Investigating the impact of the Spanish Flu and its relevance in the contemporary world through the PJAEE, 17 (6) (2020) individual and collective memories of the people lived through it. INVESTIGATING THE IMPACT OF THE SPANISH FLU AND ITS RELEVANCE IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD THROUGH THE INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE MEMORIES OF THE PEOPLE LIVED THROUGH IT. Niranjana, PhD Scholar, Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai [email protected] Dr. G. Bhuvaneswari, Assistant Professor Senior, Vellore Institute of Technology,Chennai [email protected] 9943435572 Niranjana, Dr. G. Bhuvaneswari, Investigating the impact of the Spanish Flu and its relevance in the contemporary world through the individual and collective memories of the people lived through it.-Palarch’s Journal Of Archaeology Of Egypt/Egyptology 17(6), ISSN 1567-214x Abstract: “Memory studies is an interdisciplinary field, and Literature serves as one of the media of cultural memory as history, art and other forms of media”, said by Astrid Erll. According to Maurice Halbwachs, there exists no individual memory but a collective memory. Our memory is the product of the personal individual experiences informed by the societal practices. This study examines the convergence of the individual and collective memory of the common people, medical historians and scientistswho lived through the Spanish Flupandemic to understand the impact of it through the book, “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World” by Laura Spinney, a non-fictional account of the Spanish Flu pandemic tracing from its origin to the post-flu world. The biographies, stories and letters act as the sites of memory to understand the impact of the Pandemic and its contemporary relevance. Keywords: Influenza, Pandemic, Memory, Biography, Letters, Memoirs 13754 Investigating the impact of the Spanish Flu and its relevance in the contemporary world through the PJAEE, 17 (6) (2020) individual and collective memories of the people lived through it. Introduction Memory Studies Memory studies has emerged as the tool for exploring, remembering, and analysing the past with the help of literature, art, history, archaeology, and media as the sites of memory. It is an interdisciplinary field and Literature serves as the symbolic representation of the cultural memory as history, art, and other forms of media. Astrid Erll. (Erll, 145) ‘Memory proceeds selectively. From the abundance of events, processes, persons, and media of the past, it is only possible to remember very few elements. As Ernst Cassirer noted, every act of remembering is a ‘creative and constructive process. It is not enough to pick up isolated data of our past experience; we must really re-collect them, we must organize and synthesize them, and assemble them into a focus of thought’ (Cassirer 1944, 51). The selected elements must be formed in a particular manner to become an object of memory. Such formative processes can be detected in many media and practices of memory; they are also – and in fact primarily – found in literature’ There exists clear parallel between memory and cultural artefacts or in other words, literature, arts, history, and media are symbolic representations of memory. According to Maurice Halbwachs, there exists no individual memory but a collective memory. Our individual memory is the product of the individual experiences informed by the societal practices deriving its idea from Wolfgang Iser’s phenomenological approach towards reading process, wherein he propose that the attitudes and reaction of the reader to the text or the pre-conceived notions of the reader are the experiences which form the basis of interpreting/ reading the text. Therefore, reading/decoding the memoriesimplies the reconstruction of the past with present attitudes and beliefs.(Erll, 17) 13755 Investigating the impact of the Spanish Flu and its relevance in the contemporary world through the PJAEE, 17 (6) (2020) individual and collective memories of the people lived through it. ‘Halbwachs makes a sharp distinction between history and memory, which he sees as two mutually exclusive forms of reference to the past. Right at the beginning of his comparison of ‘lived’ memory and ‘written’ history in La memoir collective, Halbwachs emphasizes that ‘general history starts only when tradition ends and the social memory is fading or breaking up’For Halbwachs, history deals with the past. Collective memory, in contrast, is oriented towards the needs and interests of the group in the present, and thus proceeds in an extremely selective and reconstructive manner. Along the way, what is remembered can become distorted and shifted to such an extent that the result is closer to fiction than to a past reality. Memory thus does not provide a faithful reproduction of the past – indeed, quite the opposite is true: ‘A remembrance is in very large measure a reconstruction of the past achieved with data borrowed from the present, a reconstruction prepared, furthermore, by reconstructions of earlier periods wherein past images had already been altered’ (ibid., 68). This already points to what half a century later, within poststructuralist discussions, will be called ‘the construction of reality.’’ Maurice’s ideasoverlaps with Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra and simulation where there is no reality but altered realities (hyper realities) That is, the present interpretations of the past are reconstructed by the present or in other words shaped by the present. This dimension of memory can be a useful tool in interpreting the impact of the Spanish flu Pandemic to better equipped for the future pandemics. (Erll, 150) ‘As Ansgar Nünning (1997) has shown, literature’s power in culture rests on a number of ‘fictional privileges. Fictive narrators, the representation of consciousness, the integration of unproven and even counterfactual elements into the representation of the past, and the symbolic form of literature. It is these privileges that allow us to distinguish between historical fiction and historiography on the level of the text. But according to the ‘logic of literature’ (Hamburger 1957), the 13756 Investigating the impact of the Spanish Flu and its relevance in the contemporary world through the PJAEE, 17 (6) (2020) individual and collective memories of the people lived through it. fictional status of literary works and their resultant depragmatization will also lead to certain restrictions, such as a severely limited claim to referentiality, adherence to facts, and objectivity (see Cohn 1999). Literary representations of the past are distinct from historiography in this aspect. They are also distinct from autobiographies and memoirs – however ‘literary’ in style those may be. Having said this, it must also be conceded that in the social sphere these distinctions are by far not as clear-cut as in literary theory. It is especially in connection with cultural remembrance that we find rather complicated performances of what Philippe Lejeune (1975) has called the ‘autobiographical pact’. ‘ Laura Spinney’s non-fictional account exhibits the quality of biography, history, science, and literature. She collated the isolated data of the past concerning the Spanish Flu, “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World” tracing the Spanish Flu pandemic tracing from its origin to the post-flu world. This study examines the convergence of the individual and collective memory of common people, medical historians and scientists who lived through the Spanish Flupandemic to understand its impact on humanity and its contemporary relevance. Analysis: The non-fictional account of the Spanish Flu by Laura Spinney is the record of the forgotten history of the past. Unlike the existing medical histories of the Spanish Flu, Spinney’s multi-disciplinary approach in investigating the effects of the Spanish Flu act as the site of convergence of the individual and collective memories of the past. The treatise is an account of the recollection of the past reconstructed in the present. It was written after the popular Zika and Ebola epidemics, and it offers multitude of perspectives in the response to Spanish Flu. In Maurice Halbwachs’ words, there exists no individual memory, but collective memories often created as the result of the convergence of 13757 Investigating the impact of the Spanish Flu and its relevance in the contemporary world through the PJAEE, 17 (6) (2020) individual and collective memories of the people lived through it. the individual experiences with the cultural memories and events reconstructed. Laura Spinney retrieves the forgotten cultural memories of the Spanish Flu. The author traces the evolution of the Flu from the pre-historic times dating back to 434 BC to the present, which enable us to understand the inherent characteristics of the virus and its evolution in the present world. The treatise begins with scientific perspectives but gradually moves away from it towards a more historical and humanitarian aspects in understanding the Spanish Flu. Humans and the Flu virusare similar insuch a way that the flu viruscarries its ontological information as the human genes carry information about their evolution. The concept of remembering, forgetting, and reconstructing is embedded in our genetical composition. Every living organism in the world itself acts as a site of memory with respect to its genetical structure and events of the past. The genetical information coded in our cells either remembered or forgotten based on our evolutionary needs. (Spinney, 192) ‘The medical literature contains around fifty reports of babies born with tails – a glimpse of the arboreal primate in all of us.’ The above excerpt is the evidence of the last-born babies with tails. The genetical coding for the development of the coccyx was forgotten from our DNA structure owing to our evolutionary needs. Darwin’s natural selection favours the survival of the fittest. The success of the dominant species not only conforms to human species but any living organism. The virulent strains of the microbes reproduce successfully and affect its host. The genetic structure of the virus reconstructs itself for better survival.