Global Plague, Local Pain: Mourning the Tragedy of Covid

Abstract

The recent pandemic, originating in China but eventually spreading to every continent, highlighted the connections and tensions between the global and local, the collective experience and individual suffering. These tensions between the generic and the particular animate traditional dramatic tragedy. This paper therefore draws on the key features of Aristotle’s ideas of tragedy – hamartia, anagnorisis, catharsis – to attempt to “read” the tragedy of Covid. Our responses to the global pandemic both conformed to traditional tragic practices and also deconstructed them. But this resistance to tragic pattern and intelligibility positions the Covid event para-doxically in line with many tragedies, both dramatic and historical, in our past. Ultimately, it is argued, the tragic tradition carries a moral and political force. Setting individual events within a wider pattern of narrative has the merit of making intelligible what seems particular. It makes it recognisable and therefore grievable.