Language in Limbo: Being Suspended between Consolation and Control

Author(s): Reingard Nethersole

Source: Philosophy & Rhetoric , Vol. 53, No. 3, SPECIAL ISSUE: IN THE MIDST OF COVID-
19 (2020), pp. 306-311
Published by: Penn State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/philrhet.53.3.0306

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 Language in Limbo: Being Suspended
between Consolation and Control

Reingard Nethersole

a b s t r ac t

Forced by the COVID-19 pandemic into lockdown during intercontinental

­travels, the author finds herself in limbo. With help from literary precedents such
as Dante, Boccaccio, and Defoe supported by a brief interrogation of contempo-
rary utterances surrounding the master trope “virus,” she claims a chiasmic relation
between the concepts “consolation” and “control.”

Keywords: limbo, state of being, master trope, consolation, control

Supposedly a singular, unique event, the current global health emergency

is by no means a novel occurrence, despite COVID-19 showing hitherto
unknown biomedical traits. Fear of contagion of the (fleshy) body cer-
tainly feels new, gaining intensity in parallel only to the contamination of
vocabulary spreading across all language games from the epidemiological
to the martial, from economics to politics and from psychology to sta-
tistics. However, reactions and responses to the Virus as master signifier,
oscillating between the ancient topos of “consolation” (Boethius) and the
supposedly modern notion of “control of whole populations” (Foucault),
have been figured in Plague stories of the past. Thus Jill Lepore in a recent
article in the New Yorker examines some classic “literature of contagion,”
such as Defoe’s 1722 A Journal of the Plague Year and Camus’s 1947 politi-
cal allegory The Plague, among others. As I “shelter in place” like millions
of people the world over affected by the pandemic, I follow Lepore and
find direction in literary precedents, especially Boccaccio’s response to the
bubonic plague that ravaged Florence, Italy, in 1348. His Decameron points

doi: 10.5325/philrhet.53.3.0306
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 53, No. 3, 2020
Copyright © 2020 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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 special issue | in the midst of covid-19

to ways of how to deal with an existential, world-changing disaster similar

to the one we all face right now, even though I take from his much-admired
predecessor Dante Alighieri the concept of limbo proffered in the Inferno
(Canto 1, 2.2), the first part of the Divine Comedy (ca. 1308–20). It is, after
all, Dante’s landscape of Limbo that perfectly resembles my—and perhaps
even your—current experience of Dasein, making it serve as fitting analogy
for our collective state of Being in these troubled times.
Capitalized “Being” I here use in the sense of denoting existence (Being
as Dasein), whereas by (noncapitalized) being in its continuous present
participle aspect I mean my current state of being suspended between
three jurisdictions of State power, respectively Germany, the United States,
and South Africa, all of which declared an “Ausnahmezustand” (“State of
Emergency,” Chancellor Merkel in Germany), and a “national State of
Disaster” (President Ramaphosa in South Africa) while ordering closure
of all borders with the outside world (the United States), resulting in lock-
down at various times during March. Traveling in the United States on my
way to Johannesburg, South Africa, I was caught by President Trump’s ban
on landing flights from Europe. Thus separated from my usual life-world
in Johannesburg, and not at all certain when I shall be allowed to resume
my journey home, visiting one last time with my aged mother in Germany
on the way, I now am quarantined in rural Virginia. Like everyone else
and luckier than most poverty-stricken peoples in the Global South for
whom “social distancing” due to physical proximity in cramped quarters is
well near impossible, I am badly affected by restrictions of (spatial) move-
ment, not to mention excruciatingly wearisome anxiety about the time it
will take until restrictions are eased. Seeking spiritual comfort I vacillate
between raw emotional reaction and reasoned discursive response to an
in-between state of being betwixt a known past and an uncertain future
that I can neither imagine nor control. Finding myself in Limbo remi-
niscent of Dante’s no-man’s land between heaven and hell, I traverse its
“wasteland” extending from the present “savage wilderness” to the “distant
sun” (Canto 1, 2.2), assaying the hitherto obscured correlation the global
health emergency unwittingly exposes between apparent antonyms such as
consolation and control.
Boccaccio, like Defoe after him, draws a grim picture of Dante’s “waste-
land” when he testifies to the havoc wrought “between March and the fol-
lowing July” by “the virulence of that pestiferous sickness” (Decameron “First
Day”). Yet in contrast to Defoe who had assembled his Journal thirty-three
years after the event, Boccaccio delivers an eyewitness account, uncannily

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 philosophy & rhetoric

resembling current conditions where “the common people (and belike, in

great part, of the middle class also)” are “yet more pitiable to behold, for
that these, for the most part retained by hope or poverty in their houses
and abiding in their own quarters, sickened by the thousand daily and being
altogether untended and unsuccoured, died well nigh all without recourse.”
Moreover, as Boccaccio continues, there was “naught of tears or candles or
funeral train” and “the thing was come to such a pass that folk recked no
more of men that died than nowadays they would of goats.”
Significantly, both authors appreciate the need for “social distancing”
to halt the deadly spread of bacteria that, in the case of the Bubonic Plague,
are transmitted by fleas from rats to humans and vice versa. Amusingly
Defoe’s narrator weighs, just like many people do today, the pros and cons
of economic interest against his own health concerns when he contem-
plates leaving the City of London. Likewise Boccaccio’s narrator together
with seven young women and three men (ironically, the same number cur-
rently permitted for social gatherings in Virginia!) flee from plague-ridden
Florence to a deserted villa in the Tuscan countryside. There they famously
find safety from the looming health hazard and solace for their troubled
psyches, exchanging between them one hundred stories in the space of two
weeks, uncannily the same time period prescribed by current quarantine
measures worldwide.
Though epidemiologically different, it hardly matters if bacteria or the
coronavirus cause a pandemic, since both demand physical separation to
prevent contagion. In this context it is worth noting that the Latin root
of contagion means “fear of touching,” and “virus,” also a Latin borrowing,
means quite literally “slimy liquid” or “poison.” The poisonous COVID-19
might readily nest in mucous membranes yet it transfers as easily onto mul-
tiple tongues, contaminating to great effect the likes of Facebook, YouTube,
and WhatsApp with a witches’ brew of rumors, fake news, and conspiracy
theories. For in today’s multimedia discursive universe there is no getting
away from the signifier Virus that has mutated into an all-encompassing
master trope from the lexicon of the so-called Life Sciences and their con-
cern with what Aristotle named pure or “bare life” (zoë) as distinct from
“form of life” (bios). Bios in contrast to zoë constitutes the subject matter
of the human sciences or humanities, concerned chiefly with linguistic per-
formativity, mindful of the ways in which language permeates any lived-
in environment from a historical and critical standpoint. By saturating an
historically formed repository of available representations with the cur-
rent master trope coronavirus, language has begun to dispense everywhere

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 special issue | in the midst of covid-19

alluring mixtures of hyperbole and imprecision with recourse to mostly

martial metaphors. The narrative of Trump’s belligerent “wartime presi-
dency” for instance, personifies the medical concept “virus” by calling doc-
tors and nurses “frontline soldiers” fighting an invisible “intruder.” Medical
workers together with other indispensable personnel in service industries
are hailed as “brave warriors.” Panicked utterances of this ilk are perilous
because of the destructive imprint they leave on public life, not to men-
tion calls “for an arms race” to combat The Virus. Performatives like these
together with the declaration of a “national competition” for the purpose
of producing a vaccine to eradicate the pandemic might deflect feelings
of fear and frustration, but the language of war does little to comfort an
ambient, intangible sense of all pervasive helplessness on part of an aban-
doned people. In addition, a Manichean division into good and bad, that is,
the well and the ill, the tested and not tested, only provokes animosity in
a Hobbesian-type fight for mere (bodily) survival. Besides, neither health
metrics nor graphs to demonstrate a “flattening of the curve” fed by statistics
on an almost hourly basis, together with “data-driven insights by special-
ists in risk mitigation,” can placate feelings of being, in Boccaccio’s words,
“abandoned, seeing that our kinsfolk, either dying or fleeing from death,
have left us alone in this great tribulation.” Even Defoe had provided his
readers with tables of casualty figures but then as now they say little about
linguistic competence, strangely suspended and overtaken by a cacophony
of voices claiming varying authority and legitimacy. But who speaks for our
collective, fractured state of tactile sociality separated physically in space and
time? Who and what consoles and comforts us mentally and physically in
our present state of Being defined by ambient fear of contagion and nagging
uncertainty about ever reaching what for Dante (Inferno 2.2) was “paradise”?
For me—and perhaps for you—it would be reaching the other side of the
pandemic. But until that happens our sense of chronotopy (time-space rela-
tion) once seen as unshakable remains profoundly unsettled.
With time deferred indefinitely in “lockdown” I look for the kind of
guide Dante, while traversing Limbo, found in the Roman poet Virgil.
Closer to home, perhaps Mandela could serve as model for showing how
to lift the anguish felt by myself and others suspended by “physical dis-
tancing” (the more apt South African term for restructured social inter-
course). After all, Mandela, akin to sixth-century Roman political leader
and thinker Boethius, was incarcerated on Robben Island where in a small
cell during extended times of solitary confinement he mined “the landscape
of his memory,” studied, and “used his prolific letter-writing to family and

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 philosophy & rhetoric

friends to reflect,” as South African journalist Marianne Thamm recently

pointed out.
Literary history credits Boethius, famous for his treatise Consolation
of Philosophy written in jail, with the invention of the topos of consola-
tion that informs the “Conclusion of the Author” in the Decameron. In
addition to his claiming to have written “my stories . . . to ease women of
melancholy,” Boccaccio paraphrases the sentiments Boethius’s develops in
conversation between himself and Lady Philosophy concerning the vicis-
situdes of fortune and the transitory nature of fame and wealth. Boccaccio’s
narrator adds, in strikingly timely affirmation of current contingencies,
“I confess that the things of this world have no stability and are still on the
change” (Boccaccio 2007, “Conclusion”). Before this horizon, the author of
the Decameron finds consolation in “telling stories.” Moreover, Boccaccio
underwrites, in shape of his character Pampinea who suggests during “First
Day” deliberations, that comfort can be found also in the “especial care it
shall be to dispose us to live joyously” even in times of flux and mental stress.
Boccaccio rightly infers the need for consolation when he observes in
the “Proem” section of the Decameron: “A kindly thing it is to have compas-
sion of the afflicted and albeit it well beseemeth every one, yet of those is
it more particularly required who have erst had need of comfort.” However
it is not enough to exploit the mediating function of narration. As heads
of government charged with pastoral care during states of emergency real-
ize, “Extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures,” as German
Chancellor Merkel proclaimed, outlining the steps her government had set
into motion preparing an enormous “aid packet to assist businesses, fami-
lies, workers and all affected by the Corona crisis.” But practical in addition
to mental consolatio (Latin: “consoling comfort”) come with a price because
insofar as consolation mitigates grievous circumstances and alleviates hard-
ships also of an economic, financial, and medical nature, it is predicated
on limiting the very source of these afflictions. Put differently, to console
or comfort you by easing your pain I have to keep in check its source; for
misery to be lifted misery has to be controlled. Hence protection from the
wretchedness caused by COVID-19 infections can be purchased only with
population control. Protection from contagion demands control of people’s
movements, spaces, and behavior that newspeak terms “social distancing,”
“lockdown,” and “behavior modification.” Already Defoe recognizes that as
“Parishes” become “infected” by the Plague, “Government was to be issued
out to place turnpikes and barriers on the road to prevent people travel-
ling.” In Merkel’s voice preventive measures include also the reduction of

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 special issue | in the midst of covid-19

“everything that could put people at risk, everything that could harm not
only individuals, but also the community. We must limit the risk of one
person infecting another as much as we possibly can.”
A closer look at the few examples cited from stock poetic and political
utterances reveals an uneasy relationship between the concepts “consola-
tion” and “control” usually seen as almost opposites. But once a contiguous
(metonymic) relationship is acknowledged to exist between the semantics
of “control,” encompassing an “act of keeping under authority and regu-
lation” and the semantics of consolation, relating to the praxis of mental
(spiritual) and socioeconomic upliftment, the chiastic structure becomes
apparent. Being comforted in times of need requires the control necessary
to stem the flood of emotions, grief, misfortune, contagion, and so on, in
short, all matter that threatens to overwhelm. Nothing reveals more poi-
gnantly the chiasmic relation between “consolation” and “control” or caring
assistance and (social) curtailment in matters of collective Being than the
virus in its role as today’s master trope. But does controlling the global viral
health threat coupled with the necessary praxis of “consoling” victims jus-
tify being in an endless state of collective limbo?

School of Modern Languages and Literatures

University of the Witwatersrand
Johannesburg, South Africa

works cited
Alighieri, Dante. 2012. The Divine Comedy, Complete. The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and
Hell. Trans. Rev. H. F. Cary. Illustrator Gustave Dore. www.gutenberg.org/
files/8800/8800-h/8800-h.htm.
Boccaccio, Giovanni. 2007. The Decameron. Trans. John Payne. www.gutenberg.org/
files/23700/23700-h/23700-h.htm.
Defoe, Daniel. 2020. A Journal of the Plague Year. www.gutenberg.org/files/376/376-h/
376-h.htm.
Lepore, Jill. 2020. “Don’t Come Any Closer: What Can We Learn from the Literature of
Contagion?” New Yorker, 30 Mar., 22–25.
Merkel, Angela. 2020. “An Address to the Nation by Federal Chancellor Merkel.” www
.bundeskanzlerin.de/bkin-en/news/statement-chancellor-1732302.
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Nelson Mandela Did, in His Mind.” Maverick Life Moments in Time. www
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you-like-when-you-like-nelson-mandela-did-in-his-mind.

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