Tell a story to end the pandemic. COVID-19 and the remedy of narration: instances from India and Italy

This paper argues that narration represents an essential tool for dealing with the visible and invisible damages produced by the recent COVID-19 pandemic. To support this argument, the paper briefly examines the concept of narrative structure, suggesting that pandemics also fall under the same pattern (Rosenberg 1989; Steel 1981), and analyses a few well-known fictional and non-fictional accounts of past epidemics. It then concentrates on narrative materials drawn from Indian and Western classical traditions, making evident how narration enacts dynamics that help overcome crises by inducing awareness and proposing alternative points of view. The second part of the study analyses a few stories produced during the recent health emergency in two of the most affected countries – India and Italy – bringing to light the healing and transforming power of narrative also in the event of epidemics. Converted into stories, the adversities experienced during the pandemic can in fact demonstrate “that hard times don’t just break a person; they also can make a person” (Basu 2021), which is particularly true in the case of autobiographical narratives and collective articulations of the experiences lived during the crisis. At the societal level, these elaborations of the pandemic conflict with the mainstream narrative constructed by restricted groups of actors, characterized by a rigid conceptual framework and its dramatic vocabulary. This process of elaboration however is opposed by the tendency to forget, since “humans seem to forget about these tragic events quickly” (Perrino 2021, p. 7). It is between these two opposite tendencies, then – the temptation, or the need, to forget, and the duty to narrate in order to remember and to heal – that a way out of the crisis must be found. We still have to ask ourselves what lessons – if any – have been learned: “Have the dead died in vain? Has a heedless society reverted to its accustomed ways of doing things as soon as denial became once more a plausible option?” (Rosenberg 1989, p. 9).