Responsibility and Community: Narrating the Individual and the Collective in Pandemic Times

Epidemics are times of negotiation between the individual and the collective. The British realist novel, with its emphasis on possessive individualism, turns in the mid-nineteenth century to engage a larger population brought into view, in large part, by the emergence of statistical models of public health. Dickens is critically engaged in this process in Bleak House, which shows the difficulties of negotiating between the plot of individual agency and representing collective suffering and responsibility. Moreover, it highlights one of the major problems of defining such a collective. At a moment when Britons were beginning to understand themselves as part of a worldwide system, specifically in the light of pandemics such as cholera, what is the definition of the society to which one belongs and has responsibility? Dickens reaches for inclusion in his insistence on the linkage between events and bodies in England, but does so in part by implying that other, racialized, bodies - in Borrioboola-gha for example - are beyond that collective and its concerns. In so doing, he appeals to the notion of an ethnically coherent nation-state that was gaining ground in the period. Now we, supposedly beyond the nation-state model, find that we must think about global community within the terms of COVID-19 (and climate change) - precisely when regressive fantasies of the self-enclosed, homogenous nation are being peddled by some of the most politically reactionary governments the West has seen in many decades. This essay uses Dickens to think about the problems and opportunities of representing our global interdependence.