**4. The Affective Present and the Historically Affective Aesthetic**

To better understand the present pandemic situation, we need to look to the past. As Michael Lewis reveals in his interviews, scientists and public health officials woefully neglected historical research conducted on pandemic response in formulating public policy strategies in 2020 and beyond. Instead, the response to COVID-19 was slow, and the fear of a public shut-down delayed quarantine measures (Lewis 2021). It is clear from Lewis' presentation that a wealth of pandemic modeling and scientific research had been performed in the fields of epidemiology and public health. Despite showing efficacy in slowing or stopping the spread of past contagions, these insights and tools were ignored as options in the current crisis. Along with Lewis's anecdotal material, as well as studies on previous public health crises such as polio and AIDS to highlight the roles played by vigilance and intransigence in the face of epidemics, I suggest a turn toward literature as a means to ascertaining why such attitudes exist and how to effectively respond to them.

As a supplement to looking at scientific data and biographical accounts which do not always or readily address cultural factors that play into a public health response, we might also consult fictional narrative accounts as prospective entry points into how human beings might cope with pandemics, or indeed have coped with them in the past. An exemplification of this approach occurs with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's *Love in the Time of Cholera*, a novel which details both the woe and the response attendant to such a delicate navigation that is precipitated by a historic and disruptive health crisis. As I write this article, cases are spiking yet again in New York City, even as vaccines and boosters have been rolled out, the city has reopened, and COVID-19 is well on its way to becoming endemic rather than a pandemic. Any analysis I write, though removed from the constant sirens and high death tolls that marked the height of the pandemic, is therefore situated in what Lauren Berlant deems the affective present. She writes: "everyone lives the present intensely, from within a sense that their time, this time, is crisis time" (Berlant 2011, p. 57). Yet, the crisis we are facing and the challenges that accompany it are not new. They are historically situated and can thus be explored both historically and presently. It is for this reason that Garcia Marquez's novel becomes a key piece of my analysis. As Berlant points out, "all genres are distinguished by the affective contract they promise: by claiming that certain affects embed the historical in persons and persons in the historical in ways that only the aesthetic situation could really capture" (ibid., p. 66). Rather than exploring strictly sociological inquiries into pandemic response, by incorporating the fictional novel I can explore the atmosphere of the historical moment of the cholera pandemic to further understand the role that religious identity played then and now. Like Berlant, I will be interrogating this text for "patterns of adjustment" in order to illuminate collective action in the time of the pandemic (Berlant 2011, p. 9), which can then be used as a comparative tool into the present—a mediation of this crisis time.

Garcia Marquez paints a picture of Colombia during and after the fourth and fifth cholera pandemics. The novel, set in an unnamed Colombian city (presumed to be Cartagena) across the span of the 1870s to 1930s, tells the story of Florentino Ariza, Fermina Daza, and Dr. Juvenal Urbino as they navigate love, illness, and a changing world. Florentino and Fermina were young and in love, though Fermina's father disapproved, seeking a more illustrious name for his daughter than marrying the son of a freed slave born out of wedlock. After being forbidden to communicate with Florentino and taken on a trip to her mother's homeland by her father, Fermina begins to see love in a different light. Upon her return, she rejects Florentino, only later to fall in love with and marry the doctor Juvenal Urbino while Florentino waits for his true love to be widowed. In weaving the narrative of this love story, Garcia Marquez illustrates the intricate web of identities in the city, revealing how varied conceptualizations of the world, especially regarding health and medicine, are crashing into one another. However, in the novel, the varied views co-exist

with less tension than those regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, Dr. Urbino is able to reconcile the differences between religion and science and is thus accepted by the citizens and able to eliminate cholera outbreaks in the city.

Dr. Urbino's identity and how it is understood by those in the city he serves is key to his success in stopping the spread of cholera. Early on in the novel, regarding Urbino's differing view on the value of old age, the narrator states, "If he had not been what he was—in essence an old-style Christian—perhaps he would have agreed with Jeremiah de Saint-Amour" (Garcia Marquez 1988, p. 40). Even when serving in his role as doctor and friend to Saint-Amour, Urbino's religion is described at the fore of his identity. Importantly, here, Urbino is not just Christian, but described as "old-style", suggesting that he holds more traditional beliefs than others around him. Yet, unlike the rift between white Evangelical Christianity and modern science, his traditional beliefs do not interfere with his career as a medical professional, or vice versa. Instead, he is able to use his identity as a means to connect with the community and eventually institute life-saving public health policies and begin initiatives to transform the city into a safer space—one that does not readily breed and spread the cholera bacterium.

Still, Dr. Urbino's ideas were not accepted at first, neither by lay citizens nor by the doctors in the city. Having been trained in Europe, Urbino's suggestions to create more sanitary conditions were viewed as foreign intrusions that clashed with the traditional way of life in the city, and his way of thinking was scoffed at by fellow doctors, old and young alike. This tension comes to a head regarding the safety of the city's water supply. Locals believe that the mosquito larvae in the drinking cisterns were animes that cause inguinal hernias. Though Dr. Urbino was "aware of the scientific fallacy in these beliefs ... they were so rooted in local superstition that many people opposed the mineral enrichment of the water in the cisterns for fear of destroying its ability to cause an honorable hernia" (Garcia Marquez 1988, p. 110). The local beliefs are established as a key aspect of the identity of those who live in the city. Though Urbino is bringing knowledge from Europe that can help prevent ill health in numerous ways, the belief that a scrotal hernia was a mark of honor outweighed the up-to-date foreign scientific knowledge brought home by the doctor. Local identity and belief systems trumped scientific knowledge and Urbino was judged harshly and viewed as an outsider, rather than part of the in-group.

Despite this initial setback, Dr. Urbino is able to overcome the division between his views and the beliefs of the other citizens when cholera threatens the city yet another time in the pandemic's long history. During the earlier pandemic, the city had enough bodies to fill the church crypts and close off church attendance. Rather than allow the pandemic to spread, Urbino, a cholera expert, implemented quarantine and minimized the outbreak. It was this success that led the community to believe "the sanitary rigor of Dr. Juvenal Urbino, more than the efficacy of his pronouncements, had made the miracle possible. From that time on ... cholera was endemic not only in the city but along most of the Caribbean coast and the valley of the Magdalena, but it never again flared into an epidemic" (Garcia Marquez 1988, p. 115). The institutional flexibility that arose during the initial outbreak is what prevented a pandemic. Rather than stubbornly disregarding Urbino's suggestions, the institutions of medicine and military government adapted and abandoned outdated beliefs such as firing a canon to purify the air, and yet, religion still plays a role in the interpretation of events. The prevention of the pandemic is viewed as both a success for Urbino, but also as a miracle. The science-based policy making that Urbino instated is folded in with the belief systems that dominate the city.

During the outbreak of cholera, the damage of which Dr. Urbino did his best to minimize, mortality rates were kept in reasonable check and the city was able to go on with its daily routines mostly as usual, with the exception of some quarantines. Unlike previously when, "The air in the Cathedral grew thin with the vapors of badly sealed crypts, and its doors did not open again until three years later" (Garcia Marquez 1988, p. 111), the religious community was able to attend mass regularly and without pause. Without the immunity, or at least the risk-mitigating factors put in place by Dr. Urbino, the religious community could not have congregated, at least not in the way that it had previously. The health of the community was put first, and arguably at a greater interruption than today when technology such as Zoom has risen to the challenge of maintaining a semblance of community while still sheltering in place. Thinking back to Esposito, reframing our understanding of immunity from something that separates individuals from the community to something that allows community to exist safely and uninterrupted is key to more effectively preventing the spread of communicable diseases. Not adapting to the circumstances that diseases such as cholera or COVID-19 present only puts community at risk for the long term, whereas immediate adjustments that protect individuals enable the ongoing existence of the community. As we see evidenced for Catholicism in *Love in the Time of Cholera*, the medical science that informs public health policies is not *necessarily* a threat to the religious beliefs of evangelicals but rather something that could help preserve that community.

Even when the text echoes the arguments of white Evangelical Christians today, Garcia Marquez creates a sense of coexistence between religion and science rather than opposition. Like Lauri Armstrong, who believes that God's will is playing out with COVID-19, in Garcia Marquez's narrative cholera was also viewed by some as an act of God. While on a trip, after her husband all but eliminated cholera in her city, Fermina sees the bodies of people who died of cholera and remarks that they appear different than those she had seen in the past. An officer responds, "That is true ... Even God improves his methods" (Garcia Marquez 1988, p. 252). The speed and efficiency with which cholera killed was viewed as an act of God. However, scientific approaches to containing outbreaks were able to be implemented, including quarantining infected individuals. Rather than viewing necessary preventive measures as antithetical to their religion—as many white Evangelical Christians did—the characters in the novel saw them as miraculous, as though God's will worked through Dr. Urbino's new approaches to medicine and public health.

Furthermore, medical and religious habits are often described together through the character of Urbino, suggesting that the two are inseparable pieces of his identity. Early in the novel, his routine is described as the following: "He would spend an hour in his study preparing for the class in general clinical medicine that he taught at the Medical School every morning, Monday through Saturday, at eight o'clock, until the day before his death ... After class it was rare for him not to have an appointment related to his civic initiatives, or his Catholic service" (Garcia Marquez 1988, pp. 8–9). The nearness regarding the discussion of Urbino's Catholic religion with his medical career and his duty to the city in which he lives suggests that the strong ties he holds with both religion and science are not an anomaly, but rather something that permeates the rest of the local culture. As Berlant might suggest, Garcia Marquez is building a sense of unity between religion and science, a unity that may seem entirely alien to someone living in the present-day United States where the two are positioned as opposing forces. Dr. Urbino's routine is not a private affair, but rather something publicly known and related to his work in the community. He hides neither his medical training nor his faith, and as such, is not ostracized for either.
