Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell...

These words come from the 20th century Nobel Laureate Hermann Hesse’s masterpiece Narziss and Goldmund. One recalls that the novel has two protagonists, whose names the title announces. Both of them emerge on the narrative’s landscape from the monastery of a medieval church somewhere in the Holy Roman Empire, Narziss being a relatively older teacher of a youthful Goldmund. But despite a relationship between them of mutual complement, of profound and unbroken affection —affection that is complex, ironic, and sometimes intractable — they contradict each other too. Narziss is a man of the mind, of strict intellectual and self-discipline, given to logic, theology, rhetoric, and the regulatory hierarchical structure of the cloisters. But the younger protagonist, Goldmund, is an artist, wild as a colt in an open field, creative, restless, sinful, curious, impulsive.

The novel moves on a symbolic plane in a Christian environment of the plague and post-Crusade Latin European hangover. Predictably, the stifling restrictions of the monastery do not suit the free spirit of Goldmund. So he runs away to become like a character reminiscent of our familiar Amir Hamza — living like an adventurer, a vagabond, indulging in much promiscuity, moving from woman to woman, place to place, dodging, lying, jilting, and also producing highly creative works of art. Then, once during his travels he cultivates a friendship with one Robert and they try to enter a village.

They are refused entry into the village: the plague had broken out in that valley. This part of Hesse’s story rings so familiar to us these days, now that we are ourselves actually and literally in the throes of a pandemic. Goldmund looks at the dead corpses — “they had a fascination for him, it was all full of greatness and fate, so true, so direct.” While not abandoning life’s base pleasures of flesh and worldly desires, it is at this point that the vagrant young man ponders over an irony, the life-death complement attended by contradiction:

He thought the fear of death was perhaps the root of all art, perhaps also of all things of the mind. We fear death, we shudder at life’s instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, as transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do.

This was the same complement and contradiction that existed in the Narziss-Goldmund relationship, now projected inside out on to a valley ravaged and devastated by the plague.

We see the memory of the Black Death of the 14th century ringing throughout European creative literature well into our own times, undergoing fictional reformulations and conceptual reconfigurations, and being turned into a powerful metaphor. In Crime and Punishment, for example, Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov had a dream —

He dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague … some new sorts of microbes were attacking the bodies of men, but these microbes were endowed with intelligence and will…

While we admire the prescience of the Russian author in the 19th century (note: “intelligence and will”), let’s recall that a contemporary of Hesse and another Nobel Prize winner, Thomas Mann, has provided us in his Death in Venice a graphic and disconcerting depiction of the plague in Venice, an imagined pestilence arising out of the bosom of youthful promises found in the playful and joyous life of a Polish youngster. The protagonist here is a writer Aschenbach who is himself, as one critic put it, “the embodiment of the plague. He delights in the plague … the plague will literally die with him.”

Indeed, the echoes of two of the major pandemics known in human history, the Justinian Plague of the 6th century, and the Black Death, ours notwithstanding, are discernible all over — in histories, biographies, medical writings, fiction, music, and the visual arts. We see the ghosts of the Black Death from Shakespeare to Defoe to Hesse, down to the contemporary British musician Shirobon. And as for the earlier plague named after the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, it has cast its shadow also in Islamic normative literature — in Hadith corpora, for instance, from where legal scholars draw rules of quarantine and limitations on congregational prayers, and also perhaps in the Qur’an.

Recall the account of the stone-pelting birds in the 105th chapter, “The Elephant,” an attack that destroyed the army of the Abyssinian Abrahah’s elephants. Here, some commentators, such as the well-regarded Abdullah Yusuf Ali, have speculated that the verses are telling us about sores and pustules on the skin caused by pebbles of “baked clay” (sijjeel) thrown by the birds upon the advancing elephants. Was it some kind of an epidemic like small pox? People have wondered.

It is most significant that in sober moments, the recollections of devastating pandemics have one common feature, as pointed out by the scholar Rene Girard — that it is made sense of as a process of undifferentiation, for it destroys specificities. “It renders all accumulated knowledge and all categories of judgement invalid… It overcomes all obstacles and disregards all frontiers. All life finally is turned into death, which is the supreme undifferentiation.”

In the meantime, let’s pick the flowers with Goldmund. Now that the fumes from vehicular traffic no more pollute our streets these days, doesn’t the moon shine brighter?

The author is Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at the University of Management and Technology in Lahore and Visiting Distinguished Professor at Habib University in Karachi

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, April 19th, 2020