Coronavirus stories

COVID-19 is a convenient source of widely shared stories that people are using to make sense of something important. They've help me think about what I mean by 'stories'.


Two stories immediately come to mind:

• Li Wenliang, the whistleblower doctor in Wuhan (RIP)
• Cruise ships

Then there are things like

• Panic buying toilet paper 
• Empty store shelves
• Shortage of test kits
• Quarantines and travel bans
• Italians serenading each other from their balconies

These examples help me explain why and how I  distinguish between the many things all loosely called stories:

• The first group are what I’d like restrict the term 'story' moniker to, since they have clear plot and character. 

• The second group I’d describe as symbols or images rather than stories. They seem to express some powerful emotion or meaning, but they don’t have a lot of narrative – even though we learn about them through news “stories”

1. 'Real' stories

The Li Wenliang drama qualifies because there are clear characters (Li, the police, the public, the government), and a lot of plot: he tried to warn people, was muzzled by the state, became infected & died; the story spread on social media, the government semi-apologized. Morals can easily be drawn, e.g. about the costs of suppressing information.

The cruise ships are not a single story, the pattern increases the power of the meta-story. One could say that multiple stories accumulate into a narrative. I haven’t researched the various instances in detail, but my take-away of the common plot is something like this: Infected passengers, ship denied entry to harbor(s), passengers trapped on board in worsening conditions, disease spreads, eventual release. (See Diamond Princess, Grand Princess, Costa Fortuna, Westerdam, Aida Perla, etc.)

There’s something mythic here, in the sense of something exaggerated or idealized (cf. Lexico), for a couple of reasons:

• The story of wandering ships, and ships refused landing, is old and familiar; cf. the Flying Dutchman and plague ships.

• I suspect people trapped on a ship is also a powerful metaphor for ordinary people who feel encircled by disease fears, and perhaps kept indoors by lock-down regulations.

2. Images

The second group (toilet paper, Italians etc.) make the news. However, being “news stories” doesn't make them stories in my book; rather, they're better described as images or symbols. They signify important things like panic, incompetence, confinement, or resilience, but they don’t have a narrative arc. Each of them may reported in terms of particular events, characters, and settings – these people fighting each other in the aisle of that store in that place; this Italian playing the accordion in that town – but the meaning is in image, not the narrative.

(Linking to earlier posts: most of what economist Robert Shiller calls narratives (see e.g. blog posts 1, 2 and 3) fall in the second category.)