Remembering and Narrativising COVID-19: An Early Sociological Take

Abstract

How the COVID-19 pandemic, and the deaths that occurred during the acute phase of the pandemic (2020–2021), will be remembered is yet to be determined. Writing from a UK perspective, this short article reflects on the way in which memory, narratives and death are constructed, contested and (re)produced. Drawing on the authors’ respective sociological sub-fields, it makes a case for an ongoing sociological appraisal of emergent COVID-19 narratives, that can encompass and intertwine understandings of temporality, accountability and loss.

Introduction

On 29 March 2021, almost one year to the day since the COVID-19 pandemic was declared in the UK, groups of volunteers began work on what they called a ‘National Covid Memorial Wall’, located on London’s South Bank. Opposite the Houses of Parliament, the wall is comprised of over 150,000 hand drawn red hearts, each intended to visually symbolise a life lost during the pandemic. Over the coming months, with the encouragement of the two organising groups, Covid Families and Led by Donkeys, bereaved visitors attending the wall began to populate the hearts with the names of individuals who had died and further messages, many of them critical in tone.

The wall provides an entry point to several significant questions for sociologists. While the organisers were keen to stress that their work ‘isn’t about party politics’ (Covid Families, 2021), ¹ as this short article will show, the memorial (re)presents multiple issues regarding memory making, narrative construction and the public ownership of the deaths that occurred during the pandemic. Here, we draw from three sociological sub-fields as follows: (1) memory studies to explore what the wall tells us about the temporal ellipses and elisions that shaped experiences of the pandemic; (2) cultural sociology to consider how the refusal to narrativise COVID-19 contributes to a distinctive politics of blame; and finally (3) the sociology of death to consider how the deaths during the pandemic are being made public property.

Temporality and Memory Making

Memory Studies is a field of scholarship that invites us to think about the terms and frameworks through which the past is made meaningful. The starting point for this article is recognising that the Memorial Wall – itself indicative of an ambivalence concerning how COVID-19 deaths are (re)presented and remembered – exists in an uneasy space between official state sponsored tropes and more personal expressions of loss. On the one hand, the iconography in the memorial appears to be a gesture towards national convention, with the red bursts of colour mirroring recent commemorative practices that utilised poppies for the First World War centenary. Such a resemblance was not coincidental and has been accompanied by calls for the formal consecration of ‘covid poppies’ (Evening Standard, 2021). At the same time however, while it has been labelled a ‘national memorial’ by its organisers, the design of the memorial challenges notions of traditional ‘top–down’ commemorative practice (see Margry and Sánchez-Carretero, 2011). In other words, it is made meaningful through the spontaneity of its creation and the individual inscriptions of the bereaved creators and its visitors. The wall is thus illustrative of tensions between the representation of the (preventable, needless) death of individuals during the pandemic, with the personalisation of each heart and the discrete death it conveys (and the space for critique it enables) and, at the same time, the wider tendency of any ‘national’ representation of loss to de-personalise those who died. It also reflects an uncertainty about how to characterise the deaths from COVID-19 or COVID-19-related measures during the 2020–2021 period, illustrated by the recently launched Government Commission on COVID Commemoration, and which is expected to report in March 2023.

The Memorial Wall was not the first time that there was tension in public calls about how to remember and commemorate COVID-19 and specifically the pandemic’s acute phase in 2020–2021. Rather, it reflects the (ongoing) framings of the pandemic by the Westminster Government to manage (and deflect) public attention, scrutiny, vigilance and support: from the initial crypto-militarisation of the ‘save the NHS’ mantra to significant contractions as the government shifted its messaging towards moving on by ‘eating out to help out’ in the summer of 2020, and so on. These changing and often contradictory attempts to manage UK citizens’ relationship to, and perceptions of, the pandemic were replicated in a lack of clarity about how to acknowledge deaths during COVID-19. In 2020 multiple lockdowns were supported by a public narrative of risk, exhortations to protect the most vulnerable and naturalised injunctions for (national) vigilance (see Fitzgerald, 2021). Those who died during this time were characterised as victims of the virus, their deaths ‘unjust’ and their bereaved kin susceptible to problematic experiences of grief because they were unable to visit patients in hospital or attend funerals. At the same time, as the pandemic moved into 2021, emergent appeals from political leaders to reclaim ‘normality’ encouraged a wilful public amnesia of the deaths that had occurred, and, potentially, the removal of the deceased people’s ‘victim’ status.

Drawing on memory studies, the political management of public narratives about COVID-19 thus had temporal dimensions that now make the possibility of narrativising the experience of the pandemic – as a discrete episode with a clear sequence from beginning to end – difficult. During the early days of the pandemic this management included a schedule of daily news briefings and death tolls, that punctuated daily routines of domesticity, home education, working from home, the overconsumption of digital streaming services and boredom. The structure of updates was both a rupture with past ‘normality’ but also cemented public uncertainty as the only known condition of the future. As COVID-19 brought everyday life to a standstill, and death toll figures of the ‘victims’ became common place, one effect of the pandemic was to challenge the conditions that make memory and narrative possible (Cohen, 2001: 242–243). In the later stages of the acute phase of the pandemic, media reporting of daily death tolls remained, before being ceased in April 2022. At the time of writing death statistics from COVID-19 are still available via the Office for National Statistics, and there are occasional news stories with concerns about ‘spikes’ and new strains of the virus. But with the acute phase of the pandemic appearing to have finished, we are now seemingly in the ‘recovery’ phase of the pandemic where the after-effects are being felt (Easthope, 2022).

Narratives and Blame

Cultural sociologists urge us to recognise the role of narrative (stories, for want of a better word) in producing a shared understanding of public events (see, among others, Eyerman, 2008). Fundamentally, these stories support the ability to effectively remember events, or, at least, to order memory of events in certain ways. This is true at an individual level – research in developmental psychology suggests that the acquisition of autobiographical memory during childhood is intimately connected to the ability to follow a story (Nelson, 2003) – as well as a cultural level. If, as discussed in the previous section, COVID-19 disrupted a sense of ‘normal’ life, and in doing so eroded the conditions that enable memory making, this coincides with – and perhaps is partly a product of – the lack of an established, shared narrative concerning ‘what happened’ during the pandemic.

At the time of writing (mid-2022), beyond a lack of narrative around the deaths that occurred between 2020 and 2021, there is not yet consensus about where COVID-19 came from, nor an established evaluation of how the pandemic was handled as a public health crisis, nor any agreement as to whether it is even over (or what it might mean for it to be ‘over’). Much of this will take place in the forthcoming COVID-19 Inquiry. What we do know is that politically there is much at stake while these are still to play for, for those who produce and control narratives about the pandemic, for those who died, and for those who were bereaved.

The implications of this limbo mean that the purpose of the Memorial Wall and its long-term future is still unclear. This early stage of narrative contestation – where the critical point of debate is about the impetus to narrativise rather than the content of the narrative – highlights the significance of storytelling (and, linked to that, collective sense making) in allocating responsibility and reconciling the meaning of the loss(es) that occurred. A reluctance to create that story is thus a delay in deciding who, or what, is to blame.

A refusal to narrativise often works alongside an allied set of claims: that the crisis in question was too complex and unforeseeable to be taken as emblematic of anything, and that it is better seen and treated as a one-off emergency. Bacevic and McGooey (2021) argue that the Westminster Government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic reflects a distinctive mix of ignorance and incompetence that has become a characteristic feature of political crisis-management in the 21st century. They call it ‘fatalistic liberalism’, a convenient determinism that makes ‘the pandemic’ something akin to ‘the market’ as a political fiction: both are represented as having a life of their own, rather than being products of human action and inaction. For Bacevic and McGooey (2021) this was epitomised by the then MP Liz Truss’s assertion in the early stages of the pandemic that ‘no one could have predicted this’, a statement that only makes sense if the pandemic is conceptualised in very narrow, technically specific terms: as an event unrolling day-by-day, rather than a known category of crisis, the likes of which national security advisors and public health professionals have long predicted (Easthope, 2022).

All of this – the temporal disruptions of COVID-19, the lack of any shared narrative around ‘what happened’, the attempt to delay accountability, assertions that the pandemic was unforeseeable and best thought of as a specific, discrete event – presents challenges for how deaths during (and from) COVID-19 may and can be conceptualised, characterised, remembered and memorialised.

Public Death and the Right to Know

There has been considerable sociological interest in how narratives around particular deaths are constructed, (re)presented and (re)produced in the last three decades. Much of the focus has been on ‘extraordinary’ deaths of high-profile individuals or through mass death events. The contemporary narrativisation of death is best reflected in Jacobsen’s (2016) work, who argues that death has become increasingly ‘spectacular’. This, he asserts, is when media coverage projects a proprietorship over death, where people feel they have a right to bear witness, to express the impact of others’ death(s) and to publicly lament loss. During the pandemic, and specifically 2020–2021, the collective distinctiveness of deaths that occurred during a universally impactful geo-political event – and the relentless itemising of those deaths via the running death toll – meant that they were subject to being ‘spectacularised’. In other words, COVID-19-related deaths during this period were commodified by the media in their reporting and utilised by the Westminster Government to compel public behaviour(s), and as a result they began to ‘belong’ to all those affected by the pandemic (i.e. everyone). Through this spectacularisation came a narrative that ‘the public’ had, and still has, a stake in knowing what happened to those individuals who died, and a stake in how they were and continue to be remembered.

At the time of writing, this public stake and having a ‘right to know’ is accompanied by a cultural framing of the pandemic and those who died during 2020–2021 as an avoidable event. Here, the ‘National Covid Memorial Wall’ takes on another set of meanings, its very deliberate location serving to continually remind those in the Westminster Houses of Parliament opposite about the individuals who died during the pandemic, and politicians’ accountability for those deaths. Time will tell what happens to this impulse to visibly remind and justify ‘what happened’, in a context where the temporal moorings of collective memory have been eroded and attempts to narrativise events repeatedly frustrated.

Charting New Territory: Public Death in the 21st Century

It is imperative that sociologists contribute to understandings of the way in which the deaths during COVID-19 are remembered, narrativised and become part of collective memory. As we show above, there are multiple ways in which sociologists can do so, by examining the pandemic’s temporality and conditions of memory making, the way in which pandemic narratives have been and are being constructed and contested, and the extent to which pandemic deaths during 2020–2021 were and are spectacularised. Much of this will be on display during the COVID-19 Inquiry, which commences shortly and will ramp up throughout 2023, and likely beyond.