Historical accounts can rarely capture the experience of narrative vertigo, the dizzying sense of scrambling for traction in midair before a finished story is possible. How do we represent the peculiar anxiety of not knowing how many of our fears came true and how many did not, of a time before we knew when a cataclysm would end, or how it would end, or if it ever would?
The writers I study — and the works they produced in the wake of personal, visceral experiences with the influenza pandemic — powerfully represent the burdens of such uncertainty. Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” completed in 1919 while his pregnant wife, George, was recovering from her nearly fatal flu case, plunges the reader into the immediacy of delirium reality, capturing a moment when nations and individual bodies were “turning and turning,” teetering on the edge of collapse. The first stanza is saturated with threats from an unseen presence, something that is drowning innocence and letting loose anarchy and blood-dimmed tides, an insidious danger reflecting global war and revolution, but also an invisible viral threat that filled the lungs and produced massive hemorrhaging.
The narrative vertigo bleeds into the second stanza as the speaker grasps for familiar stories that might map the moment: “Surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand. / The Second Coming!” Does the panic that infuses the language arise from the thought of the second coming, or does the story of the second coming help ease the panic of having no idea what might happen next? Yeats captures the sense of being unmoored, the ways we grasp for patterns and stories, and how those, too, are upended as we wait to see what “Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”
Another type of narrative vertigo is also embedded in the poem, one that may be familiar to those who have been raised on stories: the pain of finding you are telling the wrong story about yourself, that you are not in the story you thought you were. This experience may be collective (we will enjoy a return to normalcy soon!) or individual (after many setbacks, I am now in the healing part of the story). Things have been hard, but you’ve learned the trajectory now — only to be jolted, often violently, out of such plotlines. The pain and vertigo come from the jolt, from the realization that you were wrong, from the fatigue of forming a new story, from the bitterness and distrust the process may engender.