Home-Comfort Studies The Dis/ Comforts of Home in Contemporary British and American Pandemic Literature Stella Butter 1 Introduction The twenty-first century is a time of global crises: the climate crisis, the Covid pandemic, and the epistemic crisis in the wake of digital disinformation or fake news are just the beginning of a depressingly long list. The pervasive labelling of these developments as ‘crises’ indicates how strongly these phenomena are seen as a threat to life as we know it. While each crisis has its own history and particularities, it is, as the sociologist Jens O. Zinn points out, fruitful to consider even exceptional crises such as the Covid pandemic within “a broader framework […] of how risk, uncertainty and social change are experienced, approached and envisioned at different times and places” (2021: 604). As a literary studies scholar, I am especially interested in the contribution that imaginary storytelling may make to the ways in which we envision and respond to such crises in contemporary modernity. A crisis is not simply something given, but the perception and experience of ‘a crisis’ is shaped by cultural plots and tropes, that is, a specific imaginary (see Nünning 2009: 240) - an imaginary that is also forged by literary production. A focus on literary representations of the dis/ comforts of home is particularly helpful to gauge how literature taps into but also potentially orders our perception of crises in Western modernity. Literature is attentive to the ways home is profoundly impacted by large-scale crises (witness, for example, the loss of homes in the wake of the financial crisis, the outbreak of wars or ongoing climate change) and how sites of home, in turn, play a vital role in generating macro-level structures, such as patterns of global consumption, that feed into the dynamics of crises in modernity. At the same time, literature is mindful of the myriad experientialities of home - the ways it can morph into an arena of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 1 See, for example, recent special issues on “Representations of Home” (Journal of Literary Studies 36.1 [2020]) or “Imaginative Geographies of Home: Ambivalent Mobility in Twenty-First Century Literature and Culture” (Literary Geographies 5.2 [2019]). 2 Timothy Aubry’s (2022) review provides an astute discussion of the strengths but also distinct shortcomings of James’s innovative approach to literary consolation. 3 For an approach to home comforts that combines literary studies with linguistics, see Bułat Silva and Butter (2019). oppression, violence, and death or, conversely, provide solace and a place of resistance or survival not only in times of crisis. One may extend this perspective to reflect on how writing and reading literature itself might be conceived as a form of dis/ comforting homemaking. The many vloggers who talked about their comfort reading at home during Covid lockdown, for instance, betoken the ways reading literature may, indeed, be experienced as a positive practice of homemaking and (virtual) community building. The experience of living through the Covid crisis prompted my choice of pandemic fiction as a case study to explore representations of dis/ comforting homes, although my corpus will not be restricted to Covid fiction. Despite ever-growing research on representations of home in fiction, 1 strong bridges have not yet been built to comfort studies. ‘Comfort’ refers to physical ease or consolation; it is the possibility of the latter that has enjoyed particular attention in literary studies, especially with regard to elegiac literature (e.g. Spargo 2004; Watkin 2004). More recent publications have analysed historical discourses on the alleged consoling power of literature (Pieters 2021) and challenged conventional understandings of consoling fiction by shifting the focus from a reader-response perspective to a new formalist approach that establishes literary consolation as “an agent of contestation” ( James 2019: 7). 2 However, few publications draw the concepts of ‘home’ and ‘comfort’ together in their analysis of literary fiction. This is not to say that existing research, especially on nostalgia, longing, or mourning and home (e.g. Rubenstein 2001), does not open up valuable perspectives for reflecting on the interplay of home and comfort, but the conceptual focus in these studies is placed on related terms rather than on the concept of ‘comfort’ or ‘consolation’ itself. The volume of essays on Comfort in Contemporary Culture (2020), which I co-edited with Dorothee Birke, provides the first steps for conjoining ‘comfort’ and ‘home’ as an analytic focus in literary studies. 3 My contribution expands this research through its focus on contemporary pandemic fiction and its mapping of the depicted interplay between homes and specific forms of (in)consolability. As the stock phrase ‘the comfort of home’ already signals, ‘comfort’ is a key element in Western ideals of home, both in the sense of a dwelling place 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 174 Stella Butter that enables physical ease (e.g. due to its interior design) and in terms of a sphere that provides strengthening support or consolation. Comfort, then, can be connected to different dimensions of home, ranging from the spatio-temporal and economic dimensions to the social, cultural, and emotive dimensions. If ‘home’ is “a spatial imaginary” (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 2) that reflects cultural ideals, then ‘comfort’ is one of the key components that furnish the aura of home. Indeed, it is no coincidence that ‘comfort’ finds regular mention in phenomenological descriptions of home. Home is, Yi-Fu Tuan explains, “the locale of human warmth and material sustenance, moral probity and spiritual comfort” (2012: 227). From a sociological perspective, the ways we ‘do’ home, that is, our everyday patterns and routines of our homemaking, encapsulate a whole form of life - one that is traversed by power hierarchies shaped, for example, by race, class, gender, and nationhood. Criticism of these power hierarchies has been clearly voiced in debates on home, thus rendering the so-called comforts of home ambiguous. Feminist assessments of home are a case in point. On the one hand, feminists oppose traditional ideals of home because domestic comforts tend to be based on the large unpaid housework and also draining emotional work of women. While in this critical perspective the alleged ‘comforts of home’ are rejected due to their alliance with patriarchal hierarchies and reactionary values (e.g. heteronormativity, norms of whiteness), other feminist critics such as Iris Marion Young want to use the emotional pulling power of ‘home’ to “extend key values, such as safety or privacy [i.e. crucial comforts associated with home; S.B.], as a basic human right to everyone” (Birke and Butter 2019: 120). All in all, the fierce debates surrounding ‘home’ attest to how our imaginings of home matter because ‘doing home’ is guided by idea(l)s of home. Due to the diversity of ‘homes’ in literature, I will avoid working with a pre-given definition of ‘home’ in favour of identifying how dis/ comforting homes are conceptualised in the selected pandemic stories themselves. It is my contention that the shape home takes in these texts is tied to a specific form of (in)consolability in response to the crisis time of the pandemic. These aesthetic configurations of home and (in)consolability also have implications for thinking about the consolations literature may have to offer. My corpus of pandemic fiction includes two Covid flash fictions, published by the authors Sadia Quraeshi Shepard and Chen Chen in the literary magazine The Margins on the website of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW), and two British novels: Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat (2021) and the pre-Covid novel Cold Earth (2009), written by Sarah Moss. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 Home-Comfort Studies 175 4 As mentioned earlier, the opposite is the case in research on comfort in literary studies, which is primarily concerned with consolation or psychological comfort. 5 Ellsworth-Krebs et al. (2019) distinguish between twelve meanings of home comfort that they categorise as either physical, psychological, or physical-psychological. 6 Shepard’s and Chen’s stories stay below 1000 words. The analysis of these case studies serves to demonstrate the valuable role that literary studies may play in the emerging research field of ‘home-comfort studies’. The latter is not an established term - yet - but has been used by the scientists Katherine Ellsworth-Krebs, Louise Reid, and Colin J. Hunter (2019: 204) in the context of a research project devoted to developing a “broader, holistic framework of home comfort” (203). In their extensive research overview on home and comfort (albeit one that excludes literary, media, and art studies), Ellsworth-Krebs et al. (2019: 204) note the small number of studies on home comforts, more specifically, studies that do not delimit their understanding of comfort to its purely physical dimension. 4 Based on qualitative interviews with Scottish household members, Ellsworth-Krebs et al. provide a nuanced understanding of home comfort by redefining it as “relaxation and wellbeing that results from companionship and control to manage the home as desired” (215). Such a definition is helpful because it allows for an interplay of physical and psychological aspects in what is perceived as home comfort. 5 Literature taps into these different facets in its imaginations of home dis/ comfort, which in turn play a vital role in shaping “broader historical and cultural narratives around the meaning and making of home” (209). A holistic framework of home comfort, then, needs to include the perspective of literature and other forms of art. New directions of research are opened up by a focus on the aesthetic dimension of home comfort: how art engages with specific configurations of ‘home dis/ comfort’ and the way art itself can serve as a form of dis/ comforting homemaking, especially in crisis times. Such a focus foregrounds the cultural value and functions of literature and art in modernity - points that are worth emphasising in the current hostile environment towards the humanities, generated by neoliberalism and populist politicians. 2 Configurations of Dis/ Comforting Homes in Pandemic Fiction Given the upsurge of flash fiction or very short fiction during the Covid pandemic, 6 it seems fitting to start my analysis of literary dis/ comforting homes with this particular genre. As the editors of AAWW’s Flash Fiction project point out, “flash fiction, with its urgent language coupled with its swift writing pace 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 176 Stella Butter 7 In the following, I will abbreviate “Monsters” with ‘M’ and “Summer” with ‘S’. The stories do not have pagination. 8 These quotes from the artist Toby Allen are taken from Mihai Andrei’s (2013) online article on Allen’s art project. has unique possibilities for writing into the present moment” (Khurana and Wei 2021: n.pag.). Read side by side, Shepard’s “Monsters” and Chen Chen’s “Summer” 7 help chart an axis on which representations of dis/ comforting homes in pandemic fiction may be situated. One end of this axis features the sacralised home as the site of remedial consolation, as represented in Chen’s story. On the other end of the axis are stories that tie home to the impossibility of any moments or forms of consolation. Shephard’s flash fiction is roughly situated in the middle of this axis because “Monsters” explores the ambiguity of home comforts. Precisely because Shepard’s story contains elements that pull into different directions, it is helpful to start mapping the field with a discussion of her story. “Monsters” captures the ambiguity of the consoling power of art by drawing on the classic Gothic trope of the uncanny home. Although Covid is not explic‐ itly mentioned in the story, it is evoked through the references to lockdown and a key ritual associated with it, namely the 7 o’clock cheer for health care or frontline workers. The beginning of the story depicts how the home sphere is gradually rendered uncanny through monstrous Covid art. The first-person narrator’s wife, who stays unnamed throughout the story, covers the “walls of […] [the] living room in newsprint” (M) to draw “one monster per day” (M) with sticks of charcoal. These monsters, who have been keeping her awake all night, embody her heightened fear of Covid infection and death, for she is immunocompromised. Her artistic activity allows a distancing of terror by making the previously invisible enemy tangible and by claiming (artistic) agency in the face of the monster. It is worth noting that Shepard’s monsters echo real-life art projects (e.g. by the Cornish artist Toby Allen) equally concerned with “visualiz[ing] diseases as mythological creatures” so that illnesses appear as “more beatable”. 8 Given that monsters belong to the realm of myths and legends, the specific visualisation of the Coronavirus in Shepard’s story could also be seen as a form of mythmaking. The use of newsprint as drawing paper is a heavy-handed metaphorical reference to the role that the media plays in establishing Covid-19 as a global crisis phenomenon. The media, too, creates mythic monsters, as the play with the double meaning of print, namely newsprint and animal footprints, suggests. The presence of media underlines the permeability of home. Such a permea‐ bility is also emphasised in the narrator’s description of his work-related Zoom 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 Home-Comfort Studies 177 meetings and the sounds of neighbours entering his home. Home is not “a bulwark” (M); instead, just like the Coronavirus “forces itself into a cell by becoming one with its membrane barrier” (Davis 2021: n.pag.), so is the cell of the home - this specific ‘living room’ - not a sealed off space, but its membrane, too, is inscribed with the presence of the virus. The ‘living room’ becomes haunted by the presence of death as the “ash from my wife’s charcoal” (M), which she uses to draw the monsters, “settled into the corners of the room” (M). Permeability is also evoked in the relation between the woman and her artwork. It seems as if she becomes monstrous herself in the act of creation so that it requires a cleansing hot bath each night to unclench “the claw of her fists” (M, emphasis added) and for her to re-appear “new” (M). These acts of merging and cleansing indicate the mercurial dis/ comforts of creation: The consoling act of externalising and thus distancing one’s fears first necessitates a disturbing evocation of what we fear, thus rendering aesthetic consolation ambiguous (see also Dober 2019: 180). The motif of permeability is partly extended to gender stereotypes because the wife will always emerge from the bath “wearing one of the large men’s kurtas she wore at home” (M). The depiction of home in Shepard’s story is interwoven with the theme of solidarity. We learn that the narrator, who prefers staying at home to avoid infection, called “the market on the corner and asked the owner if he could send one of his nephews with bags of onions, rice, and lentils. In the four years we’d lived here the grocer and I had never communicated in our common language”. (M) While their shared language is not specified, the kurta signals that the marital couple might be of South Asian heritage. The narrator’s use of their common language hence solicits solidarity among the South Asian diasporic community. The theme of solidarity is extended to the frontline workers in the pandemic, as the narrator describes how he and his wife “joined in the cheers that erupted on our street every evening at seven” (M). In Shepard’s story, the wife’s rebirth after her nightly bath is dubbed “a kind of nightly triumph” (M). The fact that we then have an immediate transition to the communal nightly cheer suggests that this comforting togetherness, too, may be seen as a kind of triumph over the virus. While the home as a site of artistic creativity is a source of comfort for the wife, it is precisely this aesthetic practice of consolation that renders home painfully uncanny for the first-person narrator, as the ending of the story makes clear: I […] dared myself to look at the monsters lit by the dim glow of the streetlight. […] I closed my eyes and listened to their sharp keening, trying to drown out the wheezing 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 178 Stella Butter and clicking of the ventilators, the flat lines of the monitors. Then I toasted them, taunted them, told them that they didn’t scare me even though it wasn’t true. (M) For the narrator, these aesthetic Covid monsters do not offer any consolation but are a source of terror and give rise to an uncanny temporality. This vastly different response begs the question as to whether “myth process[ed] the horrors of an unfamiliar world, which it found, into stories or did myth generate the horrors for which it then also offered relief or consolation? ” (Blumenberg qtd. in Dober 2019: 217; my translation). The narrator’s strong response to his wife’s drawings may be partly explained by his different mode of subjectivity. Whereas his wife embraces liminality and is therefore arguably better equipped to deal with the ambiguous solace of the arts, the narrator has internalised a key trait of hegemonic masculinity, namely the desire to be or at least “appear [to be] in control” (M). This self-fashioning might also explain why arguably the oldest form of consolation, touch (witness the comforting embrace of children by their parents or caregivers), does not feature at all between the married couple in response to their Covid fears. A comforting embrace entails expressing one’s emotions instead of keeping them on a tight leash to avoid vulnerability. The dynamics within the narrator’s home, however, reveal the hollowness of alleged male strength as opposed to the strength of those perceived to be weak and vulnerable. At this point, one may be reminded of Hans Blumenberg’s discussion of the long tradition of the cave in Western imagination. For after all, does not the image of a living room plastered with mythical creatures and associated with darkness (e.g. the wife’s use of black ink for her drawings) but also with remnants of fire (“ashes in the corners”, [M]) conjure up a cave-like space? It is this un/ homely cave that is associated with aesthetic practices: [Blumenberg’s book] Höhlenausgänge (‘Cave Exits’) places the weak in the cave - such as women, children, the wounded, the old - those who are unable to leave it in order to hunt or fight. […] Weakness becomes an ability of another kind. […] The lack of action inside the cave makes place and gives time for aesthetic impulses, i.e. memories and reflections, […] painting, storytelling, and listening. […] In short, in Blumenberg’s description the cave features not just as a physical shelter but, more importantly, as an aesthetic comfort zone. (Breidenbach 2020: 91f.) By tracing the artistic transformation of the home into a cave-like space, Shepherd’s story pairs mythmaking with what Benjamin Dober calls an “ethics of consolation” (Dober 2019: 223, original emphasis). A myth or image that embraces an ethics of consolation will reflect on its own conditions of produc‐ tion, thereby raising epistemological awareness (see ibid.). In contrast to Plato’s 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 Home-Comfort Studies 179 9 On the widespread denigration of literary consolation among contemporary scholars, see James (2019: 6-15) and Aubry (2022). allegory of the cave, which describes humans as trapped in a world of shadows mistaken for reality, Blumenberg insists on our need for dwelling in the cave precisely because we require consoling fictions. Our need for consolation is enduring because we will always be confronted with the contingencies of life, such as illness or death, which, in turn, give rise to the ever-burning question ‘why? ’ (see Blumenberg 2020: 626, 634f.). Blumenberg’s appreciation of (literary) solace makes for an edifying comparison to the stance of many contemporary critics who sweepingly denigrate all forms of (literary) consolation as an insidious escapism that lulls the reader into complicity with dubious ideology or the status quo. 9 An ethics of consolation, then, entails a careful calibration between avoiding awareness and facing painful realities head-on (Blumenberg 2020: 631f., 655; Dober 2019: 85). Against this backdrop, it seems fitting that the story ends with the narrator oscillating between precisely these two poles, as he toasts and taunts the Covid monsters while admitting to an implicit addressee that they do scare him. Perhaps this explains his motivation for telling his story: sharing his feelings of fear and unhomeliness with an implicit addressee may bring him some solace. Conversely, finding one’s fears acknowledged in the public sphere - after all, this is a published story - might offer some ambiguous solace to the readers of Shepard’s unsettling tale of the uncanny. While Shepard highlights the ambiguous consolations of domestic art, Chen Chen’s “Summer” largely avoids such ambiguities in favour of enshrining ‘home’ as the sphere of consoling touch. “Summer” is told by a male first-person narrator, who describes how a vase of sunflowers falls onto the floor during the night in the home he shares with his lover - a description that is interspersed with memories and reflections about living during the Covid pandemic. The identification of the pandemic as Corona is firmly established by the temporal setting (“July 2020”) and through a reference to its name right at the beginning of the story: “The sunflowers fall […]. Their heads too gloriously full of early July. How they seem to know everything, except the virus. The crown it wears. All the unglory it craves. Receives” (S, emphasis added). From the very beginning, a contrast is introduced between the “unglory” of the virus and the glorious lovers, who are symbolised by the bright sunflowers. Just like the sunflowers follow the sun during the course of the day, so are the lovers turned towards each other: “The[se] sunflowers, overcome with true dizzying delight - with themselves”-(S, emphasis added). 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 180 Stella Butter The temporality of the lovers within the home is slowed down, for the narrator keeps imagining the fall of the sunflowers “in slow motion” (S). Such a slow temporality, with its “temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement”, potentially opens you up to states of enchantment (Bennett 2001: 5). In such moments of wonder, the “world comes alive as a collection of singularities” (ibid.). Indeed, the subject ideal in this story is one who is attentive to aesthetic details, as is rendered clear by the narrator’s description of shopping outings during which his lover would ask him to touch an item, then “describe it myself. So soft, yes, but in what way? Like a cloud? About to burst? ” (S). Chen’s story implies that an openness to aesthetic enchantment may contribute to one’s psychological well-being amidst the intense fears evoked by the pandemic. For after all, the narrator would love to have “row after row [of sunflowers] flicker up in the night, in the worry-field of my mother’s head” (S). The consoling quality of the sunflower image also derives from its association with ‘divine holding’ in the story. This is the description of the lovers, the sunflowers, right at the end of the story: I liked the way they [the sunflowers] looked on the carpet, like golden messages from some other, less exhausting place. […] You climb back in bed to touch my face. You climb back in bed to touch my face. You wrap your arms around me and it’s like you’re the patron saint of touch as well as soft sunlight […]. Or you must be the earthly representative of divine holding. Or you’re both and also a boy, like me, holding on. (S) Home is queered insofar as it becomes the site of divine love and comfort between male lovers. The value of consoling touch, especially of touching faces without masks, takes on double urgency in view of pervasive social distancing, or, as the narrator says, “touchless […] experiences” (S). The final line places the relationship between the lovers on a more equal footing by emphasising their vulnerability (‘holding on’) in this time of crisis. As Val Walker writes, comfort “originates from the Old French comfort, meaning ‘to be strong with’” (2010: 3). It is this with-ness and not ‘being strong for someone’ (see ibid.) that is highlighted in the final line of Chen’s story. Chen’s description of ‘divine holding’ taps into a further etymological mean‐ ing of comfort. Up until the nineteenth century, ‘comfort’ primarily referred to “spiritual consolation […]. The understanding was embedded in Christian theology: the comforter was one of the designations of the Holy Spirit” (Boni 2016: 138). Chen’s enshrinement of home as a site of divine holding fuses the physical, mental, and spiritual dimensions of comfort. In this light, home is the sphere of remedial consolation: Divine holding promises redemption from the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 Home-Comfort Studies 181 blights of alienating modernity and salvation from the darkness of the virus. The comfort of home, then, helps ward off the threatening contingency of life in more senses than one. Contingency refers to the fact that things could be different. Events such as the pandemic, which are experienced as something that unexpectedly happens to you, can increase the awareness of the world as contingent. In the story, home not only offers a respite from the threat of the Coronavirus, but the spiritual experience of divine holding, the sacralisation of romantic love, endows life with meaning and purpose. The establishment of home in Chen’s story as an intimate site of consolation is strengthened by the strict opposition the story sets up between the private and the public sphere. The public sphere is represented by a shopping mall with its social distancing and the wearing of masks. More importantly, the mall is featured as the realm of inauthenticity, alienation (the sales assistant appears as a “grinning retail robot” [S]), and a corrosive form of consumer religion. The binary oppositions in the flash fiction in combination with the cross-cutting between the description of the shopping mall and the sunflowers at home establish ‘home’ as a comforting cocoon that is sealed off from threatening and alienating life outside. While the story also hints at how home is experienced as confining during the pandemic, it is the sacralisation of home that dominates. The worry-fields of the pandemic have a bearing on the function of the arts. The narrator at one point reflects on what “any artist hopes for: not only to be remembered, but to be company” (S). Might this short story also keep us company in these anxious times - a consoling ‘golden message’ amidst our current ‘exhaustive place’? This seems to be the implication of Chen’s story. Such a literary consoling of the reader, however, cannot gloss over problematic aspects of Chen’s story. “Summer” is embroiled in glaring self-contradictions as capitalism is denigrated on the one hand but a sensual shopping experience highly valued on the other; the enshrinement of home necessitates ignoring, for instance, the quantifiable costs of residing in a place. Moreover, it is striking how the impermeable home in Chen’s story goes hand in hand with only imagined acts of care for others (the narrator does not act on his concern for a sales assistant), whereas the permeable home in Shepard’s story is embedded within descriptions of seeking and extending concrete forms of solidarity within the neighbourhood. There is not enough textual evidence to probe further, but this striking comparison between the two un/ comfortable homes hints at how practices and idea(l)s of home life interplay with larger forms of community. In contrast to the discussed flash fiction, Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat (B) is not specifically about Covid; instead, the deadly virus is called the Novavirus or AG3 and wreaks even more horrific death and social havoc than Corona. However, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 182 Stella Butter Hall’s novel can be understood as a distinct response to the Corona crisis, not least because there are still enough similarities between Covid-19 and Hall’s dystopian description of the AG3 pandemic. Burntcoat is, as one reviewer aptly puts it, “a feverish reflection on devastation and resilience” (Kreizmann 2022: n.pag.) that bristles “with maximalist feelings” (ibid.), be it intense feelings of loss or sexual ecstasy described in graphic detail. The lyrical story is told by Edith Harkness, a fifty-nine-year-old famous sculptor, in the days before her death. The Novavirus has broken out in her body again, and as her health dramatically deteriorates, Edith recalls key relationships and events from her life, first and foremost the experience of lockdown with her Turkish lover Halit, but memories of her childhood also resurface: the fraught relationship with her mother, a talented writer, who raised Edith by herself despite struggling with severe cognitive impairments due to a stroke. As I will show, ‘home’ in Burntcoat is tied to an art of resilience and an ambiguous comfort different to that of Shepard’s “Monsters”. The importance of home is already signalled by the novel’s title, which is the name of Edith’s current home: a vast “utilitarian warehouse” (B: 26) in the “old industrial part of the city” (ibid.), found in a bad state of disrepair, “scarred” (ibid.), before Edith converted it into an apartment cum studio for her vast sculpted artworks. “Burntcoat became some kind of chimerical home, […], two hemispheres, both me” (B: 87). The word ‘chimerical’ takes on additional meaning in the light of Edith’s infection with the AG3 virus. She survives, but the virus “retreat[s] deep into the cells, lying dormant” (B: 127). “[W]e are not separate” (ibid.), Edith ruminates. If the virus is now part of Edith’s cells, then the DNA within her body is diverse or ‘chimerical’. By becoming an extension of Edith’s embodied subjectivity, including her history of emotional and physical scarring (witness her troubled childhood, the painful loss of Halit), Burntcoat signals resilience. The burning of a top layer (‘burnt-coat’) brings to mind the Japanese charring technique (Shou sougi ban) with which Edith produces her artwork. She learns in Japan “how to wire-brush the scorched charcoal coat [of wood], to reveal the beautiful grain beneath” (B: 14) - the “patterns” (B: 45) of this “true grain” (ibid.) are “so suggestive they became stories” (ibid.). Moreover, charring makes the wood resilient to rot. Destruction, then, births new creativity and resilience - this is the basic premise of Hall’s novel, rehearsed with the help of manifold examples. “I’m the wood in the fire. I’ve experienced, altered in nature. I am burnt, damaged, more resilient” (B: 210), Edith concludes at the end of her tale. If ‘Burntcoat’ is a metaphor for resilience in the novel, then resilience is a mark of home. Edith’s tale, indeed, suggests that resilience is necessary to 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 Home-Comfort Studies 183 carve out spaces of home from the devastation of our lives, but also that spheres of home may nourish our resilience. The latter is foregrounded by Edith’s experience of home during lockdown. Burntcoat is the place where Edith experiences passionate lovemaking with Halit - a bodily and psychological intimacy that consoles her in the frightening time of the pandemic: [L]overs […] buil[d] shelters with their hopes. Other worlds cease. I know I felt something as it began, an understanding, foreboding, ordinance, even. Love […] grows in the rich darkness. (B: 52) If we went deep enough into each other, there would be a hiding place. (B: 104) This fetishization of romantic love as comforting is reminiscent of ‘divine holding’ in Chen’s story (see Edith’s telling choice of religious words: “ordinance”), albeit with the difference that Hall describes lovemaking in visceral detail, foregrounding the unsettling messy body. There is arguably a feminist impetus driving these graphic descriptions. The positive coding of Halit’s erotic play with an inserted tampon, for instance, breaks with the enduring cultural taboo that women’s bodies are dirty and hence untouchable during that time of the month. (The discussion of a feminist outlook in Burntcoat may easily be extended, for example by addressing the novel’s imaginative replacement of famous male artworks, such as Antony Gormley’s ‘Angel of the North’, by Edith’s feminist art.) If Burntcoat is the site of creativity (Edith’s studio), then the strong presence of sexuality extends this creativity to (potential) procreation. The privileging of creativity in the story invites an aesthetisation of life. Precisely this stance is rendered explicit by Edith when she states “It’s all art, even thought, everything is” (B: 110). The premise that destruction engenders new creation introduces cyclical temporality and renders all things ambiguous. Cyclical temporality is reflected on the level of form because the novel begins and ends with Edith thinking about her mother (Naomi). Double-coding runs through the entire novel so that, for instance, the scan of Naomi’s brain haemorrhage is described as “completely horrible and beautiful too” (B: 58, original emphasis). The logic of the double-coding in the novel also helps explain why the AG3 virus is held up for our admiration. “It was”, Edith explains, “- it is perfect. Perfectly composed, star-like, and timed for the greatest chaos, for transmission across borders, replication, creating galaxies of itself” (B: 127, emphasis added) while it destroys human lives. Does such a view of existence offer any consolation? “At any given moment”, Edith ponders, “the body is simply its state: reformation [‘re-creation of cells’, S.B.] and decay of flesh [‘destruction’, S.B.], its neutral routes. There was a sensuality - unfrightening, comforting even - of cells altering hour by hour” 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 184 Stella Butter (B: 92, emphasis added). Acceptance of change, then, appears as a prerequisite for experiencing consolation. However, this same passage ends with Edith’s reflections on how the “body is a wound, a bell ringing in emergency - life, life, life” (ibid.). Despite opening up spaces of consolation, Burntcoat is sobering in its insistence that we never move beyond an enduring inconsolability because we fight death. Such a stance renders all consolation ambiguous, albeit not in the previous sense that one person’s source of consolation may cause another person intense discomfort (see “Monsters”). Instead, Burntcoat presents many moments where consolation and inconsolability are intricately intertwined for the protagonist because their source is double-coded. The “Visitations” (B: 177) of Halit, expe‐ rienced by Edith as she nears her death, are double-edged: “If I turn round, his image will be beautiful, or he will appear as terrifying, foul and dark as my heart” (B: 207). The deadly virus transformed Halit into a “putrid, bluish organism” (B: 177) - an image that Edith cannot shake as she holds on to his decomposing body in Burntcoat. ‘Divine or consoling holding’, then, takes on dark hues in Hall, as this description of her response after Halit’s death shows: “I […] crawled to where the body lay. I moved the heavy arm and put my head against the wall of the chest […]. Halit had gone and you had come. I let you hold me” (B: 180). Passages addressed to a ‘you’ recur throughout Edith’s narration. At times, they refer to Halit, thereby emphasising the closeness she continues to feel to him. In the quoted passage, it seems that the ‘you’ refers to Halit’s corpse, or more precisely, to death itself, foregrounding how Edith’s act of storytelling is also about navigating her relationship to mortality (see also Hall 2022). The ambiguity of comfort means that art in Burntcoat cannot be conceptual‐ ised as providing any form of straightforward consolation, as was the case in Chen’s story and partly in Shepard’s fiction. Tellingly, Edith stresses that the artwork she was commissioned to create as a memorial of the pandemic, her “nova piece” (B: 207), “cannot possibly comfort, or reparate” (B: 208). The story, as a whole, however, ends on a more hopeful note, leaving us with a strong image of resilience, wonder, and being held: “A life is a bead of water on the black surface, so frail, so strong, its world incredibly held” (B: 210). This image refers back to the Japanese master who taught Edith Shou sougi ban because he always left a single drop of water, “a perfect sitting bead” (B: 45), on the sealed and beautified coat of charred wood after he was finished. Are we not back to a form of divine holding, given that one meaning of ‘beads’ is prayer? But what is it that holds the single drop of water, that allows for our resilience? Given the complexity of Hall’s lyrical novel, the answers are manifold. How‐ ever, the discussion of the theme of home has already pointed to the important 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 Home-Comfort Studies 185 role that art plays in times of crisis. “Those who tell stories survive” (B: 1), we read at the opening of Edith’s tale. Edith is quoting her mother, who uttered these words after her stroke. Edith ponders whether her mother was referring to the power of stories to “make sense of a disordered world” (B: 2), meaning that “life is only an invention, a version necessary for us to accept living” (ibid.). This would be in keeping with Blumenberg’s claim that we require a consoling dwelling in the cave (see above). Arguably, Edith’s storytelling is, indeed, born from a need for consolation: she yearns to be “re-childed” (B: 35), that is, have her mother hold her hand - a stock image of comfort - and give her the courage to soon enter the unknown territory of death. Although Edith will not survive in a literal sense through storytelling, there is a sense that her act of storytelling may provide some form of supportive consolation. After all, her tale conjures up the imaginary presence of the two people she yearns for most: Halit and her mother. Similar to Shepard’s story, Hall is thereby careful to cultivate an ethics of caution by reflecting on the nature of storytelling and art. This brief foray into Covid fiction has already shown how varied the depicted interplay between home, comfort, and art is against the backdrop of a crisis. It is striking, though, that prominent topics in political discourses on the Covid pandemic hardly feature in my literary corpus. The impact of social inequalities and the stark rise in domestic violence during lockdown are not explored in these stories; there is only a brief reference in Burntcoat: “In poorer boroughs, along lines of ethnicity and poverty, the virus spread wildly, exposing the country’s bias, its rotten structures” (B: 124). One would have to turn to books like Sarah Moss’s The Fell (2021) for an engagement with, for instance, the intense discomfort of Covid poverty during lockdown. I now, however, want to turn to Sarah Moss’s debut novel Cold Earth (CE) to move beyond a narrow focus on Covid in pandemic fiction and to show how literary negotiations of ‘home’ and ‘comfort’ also strongly draw on a planetary scale to map our current crises. Cold Earth is a story about extinction and survival in the Arctic North and the world at large. A team of six American and British researchers embark on an archaeological dig in an isolated part of Greenland to ascertain why a thriving fourteenth-century Norse Viking settlement came to an end. During their dig, the research team learns from the internet that a pandemic is rapidly spreading across the globe. They are cut off from the rest of the world because the internet appears to have shut down, and their satellite phone does not work either. When the researchers are not collected by plane on the arranged date, the team is left wondering what havoc the pandemic has caused and whether they will be saved, as the Arctic winter is about to set in. Moss skilfully builds up an atmosphere of dread, as Nina, an English literature PhD student, has dreams of the Viking past, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 186 Stella Butter in which she witnesses the slaughter of farmers and their families by raiding fishermen. The believability of her visions and sightings of ghosts increases when the team excavates a grave with several skeletons on the hillside above the barn. However, it is impossible for readers to decide whether this is a ghost story because we are presented with an alternative explanation of the events. Ruth, a team member unimpressed by the alleged hauntings, diagnoses instead a case of group hysteria. Archaeological digging in the novel, then, not only foregrounds the site of ‘home’ as an archive for the history of a people but also highlights “a mental […] tunneling process” (Monaco 2021: 5) into the landscapes of the mind. There is an overwhelming sense of loss in Moss’s novel: The Northern landscape is inscribed with death (the grave), characters wrestle with their yearning to get back to the comforts of home, and a large chunk of the story deals with the impossibility of consolation due to the sudden death of a loved one. At first glance, the homesickness of the characters pertains only to their localised homes and their absent loved ones. The concept of home, however, is also extended to a planetary scale due to the depiction of the archaeological site. The coding of the derelict Viking buildings as a site of ‘home’ is strengthened by Nina’s dreams of past family life in these buildings and by her daydream of buying this piece of Greenland to convert the derelict barn into a home for herself and her fiancé. The discussions among the researchers as to why the Vikings vanished in Greenland foreground how sites of home are shaped by supra-local and planetary processes. The possible explanations for the abandonment or destruction of Viking settlements include brutal raiding of the settlements by fishermen, the spread of the plague, or climate change. These brief discussions also showcase the multi-temporality of home: It is not only the site of human time but of deep planetary time. The pressures of these supra-local and planetary processes render home fragile: It cannot offer protection against the threatening contingency of the world, as the example of the Viking home shows. The perceived ghostly presence of the Viking dead means that the past bleeds into the present. Instead of linear time, the novel suggests a repetition of the past. Just like the Viking inhabitants of the farmstead will have struggled to survive the Arctic winter, so are the archaeologists caught up in a struggle for survival once they are left stranded. As John Brannigan notes, Cold Earth shows that the “vulnerability of modern society to catastrophe is […] as thin as the Viking settlement they have come to exhume” (2019: 82). A sense of foreshadowing is strengthened by the fact that six Viking skeletons have been uncovered and taken by the archaeologists, who themselves make up a team of six. Will they too become six dead bodies? Moreover, the plague and the little ice age of the past are mirrored in the spreading pandemic and climate change 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 Home-Comfort Studies 187 on the level of the present. The listed ills of modernity, including terrorism, war, and the threat of nuclear holocaust, which the characters repeatedly voice, contribute to an apocalyptic atmosphere, all the more so because the characters are wondering whether the pandemic is wiping out humanity. In the face of all these ills, Catriona, one of the team members, labels the time of the present as apocalyptic (“I think we’re probably the last generation. Don’t you? ”, CE: 81). If the site of the derelict Viking home encapsulates our apocalyptic future, then it is a collective future envisaged in terms of a ruined home. The title Cold Earth plays with the double reference to the cold earth in the Arctic North and the destruction of planet Earth. Cold Earth, then, does not follow in the footsteps of critics who assert that the environmentalist trope of Earth as our home is detrimental to engaging with climate change because of its anthropocentric bias. The metaphor of home is misguided, so the argument goes, because it solicits “a theory of human hospitality to the planet”, but what is really needed to respond to climate change is “a theory of asubjectivisation” so that climate change can be “addressed as the inhuman, wholly other” (Long 2012: n.pag., original emphasis). In contrast, Cold Earth follows a different path by introducing home “as a cognitive frame that mediates the necessarily human, anthropomorphic element of narrative with the more abstract, non-human spaces and temporalities of a fragile, dynamic planet” (Hegglund 2019: 187). Moss’s mediation of the human thereby traces the landscapes of our (in)consolability. The planetary scale of home in Moss’s novel suggests that the pervasive theme of homesickness captures a larger emotive landscape in the twenty-first century, namely the feelings of mourning and dislocation that stem from the widespread apocalyptic perception of the gradual loss of home on a global or planetary level. This aesthetic diagnosis of a landscape of feeling ties in with more recent research such as Ann Kaplan’s book Climate Trauma (2016). Kaplan argues that the catastrophic futurist scenarios we are constantly confronted with across all sorts of media result in a population living with “severe anxiety about the future […] - an anxiety that warrants the term pretrauma” (1), that is, individuals display signs of trauma although they have not literally undergone a traumatic event but are instead anticipating or imagining it. She argues that in “circular fashion, the real catastrophes caused by humans generate fantasies that in turn have material effects” (ibid: 10). Moss’s literary diagnosis of a broader landscape of feeling marked by anxiety and desolation bears affinities to Kaplan’s description of pretrauma. In Moss’s novel, we learn, for instance, that Catriona experiences a certain relief once she comes to realise that her death is near because having “at last a reality to deal with” (CE: 254) is better than the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 188 Stella Butter state of “dreading” (ibid.) what may come. Given such a state of dread, we are, indeed, in dire need of consolation. Small wonder then that forms of consolation and the troubling of consolation constitute another key theme in the novel. The most extensive reflections on consolation are comprised in Ruth’s narration or rather in the letter she writes to her therapist. Ruth, who is American, decided to join the archaeological team for this dig because she had hoped that the wilderness of Greenland would succeed where her therapist had failed, namely heal her grief. Ruth displays signs of trauma as she obsessively imagines how James, the man she passionately loved, burnt to death in a car crash. She fiercely rejects the widespread idea of grief as something that you work through so that you can then move on: “I found that there’s no place here [USA] for death. We have to call it a problem and go to trauma sharks like you to get it solved. […] I’m not allowed to be a grieving American […] who can’t face her own apartment because of the person who’s not there” (CE: 105). Given this description, the loss of James equals the loss of home. Tellingly, this loss on an individual level is repeatedly connected to those large-scale forces that are identified as destroying homes on a global level. The truck driver who had crashed into James did so because he was distracted by listening to the news about bombings. In Ruth’s ironic gloss: “Death by rolling news” (CE: 131). Moreover, with his death, “James’s DNA [is] erased like the smallpox” (CE: 114) - this comparison establishes a link to a pandemic. These links suggest that we are not just dealing with the depiction of the grief and inconsolability of an individual, but that the novel is also concerned with how the larger landscape of modernity gives rise to feelings of desolation and melancholia. The affordances of the narrative form of Cold Earth can be seen as a distinct response to this landscape of desolation. The novel consists of journal entries or letters written by the characters so that each team member features as a first-person narrator in turn. In a novel concerned with an archiving of what survives of the past, the texts written by the characters may be seen as an attempt at archiving their experiences as well: If loss and environmental changes are registered in the landscape, the very act of narrating reflects a similar archival operation in the attempt to gather the fragments of human memory. […] Moss’s fiction contributes to a poetics of the archive understood as a way to record and compensate for human loss and ecological apocalypse. (Monaco 2021: 1) Monaco’s choice of the word ‘compensate’ does not strike me as felicitous because the archival operation is not shown to fully counterbalance loss and destruction, but I agree that the act of writing texts addressed to loved ones or a significant other, i.e. this archiving of the characters’ experiences, does appear 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 Home-Comfort Studies 189 10 For an in-depth discussion of the popular notion that the value of literature lies in its power to offer solace, see Pieters (2021). to a varying degree as consoling for the characters. In the context of consolation, the open multiperspectivity, which is introduced by the letters and journal entries, takes on added significance. If one can explain the various happenings either through a supernatural or a realistic interpretive frame, then this inten‐ sifies readers’ perception of contingency. Such an awareness of contingency, that is, an openness towards looking at things from a different perspective, may allow cracks of light to shine through our walls of inconsolability. This is why a “semantics of ambiguity” is frequently seen as distinguishing “the language of comfort” (Pieters 2021: 267 with reference to Fœssel). Cold Earth provides us with an apt example of this on the level of content. Towards the end of her letter to her therapist, Ruth shares an important insight that she gained during her stay and her writing process: James had not been planning to marry her because he saw her as “his present, not his future” (CE: 181). Ruth’s wish to continue the grief counselling she had previously rejected and her readiness to “come home” (CE: 182) indicate that she may now be able to move beyond her melancholic fixation. The reasons for this shift in disposition are arguably varied, but the fact that this shift is signalled after she reassesses her love relationship to James implies that moving beyond inconsolability necessitates opening up spaces of re-interpretation. Identifying potential sources of consolation becomes more pressing in a world where traditional wellsprings of consolation like religious belief are not simply given anymore. It is telling that Cold Earth not only leaves its most religious character, the devout Christian named Jim, largely underdeveloped but also shows how Jim, when he lies dying, ultimately finds comfort in the happy memories of his family life and not in his religious belief. Cold Earth, then, implicitly affirms a shift from “pre-modern [to] […] modern economies of consolation” (Pieters 2015: 129f.) - a shift that may help explain why the idea of fiction as a source of comfort is nowadays so vastly popular. 10 Cold Earth is far from being a comfy read, but it also does not propagate unmitigated gloom. In the spirit of consoling ambiguity, the destruction of Earth as our home is countered by an alternative perspective. While Catriona rehearses apocalyptic thinking, especially by invoking nuclear destruction, Nina counters by pointing out that “People have always thought that. Wordsworth. Homer” (ibid.) and that “we’ve had nuclear weapons for seventy years” (CE: 81). As Greg Garrard explains, insisting on the coming eco-apocalypse does not necessarily galvanise people to action but may have the opposite effect: “Only if we imagine that the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 190 Stella Butter 11 Such a sentiment is also voiced in Sarah Moss’s novel Summerwater: “The land […] far under our feet […] is always shifting, forming, changing state. We write on the surface but the surface moves. […] Should the history of bedrock comfort us, in geological time? ” (2020: 25f., emphasis added). planet has a future, after all, are we likely to take responsibility for it” (Garrard 2012: 116). This adds to the importance of the future being open in Cold Earth. Despite the extensive foreshadowing of death in the novel, the researchers are saved at the end (with the exception of Yanni, the project leader), and humanity is not wiped out by a virus. While the perceived contingency of the world drives our need for solace, Cold Earth implies that awareness of contingency can also afford some consolation when we feel that home is lost. In the words of one of the characters: “The Arctic’s always changing, that’s why I like it so much. […] You can kind of feel the planet moving all the time” (CE: 62). 11 This focus on enduring change is reminiscent of Edith’s ruminations in Burntcoat on how the awareness of one’s cells altering by the hour may bring some comfort, albeit not one that remedies our underlying inconsolability in the face of mortality. 3 Conclusion: The Complexity of Home Comforts The crises of modernity place our normality under duress, hence augmenting the need for creating different forms of life and support structures. The perceived proliferation of crises also means that we are living in a time of a heightened need for consolation. This, at least, is the diagnosis shared by the literary texts in my pandemic fiction corpus. The analysis has shown how the fabric of the imagined home spheres is shaped by specific idea(l)s of consolation, ranging from remedial consolation to variants of ambiguous comfort in response to the pandemic. While stories like “Summer” solicit remedial soothing through the saving grace of home, novels like Burntcoat or Cold Earth render consolation ambiguous due to their intimate dissection of wounding, scarring and death. “Unlike effortless distraction”, David James emphasises, “solace only brings into greater focus the wound it targets, more often exposing than dispelling the desolation it promises to offset” (2019: 1). The reverberations of such a grimmer understanding of consolation are especially salient in Burntcoat, which presents the scarred home as the embodiment of an art of resilience that opens up spaces for ambiguous consolation without claiming reparation. The ‘comfort of home’, then, is revealed on closer inspection to be a multifaceted concept that does not sit easily with dismissive monolithic portrayals of homely solace as a fluffy evasion of the harsh realities of (pandemic) life. The discussion of discomforting 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 Home-Comfort Studies 191 12 See the growing research on Corona fiction, e.g. Heinz (2021) and Völkl et al. (2023). homes in pandemic fiction in this contribution can only present the beginning of a rough sketch of an intricate terrain. The continuous outpour of new pandemic writing, already called a new sub-genre by reviewers, invites further mappings of home dis/ comforts. 12 These literary mappings, in turn, draw attention to ways in which an ‘integrated framework of home comfort’, as proposed by Ellsworth-Krebs et al. (2019), may be developed further, especially with regard to the role of home comfort in times of crisis. 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