to ... a preventive or
retardant in the propagation ....
Page 80: superceding changed to superseding.
Page 155: TEST ON OLIO SCRAP changed to
TEST ON OLEO SCRAP.
Page 163: Cutting Sinews and Saving Bones.
changed to Cutting Sinews and Sawing Bones.
(changed in Index as well).
Page 168, table Test yield of 1,209 cattle: column
header per head Average changed to Average per
head.
Page 191: ... to prevent the tankwater from souring
... changed to ... to prevent the tank water from
souring ....
Page 199, table RECAPITULATION: 15 per cent
depreciation on $10,00 investment changed to 15
per cent depreciation on $10,000 investment.
Page 224, table REGULAR INSIDES FOR
SHIPMENT: column headers inserted cf. the other
two tables on this page.
Page 362: neatsfood oil changed to neatsfoot oil.
Page 437, table MEDIUM GRADE BUTTERINE,
second row: 30,57 changed to 38,57.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MODERN
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